A mother raising a child alone, a grandmother living by herself after losing her husband, a daughter who quit her job to care for her parents. Have you ever wondered what these three people have in common? Statistics from many countries have shown that women make up a large share of the poor, and that this share has tended to grow. In social welfare studies, this is called the “feminization of poverty.”
Simply put, the feminization of poverty means “poverty becoming increasingly concentrated among women.” The term was first used by American poverty researcher Diana Pearce in her 1978 article “The Feminization of Poverty: Women, Work and Welfare,” and it spread around the world through United Nations (UN) documents in the 1990s.
In this article, we will look in turn at what the feminization of poverty means, the paths by which women become poor, what the usual ways of measuring poverty hide, and the policies and debates aimed at reducing it.
The discovery that poverty has a gender
1. What does the feminization of poverty mean?
The feminization of poverty does not simply mean “women are poor.” It refers both to a gap, in which women make up a larger share of the poor than men, and to a change, in which that share grows over time.
(1) An observation that began in 1970s America
Pearce noticed that women made up a large share of poor adults and that households in which a woman alone supported the family were growing rapidly among the poor. Her concern started from the fact that this trend did not easily reverse even when the economy grew.
(2) Separating the state from the process
A “state” in which women’s poverty rate is higher than men’s at one point in time and a “process” in which that gap widens over time are different stories. Researchers such as Sylvia Chant, a British scholar of gender and poverty, have pointed out that mixing the two can lead to misreading reality.
(3) The gap in numbers
According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the poverty rate in 2016 was 14.0% for women and 11.3% for men. It may look like a gap of a few percentage points, but across the whole population it amounts to millions of people.
2. The paths that lead women into poverty
Several overlapping paths lead women into poverty. Rather than a single cause, it is closer to an outcome shaped by the interplay of work, family, and the life course.
- Gender pay gap: The difference whereby women’s average pay is lower than men’s even for the same working hours.
- Unpaid care work: Unpaid labor such as caring for children, older people, or sick family members, which women often take on more of.
- Female-headed household: A household in which a woman is the breadwinner, formed through divorce, widowhood, raising a child alone, and so on.
- Gender pension gap: The difference whereby shorter working careers and lower wages lead to smaller pensions in old age.
(1) Gaps at work
Women are more concentrated in part-time, temporary, and informal jobs, and tend to earn less even for the same work. When childbirth and childcare interrupt a career, it is hard to regain the previous wage level even after returning to work.
(2) Households with one earner
A single-parent household has only one person who can earn money, and that person must also handle care, which leaves less time for paid work. That is why single-mother households are often cited as a group especially vulnerable to poverty.
(3) A longer old age
Women live longer on average, so they tend to spend more years alone in old age after losing a spouse. As the pay gap built up during working years turns into a pension gap, it readily shows up as poverty among older women.
3. What the usual ways of measuring poverty hide
One of the biggest debates around the feminization of poverty is about how to measure it, because most poverty statistics measure income by household rather than by individual.
(1) Inequality within the household
If household income is above the poverty line, everyone in it is counted as not poor. But who holds the money in the household and how it is shared stay invisible, so the poverty of women who have income but no say over how it is spent can be hidden in the statistics.
(2) The “70% of the world’s poor” figure
The claim that “70% of the world’s poor are women” spread widely through sources such as the 1995 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). However, the figure has been criticized for its unclear source and method, and it has been pointed out that the lack of individual-level poverty data makes it hard to verify at all.
(3) Poverty beyond income
For this reason, researchers try to look at poverty across several dimensions, such as time, property ownership, education, and decision-making power, not just income. “Time poverty,” having a little money but no time to rest, is also cited as a problem that appears more often among women.
4. Policies and debates for reducing the feminization of poverty
The Platform for Action adopted at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 named “women and poverty” first among its 12 critical areas of concern. Since then, many countries have responded to the problem with a range of policies.
(1) Sharing care across society
Policies that share the burden of care beyond the family, such as public childcare, parental leave, and long-term care services, help women keep working and lower their risk of poverty.
(2) Systems that fill gaps in the life course
Measures that make up for losses during periods when people cannot work are also used, such as counting time spent on childbirth or child-rearing toward pension coverage and helping single-parent households collect child support.
(3) Not lumping all women together
At the same time, critics argue that women should not be treated as a single group. Poverty looks different depending on age, region, and household type, and some studies show that female-headed households are not always the poorest, so a more detailed analysis is needed.
The feminization of poverty is not a problem caused by women being inherently weak, but a result of the way work, care, and institutions are arranged. Asking not only how poor people are but who is poor, and the simple thought that the same poverty can rest more heavily on some people: that is the first step to understanding the feminization of poverty.
