woman head of household [ female head of household ]

head of household [ head of the family ]

Regent Park Sole Support Mothers Group

relation to the head of household | relationship to the head of family

single parent with shared custody

Information and Documentation Centre for Women and Families

family benefit [ accommodation allowance | child benefit | family allowance | family income support | head-of-household allowance | household allowance | rent allowance | single parent allowance | family allowances(UNBIS) ]

Office for Gender Equality | Equal Opportunities Office

A new challenge may be the increase in single parent households at risk of exclusion (most of which are headed by women).

The Nap 2003 takes into consideration a broad array of trends: the persistence of the concentration of poverty in the South, in large households and among those with one or more elderly people or whose head is unemployed; the already mentioned effects of the increase in ageing population combined with a low fertility rate; the recent increases in labour force geographical mobility from the South to the North of Italy and in the immigration flux; the considerable size of the informal economy; the low employment rate of disabled people (in particular women); and the development of the volunteer and third sectors.

- promotion of the role of women in business, in particular by developing networks for business and professional women and facilitating access of women to financial instruments.

However, the profile of poverty has not changed: it affects mainly the larger households (of five people or more: for them the incidence of poverty in 2002 was 24.6%) and those whose head is unemployed (the incidence is 32.3%), and it is still overwhelmingly concentrated in the South (the at-risk-of-poverty rate is 23.6%), where the rate is more than four times higher than in the North (5.4%).