| Gender and Poverty (taken from Nilufer Catagay, 1988)
Are women poorer than men? Three ways to think about it:
- Do women compared to men have higher incidence of poverty (are more women than men poor)?
- Is women's poverty is more severe than men's (i.e., both are poor, are women poorer)?
- Is women's poverty (relative to men's) increasing over time ('feminization' of poverty)?
The
argument
Early
approaches to poverty research on such questions focused on gender differences based on who heads
households, suggesting that since women generally have poor
access to resources (think production factors of land, credit,
labor) relative to men, that households headed by females
(through divorce, death, migration of males) will be worse
off. However, some quantitative measures often show that men-headed
households are as likely to be poor as women-headed households.
But this tends to oversimplify the problem. Too much focus
is placed on quantitative measures of poverty, on conceptions
of poverty as a category, and on differences between male-headed
and female-headed households as the key measure. Yes,
male-headed households may be below some poverty line as well
as female-headed households. But that doesn't tell us whether male- and female-headed households falling below the poverty line are equally poor (e.g., would they have equal access to land and other resources critical to livelihood?). Nor does it address differences
among members of the same household. The point is that using
female-headed households as a meterstick of gender differences
in poverty may be misleading. A slightly better quantitative measure might be the percent of female-headed households below the poverty line (relative to all female-headed households) versus the same measure for men (and even in the States, female-headed households are much more likely to be poor and have the children where there are parents involved). But there are a lot of female-headed households--over
170 million in low income countries (LICs), according to the
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
And they are increasing in number. Any ideas why this might
be occurring?
An alternative
measure might be female-maintained households (getting at
the primary providers in the family). How do we count households where, for instance, a man might be absent for periods of time working as a migrant laborer? The focus on
household heads also misses a key part of the poverty equation:
that there are gender
differences within households (difficult to measure, to
be sure)--attempts to measure poverty that assume the unity
of the household are 'gendered.'
Poverty
as a process, not merely a static indicator, and as
relative, versus absolute
Poverty
is not a static concept--people's life fortunes change--household
members die, development policies may benefit one group at
the expense of another (e.g., commercial farming that targets
men and turns women into unpaid laborers), drought or famine
may strike, poor health might prevent individuals from working
in the fields during the growing season, etc. So the important
question might not be who is poor, but rather how do people/groups
become poor (or escape poverty)? Baulch's (1996) pyramid
presents different ways to view poverty--as fairly straightforward
to complex and multidimensional:
PC
= private consumption
CPR = common property resources
SPC = state-provided commodities
| PC |
CPR |
SPC |
Assets |
Dignity |
| PC |
CPR |
SPC |
Assets |
Dignity |
Autonomy |
The
bottom of the pyramid recognizes that poverty can be thought
of as much more than household consumption, or even access to
common property resources (these are resources that are often
shared and used among a large social group--women are less likely
to have private or individual rights to agricultural land, or
a fuelwood plantation, for instance). The more multidimensional
definitions of poverty are generally referred to as human poverty (versus income poverty), which addresses non-income
issues such as health, life expectancy, opportunities, and education.
Of course measuring human poverty is more difficult than
taking average incomes.
Only
a relative approach to poverty can answer the question, if
everyone is below the 'poverty line,' how do we assess gender
differences? If a household is poor, and we're only measuring
at the household level, how do we assess differences between
men and women in the household? If male- and female-headed households
are both poor, does it matter which tend to be worse off (hint:
yes)? The notion of human poverty helps--look at the
pyramid, and think about how the different dimensions might
be measured within a household--how could you look for gender
differences with respect to consumption, assets, etc.? Who has
access to land, household labor, equipment, money, etc.? Who has freedom of movement? Freedom from physical violence or threats of violence?
So
. . . back to the question . . . are women poorer than men?
Consider that:
- In general, women's access to education is poor relative to men's (less opportunity?)
- Women
are less mobile than men, less familiar with how the society
'works' and how they can access services;
- Women
work more hours than men (refer to Diane Elson's concept
of the 'double day'--women's obligations not only to household
economy, but to household maintenance, childcare, etc.);
- Technology
initiatives have tended to favor income-generating development
projects, which have tended to favor participation by men
(through bias, as well as a lack of recognition of barriers
facing women's participation); thus women's work is usually
unpaid, often labor-intensive and drudgery-filled; (see Boserup's article on male and female farming systems)
- In
general, women's access to factors of production (think
land, labor and capital) is poor relative to men's (this
is why common property resources--resources available to
the community, for instance, instead of those resources
owned by private individuals--are so important).
All
of these differences are often experienced within the household.
So even though an entire household may fall below the poverty
line, it is dangerous to lump men and women together, say
that everyone is poor, and not try to understand household-level
differences. It may give the appearance that everyone is
poor, and gender is an irrelevant distinction.
But
more complex definitions of poverty require more complex means
of measuring and collecting data. Data collected solely on private
consumption, for instance, may not identify gender differences
that a broader data collection effort would. Now, a question
to think about . . . do gender differences in poverty
lead to higher poverty in a society? In other words,
does keeping women poor make everyone poorer (think about this
at the household level)? If
women have less opportunities to realize their potential, does
the society as a whole suffer? Understand this and spend some
time going through the logic of the argument.
What
can be done?
Understand
the causes of poverty, and some of the answers will reveal themselves.
Some of the keys include:
- addressing access to factors of production (land, labor, capital ... );
- addressing
drudgery and women's 'time poverty';
- addressing
women's reproductive burdens that limit their productive
roles.
Catagay
talks about creating an 'enabling environment,' changing opportunity
structures, mainstreaming gender--what do these mean? What role
should women themselves play in this process? How would government
support, technology initiatives play a role? This is nothing
short of a structural transformation, but not the kind
we talked about during week one related to development--agrarian transformation a la structural adjustment lending--how would the structural
transformation the author proposes be different? At what level(s)
of society? What do you see as the key barriers to this transformation? Mainstreaming refers to not perceiving women as some appendage on a development project, but as central and active participants in their own development--there is no 'separate but equal' when it comes to gender and development (or much of anything else ...).
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