Any program that deals with poor people is going to disproportionately deal with women, as you've said. To give you a concrete example of the importance of this, I'll go back to child benefits. Because of the federal and provincial reform of child benefits in recent years, their role in helping low-income families has increased quite a bit.
To give you some dollar amounts, if you look at a single parent in Ontario with one child under six, and if her earned income was $15,000, which is quite modest, not much above minimum wage, federal child benefits rose from 15% of that woman's income in 1993, to 15.8% in 1998, 22% in 2005, and just under 30% in 2007. This is an enormous boost to the income of that low-income, single-parent family. It's not the whole answer, but certainly one of the important answers to poverty is to improve incomes.
That's one example of how a federal program can disproportionately help low-income women.