## Facts

- Leon Goldfarb’s wife, Hannah Goldfarb, worked for about 25 years and paid Social Security taxes through covered employment.
- After Hannah died in 1968, Leon applied for Social Security survivors’ benefits as a widower under 42 U.S.C. § 402(f).
- The statute granted benefits to widows of covered male workers without any dependency showing, but required widowers of covered female workers to prove they received at least one-half of their support from the deceased wife.
- Leon’s application was denied because he could not satisfy the one-half support requirement.
- Leon challenged the provision as unconstitutional sex discrimination, arguing it diminished the insurance protection purchased by female workers’ earnings and contributions.
- A three-judge federal district court held the provision unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment, and the government appealed directly to the Supreme Court.

## Issues

1. Whether 42 U.S.C. § 402(f)(1)(D)’s requirement that widowers, but not widows, prove dependency to receive survivors’ benefits violates the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause as applied to federal classifications.

## Decision

- The Court affirmed and invalidated the gender-based dependency requirement in a 5–4 decision.
- A plurality concluded the provision created unconstitutional sex discrimination by providing less survivors’ protection for families of covered female workers than for similarly situated covered male workers.
- The plurality rejected justifications based on administrative convenience and generalized assumptions about male and female dependency.
- A concurrence agreed the classification lacked adequate justification and unlawfully discounted women’s earnings in an earnings-based program.
- The dissent would have upheld the statute as a permissible legislative choice that favored widows and reflected congressional judgments about economic need.

## Legal Principles

- The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause contains an equal-protection component that limits sex-based classifications by the federal government.
- In an earnings- and contributions-related benefits program, Congress may not distribute benefits using sex-based rules that, without sufficient justification, differentiate among covered workers based on gender.
- Gender classifications grounded in stereotyped assumptions about family roles and dependency are constitutionally suspect and require more than generalized assertions of administrative ease or group-based economic patterns.
- A statutory scheme that reduces the value of women’s covered earnings by purchasing lesser survivors’ protection for their spouses constitutes unconstitutional discrimination against female wage earners.

## Conclusion

The Court held that Social Security’s widower-only dependency test impermissibly relied on sex stereotypes and unlawfully provided families of female wage earners less survivors’ insurance protection than families of male wage earners, violating the Fifth Amendment’s equal-protection component.


Califano v. Goldfarb, 430 U.S. 199 (1977)