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Since the late 1970s, researchers find that an increasingly large percentage of the economically disadvantaged are women, a fact contributing to a severe gender gap in income attainment. Most research on poverty and gender inequality focuses on salaries and wages as the primary proxy for evaluating economic well-being. However, earned income fluctuates greatly and may not provide an accurate picture of the economic welfare of an individual over time. In contrast, wealth -- understood as the value of person's assets less their debts -- captures long-term economic security. I broaden current research on gender and family status inequalities by using wealth as a measure of economic welfare. My research explores the joint effects of gender, marital status, and parenthood on net worth of economic assets and portfolio behavior in order to understand whether in the United States the feminization of the disadvantaged and the pauperization of motherhood extend to wealth. Further, to gain greater insight into the parental gap in wealth inequality, I focus on the timing of fertility behavior, specifically examining the effects of teen parenthood, adult parenthood, and childlessness on adult wealth for young baby boomers, born between 1957 and 1964. My analyses are based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth between 1979 and 2000. I find that young baby boomers' marital status and parental status are very strong predictors of adult wealth. Overall, the discovered patterns suggest that married couples have much greater wealth accumulation than single adults. I find evidence of a minimal to moderate gender gap in wealth accumulation for single adults. Moreover, when I control for parenthood, I find strong evidence of a family gap in net worth and portfolio behavior for single men and women. Single mothers and fathers are economically disadvantaged in comparison to adults without children, with single mothers suffering the most severe economic penalties. In addition, young baby boomers that had a child during their teenage years experience great financial burdens, which in turn lead to large disadvantages in wealth accumulation, reflecting a strong parental gap between teen parents, adult parents, and those who never had a child.

In the United States, household wealth is unequally distributed. While facts about the distribution are readily available, less is known about the family dynamics that underlie this important component of inequality. An increasing number of households are headed by single females (both never married and divorced), and the number of single mothers among these households has grown in recent decades. This article explores differences in wealth in the US by marital status, gender, and parenting status. It focuses on young baby boomers, finding a minimal gender gap in the wealth of never-married people. However, when controlling for parenthood, strong evidence was found of a family gap in household wealth accumulation, with single mothers and fathers economically disadvantaged in comparison to adults without children. Yet, it was found that single mothers suffer the most severe economic penalties in household wealth accumulation.