Over the past 30 years, women have made tremendous gains in closing both the income and the education gaps between them and men, and growth in their homeownership rates has become an important manifestation of these trends. In 1990, there were 15.7 million female-headed homeowner households. By 2019, that number had reached 39.2 million. In contrast, the number of male-headed homeowner households decreased from 44.4 million to 43.1 million.In this report, we examine homeownership by the gender of the household head and how it has changed over the past three decades. Our analysis explores factors narrowing the homeownership gender gap, overall and by race and ethnicity. This narrowing can be attributed mostly to gains in household income, followed closely by the fact that more married women are head of household
