(taken from Nilufer Catagay, 1998)

Are women poorer than men? Three ways to think about it:

1. Do women compared to men have higher incidence of poverty (are more women than men poor)?
2. Is women’s poverty is more severe than men’s (i.e., both are poor, are women poorer)?
3. 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

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 suffers relative to men’s (less opportunity?)
• Women are less mobilethan men. Some never venture more than 20 km from their birthplace. They tend to be 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-intensiveand 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. Think of a community garden, for instance).

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 …).

Sources:

• Diane Elson. 1995 (2nd edition). Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester, UK: Manchester Press.
• Nilüfer Catagay. 1998. Gender and poverty. Working Paper no. 5. United Nations Development Program.