Is Poverty Gendered?

• Author: Razavi, Shahra
• Position: Brief Article

Global estimates of poverty, especially those comparing its incidence among men and women, are based on very shaky data; per capita and "adult equivalent" measures do not offer answers to questions which they were not designed to address. Intra-household distribution issues need to be specifically built into questionnaire design. But there is persisting reticence on the part of administrative structures to probe this arena.

The category of households labelled "female-headed" is highly heterogeneous, with lone-female units, house-holds in which women earners receive significant remittances from absent males, homes of single women wage earners with young dependants, and so on. Some of these, such as the last category, may constitute what can be reasonable thought of as poverty-risk factors; others, such as the second, may be among the better-off. So how-through what processes-do men and women slide into poverty, and what are the conditions and modalities through which some women, at least, manage to interrogate and challenge prevailing arrangements?

One of the main messages emerging from research, especially in South and East Asia, is the complex and contradictory relations between house-hold opulence and the well-being of the female household members. Evidence from some parts of north-west and more recently even south India suggests that discrimination against female children may be particularly acute among landed/propertied households, rather than the poorer landless, raising questions about whether disadvantaged women and girls can be reached by "targeting" poor households; or if transfer of land to male household heads, through land reforms, settlement schemes or social forestry, would benefit them, given increasing work burdens and nutritional risks that they experience under such conditions. Current policy dogma assumes that labour-intensive agricultural and industrial strategies are pro-poor because labour is "the poor's most abundant asset".

Many questions can be raised about this from different perspectives, both macro and micro, including important gender concerns. In some contexts and among some social groups, powerful social norms regarding female seclusion, for example, reinforced through familial and conjugal relations, impose severe constraints on women's ability to access labour markets. But, even where social norms do not inhibit such access, and physical mobility in public spaces, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa...