paid". Three assistant secretaries at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mary Jo Bane, Peter B. Edelman, and Wendell E. Primus, resigned to protest the law. According to Edelman, the 1996 welfare reform law destroyed the safety net. It increased poverty, lowered income for single mothers, put people from welfare into homeless shelters, and left states free to eliminate welfare entirely. It moved mothers and children from welfare to work, but many of them are not making enough to survive. Many of them were pushed off welfare rolls because they didn't show up for an appointment, because they could not get to an appointment for lack of child care, said Edelman, or because they were not notified of the appointment. Causes of poverty Welfare reform efforts such as PRWORA have been criticized for focusing almost exclusively on individual failure and irresponsibility, especially among people of color, as factors leading to poverty. However, there is no scholarly consensus on the etiology of poverty, and many theories focus instead on structural inequalities such as disparities in pay and hiring discrimination. The concept of "personal responsibility" is further critiqued for its lack of consideration of familial responsibilities, such as caring for children and elderly parents, which are placed more heavily upon women. Gendered and racial poverty The bill has also been criticized for ignoring and not accommodating for the complexities of gender, color, and sexual preference discrimination within society that contribute to the poverty of people of color, women, and LGBT people. Diana Pearce, the director of the Center for Women's Welfare, writes that poverty for women is fundamentally different from that for men, but welfare itself is created for poor men. She asserts that women's poverty is caused by two problems that are unique for women: the responsibility to provide all or most financial support for their children and the disadvantages they face in the labor market. In 1988, the average woman received 66 percent of the income of what an average man earned; the average female college graduate working a full-time job still earned less than the average male high school graduate. But the earnings disparity is not the only form of disadvantage that women face in the labor market. Many women are unable to obtain a full-time job not just due to gender discrimination, but also because of unavailable, expensive, or inadequate day care. This problem is only amplified