This paper examines the relationships between female headship status of households and family welfare in rural Ecuador. We first review theoretical arguments for why female headship may affect family welfare. Descriptive analysis indicates that female-headed households are worse off according to a variety of measures of welfare. We then focus on children's school enrollment as a specific measure of welfare and estimate a multivariate model to assess the effects of female headship on the probability of enrollment. We find that children in female-headed households are disadvantaged in this respect and that the effect of female headship varies across marital status categories of the female head.