Breaking down poverty impacts by sex

PolicyEngine estimates the impact of customisable policy reforms on poverty — overall, by age, and now by sex.

Welcome to the latest blog post from PolicyEngine, where we share updates on our work to build free, open-source software that helps people understand the impact of public policies. We’re excited to announce an additional feature for our existing tax and benefit reform calculator that enables users to estimate how customisable tax and benefit reforms affect the poverty rate, split by sex.

Since our inception, we’ve shown how customizable policy reforms would affect the poverty rate, overall and by age group. We model impacts under the government’s standard definition of poverty used in the Households Below Average Income publication (considering absolute poverty based on disposable income before housing costs).

We estimate that, under current law, 14.0% of the population has resources below their poverty threshold, and 2.4% has resources below half their poverty threshold (deep poverty). Women face higher poverty rates than men, and children face higher poverty rates than working-age adults, who face higher poverty rates than seniors. These poverty trends resemble those in the HBAI report, though the exact numbers differ as we adjust survey data and apply 2023 policy rules. Deep poverty does not vary much by sex, though seniors have much lower rates, due largely to Pension Credit.

Let’s consider an example to illustrate the power of our updated tool. Suppose we want to estimate the poverty impact of the Child Benefit, an unconditional cash transfer to parents of children (or young adults in further education). With PolicyEngine, anyone can compare today’s poverty rate to a scenario without Child Benefit — overall, by age group, and now by sex.

We estimate that the Child Benefit reduces poverty by 9.3% and deep poverty by 18.5%. Our pre-existing charts show that Child Benefit disproportionately benefits children, reducing child poverty by 15.3% and deep child poverty by 35.6%.

Our new charts show that the Child Benefit lowers poverty by 9.2% for men and 9.4% for women.

We also find that the Child Benefit lowers deep poverty by 18% for men and 19% for women.

Our updated tax and benefit reform calculator is a powerful tool that uses the standard poverty definition to help policymakers, researchers, and advocates better understand the impact of public policies on poverty rates, both overall and in deep poverty, for men and women. By providing policymakers with more accurate data on the impact of policy decisions, we can inform public discourse and facilitate evidence-based decision-making.

nikhil woodruff
PolicyEngine's Co-founder and CTO

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