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GENDER MAINSTREAMING IN POVERTY ERADICATION AND THE MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS >
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ID: 42966Added: 2003-08-28 9:37Modified: 2006-09-01 10:24Refreshed: 2009-01-08 00:36 
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Document(s) 8 of 13
The eradication of extreme poverty is the first – and overarching – Millennium Development Goal (MDG). It is expressed in terms of two targets:
The first target focuses on increasing household income as an important means of achieving the goal. The second deals with reducing hunger as a measure of the desired outcome. This chapter is mainly concerned with the former – the ‘means’ dimension of poverty reduction – while issues of hunger and malnutrition are explored in the next chapter. The powerful place held by the idea of the male breadwinner in development studies and policies has meant that the importance of women’s breadwinning role has been neglected, particularly among the poor. This chapter aims to make good this omission. Two other indicators that are part of the MDGs should be borne in mind in this discussion:
While previous chapters have looked at the relationship between gender inequality and income poverty at the broad, regional level, this chapter focuses on the relationship at the level of the household. Much of the empirical material is drawn from sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (although there are examples from other parts of the world in the concluding section). The focus on these two regions provides some useful comparisons and contrasts:
Gender Inequality and Household Poverty in South AsiaWomen’s work and household survivalAs noted earlier, female seclusion in regions of extreme patriarchy explains women’s generally low levels of labour force participation. Work in the public domain, particularly in waged employment for others, means a loss of status for women and their households. Thus while poverty may force women to work outside the home, increased household prosperity may lead to their withdrawal into it again. An exception is work in the public sector, an acceptable source of employment for educated women. At the same time, the active role that women, including those from better-off households, play in home-based economic activities tends to be socially and statistically invisible. It is treated as an extension of their domestic chores. This leads not only to extremely low levels of labour force participation, using the narrow International Labour Organization (ILO) definition (i.e. including only activities done for pay or profit) but also to a strong relationship between paid work by women and household poverty. A discussion of studies from India and Bangladesh illustrates this, as well as highlighting some of the constraints poor women face in their ability to contribute to household income. The gender distribution of work in rural areasRural poverty in South Asia is closely connected with landlessness, rural wage labour and, in India, with caste. Partly as a result of increasing landlessness, there has been a steady decline in ‘own cultivation’ as a source of rural employment during the twentieth century. Men have diversified into wage labour in the agricultural sector, as well as various forms of non-agricultural activities in the rural sector economy. They have also migrated into the urban economy. Women, however, remain largely concentrated in rural areas. IndiaAccording to official estimates, landless and land-poor households made up over 50 per cent of rural households in India in 1992. The landless poor are mainly drawn from ‘untouchable’ castes that also make up the bulk of the agricultural wage labour in the countryside. In addition, they are found in a variety of off-farm activities – such as non-agricultural wage labour, small commodity production and informal, caste-based services (sweepers, midwives, barbers, etc.) – and migrating into urban areas. Women from these groups do not face the same restrictions as women from higher castes and they have higher rates of labour force participation than the rest of the female population. However, they are mainly found in agricultural waged employment, among the least well-paid forms of work available in the economy. Only 19 per cent of female labour from the poorest households was involved in ‘statistically recognised’ off-farm activities (wage labour in the non-agricultural sector and self-employed traders and vendors). There is also a marked regional pattern to female labour force participation that partly reflects the ‘north-south’ gender divide noted earlier. Several explanations have been offered for the ‘feminisation’ of agricultural wage labour. These include:
BangladeshBangladesh has also experienced growing landlessness, declining farm size and diversification out of agriculture into various off-farm activities. The share of agriculture in the rural labour force has fallen dramatically – from 85 per cent in 1974 to 66 per cent in 1984/85. This shift has been accompanied by an increase in other occupations, including construction (33%), trade (17%) and transport (9.9%). However, female labour force participation rates remain low – much lower than India. In the countryside, it has risen very gradually, from 7 per cent in the early eighties to around 17 per cent in 1996. Village studies from the 1970s and earlier noted that women’s contribution in the agricultural process was largely in post-harvest processing. This used manually operated technology and was carried out in the home, usually as unpaid family labour. Larger land-owning households, however, did hire female labour from landless groups to substitute for the labour of women within the family. Moreover, women’s employment often eludes official statistics. For example, official estimates in 1981 were of 3 per cent female labour force participation. However, a study based on 1985 data from four villages found that 8–20 per cent of households sent their women in search of wage employment. Among landless households, the figures rose to 50–77 per cent. Information from 46 villages in the same district confirmed that 11–24 per cent of households – and around 60 per cent of landless households – had women in wage employment. This may have reflected: (a) a gradual lessening of restrictions of female labour force participation due to poverty; and (b) new employment opportunities for women in field-based tasks due to the Green Revolution. While some of this female agricultural labour is in own cultivation, some of it is for wages. A re-survey in 1994 of eight villages first surveyed in 1980 showed a significant increase in women’s income contributions in poor households, evidence of increasing participation in paid work. Whereas the earlier study had estimated that women contributed 24 per cent of household income, the more recent study suggested that they now contributed around 45 per cent. Children’s contribution had declined from 29 per cent of household income to 6 per cent, partly because many more now attended school. Studies of micro-credit programmes that target women in poor and landless households report their increased participation in market-oriented work as well as increases in the size of their contributions. Yet this increased participation continues to follow the traditional gender division of labour in the informal economy. There has also been a increase in female migration into towns in recent years, partly in response to the pull exercised by the rise in export garment manufacturing. Household poverty and women’s paid workApart from restrictions on women’s mobility noted, another reason for the strong association between household poverty and women’s work is that poor women are paid even less than poor men. Thus while their earnings are used to meet basic needs in the household, they are not sufficient to pull households out of poverty. This is particularly so when there is no male earner in the household. Statistics at the end of the 1980s show that women in both India and Bangladesh were commonly paid approximately half the male wage for the same employment – although there are regional variations in overall wages as well as in gender wage disparities. IndiaThe National Sample Survey (NSS) in 1983 showed that women from landless and land-poor households had the highest levels of participation in paid work, while women from landholding households had higher levels of participation in various unpaid forms of productive activity. This unpaid work played an important ‘expenditure saving’ or ‘income replacing’ role. However, there is an important distinction between those activities based on ownership of resources (livestock rearing, homestead farming) and those involving common property resources (fuel and fodder). The former were largely done by women in landowning households, while the latter were undertaken by poorer women. The importance of this latter category of activity is shown by a study in Rajasthan, which found that 42 per cent of the income of labouring and land-poor households came from common property resources compared to 15 per cent for larger landowners. Most women combined their productive activities, whether paid or unpaid, with domestic chores. For example, time allocation data collected in rural Madhya Pradesh found that domestic chores averaged 58 per cent of women’s work time across the sample of 155 households. This rose to 79 per cent among middle income and 96 per cent among wealthy households. Around 50 per cent of women’s work time went into unpaid family labour in agricultural production among middle income farming households. This compared to just 5 per cent among landless wage labouring households. Wage labour
Young woman selling food products in India accounted for around 40 per cent of women’s working time among this latter group, but was negligible among middle and wealthy farmers. Along with a general rise in wages in the country, there was a faster rise in real agricultural wages for women than men in almost every state. Gender wage disparities have declined. Overall, rural women’s earnings were only 52 per cent of their male counterparts in 1972 but had risen to 69 per cent by 1983. In West Bengal, female farm wages rose from 75 per cent of male wage rates to 86 per cent between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s. The gap between male and female wages was highest, and fluctuated most, in the least agriculturally developed areas. Studies suggest that women’s ability to translate their education into higher wages has increased over time. Earlier studies, based on data from the 1970s, had shown that the effect of extra education, even among unskilled farm labourers, was substantial for men but insignificant for women. However, a later study in West Bengal found that returns to education were positive for both women and men and actually higher for women. One explanation may be the growing need for skilled labour stemming from the spread of Green Revolution technology. Another may be connected to the increase in public sector employment, though this largely benefited the better-off households (and men more than women). Gender differentials persist, however, and have been slower to change in some regions than others (see box 5.1).
BangladeshIn Bangladesh, studies since the 1970s have showed a strong connection between female paid activity and household poverty. There was greater poverty in households with female wage earners, most of whom came from landless households and had started work either because their husband’s income was insufficient (due to sickness, disability or underemployment) or else because of divorce or separation. Such women contributed around 24 per cent of their households’ total annual income, compared to around 1 per cent of household income by women who did not undertake waged work. Household survey data from 1994 and 2000 indicated that paid work in the countryside continued to be undertaken by women from poorer households, particularly those from female-headed households. A large-scale national household survey found that share of household income from female earnings was significantly higher in poorer households. As in India, common property resources play an important expenditure-saving function for poor households. This includes collecting fuel and fodder, house-building materials and various wild fruits and vegetables; fishing; and crop gleaning. National household surveys in 1990 showed that such activities accounted for around 4 per cent of the total income of large landowning households but around 22 per cent for landless and land-poor households. Micro-level studies confirm that women and children make an important contribution to this work. Gender and work in urban areasPoverty also has a marked gender dimension in urban areas in South Asia. Urbanisation is growing across the sub-continent, partly driven by the rural poor’s search for employment. The percentage of women living in urban areas has risen from around 19 per cent in 1970 to around 25 per cent in recent years. IndiaIn India, workers in the organised sector are largely drawn from skilled castes and better-off families. Gender reinforces this caste and class segmentation. Not only are organised sector workers overwhelmingly male, but also poor women tend to be concentrated in the most casualised segments of the informal economy. Indian census data shows that women’s labour force participation in urban areas is lower both than men’s and than that of women in rural areas. It also appears to have been declining since the 1970s. This may be because it is easier to combine subsistence and paid work in rural areas. Access to some form of productive resource – a homestead plot, livestock and poultry or ecological reserves – allows women to feed the family as well as earn an income. In urban areas, on the other hand, earning a living requires more mobility, financial capital and skills, including skills in dealing with officials. This places women at a greater disadvantage. On the other hand, official statistics may be even less able to capture the nature of women’s paid activities in the urban informal economy than they are in the rural. For example, one study found that sub-contracting had increased from 9.36 per cent in 1970 to 25 per cent in 1993–1994. This has led to an expansion of women’s participation in various kinds of labour-intensive technologies, largely located in the informal economy. Yet this had gone largely undetected in macro-statistics. A great deal of this increase seems to be associated with export-oriented manufacturing and with multinational companies (see box 5.2).
BangladeshBangladesh has also experienced both a rise in urbanisation and an increase in the percentage of the female population living in urban areas (from 8 per cent in 1970 to 14 per cent in recent years). Because restrictions on women’s mobility in the public domain tend to be more strictly enforced in rural areas, poorer women have been migrating to the relative anonymity of towns since the 1970s to earn a living. Small-scale studies from the 1970s and 1980s, for example, noted the high proportion of destitute women, often female heads, among slum dwellers in Dhaka. These women mainly worked in the informal economy as domestic servants or in a range of casual or marginalised forms of work (e.g. prostitution). Unlike India, official statistics document a fairly rapid rise in urban female labour force participation over the last decade or so. This work is in a range of export-oriented industries, particularly the garment industry, which took off in the 1980s. In other words, the ‘feminisation’ of export-oriented manufacturing has taken a far more visible form in Bangladesh than it seems to have done in India. High percentages of female rural migrants are employed in these factories, often drawn from the poorest parts of the country. Clearly, the pressures of poverty have combined with the ‘pull’ of new opportunities to erode some of the previous restrictions on women’s public mobility. Household poverty and women’s work in urban areasThe association found in rural areas between women’s participation in paid work and household poverty is also found in urban areas. IndiaActivities in which women from low-income households are involved are low paying, require low skills and are extensions of domestic work. The main exception to this pattern is the information technology (IT) sector, which provided well-paid jobs but largely benefited educated urban women. A National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA) survey of six cities in 1988 found that 31 per cent of the working women were self-employed, 25 per cent were piece rate workers and 18 per cent were casual labourers. Predictably, they were concentrated in
Homeworkers often receive the lowest labour returns. This family is from Nepal the lowest paying and least skilled occupations. Homeworkers received the lowest returns, lower even than casual wage workers. The very low returns to women’s work in the informal economy, where they tend to be concentrated, explains the strong association between women’s economic activity and household poverty in urban areas. The same survey showed that female labour force participation was higher among low-income households than census estimates for all the cities, and considerably higher for younger age groups. 62 per cent of low-income households had at least one working woman; percentages were much higher in cities based in the south. Female work force participation was highest in households where the head was employed in casual labour, and these were likely to be the poorest. A study based in Faridabad noted the extreme poverty of female-maintained households: 14.2 per cent of those sampled depended entirely on female earnings and these were ‘the poorest of the poor’. However, despite the low pay women receive, their economic contributions have been shown to be the single most important element of the survival strategy of poor urban households. The NIUA study confirmed that 11 per cent of households relied entirely on female earnings, while women contributed 25–50 per cent of earnings in around a third of the households. BangladeshStudies of the urban economy in Bangladesh also reveal the association between female labour force participation and household poverty. Household survey data from 1992 gave overall male labour force participation rates of 68 per cent, compared to 34 per cent among women. While increases in per capita household income led to a decline in participation rates for both women and men – partly reflecting more younger household members currently studying – the decline was very much steeper for women. This was probably because many more women, particularly married women, gave up work. A recent study of the livelihoods of poorer urban households provides more details about women’s activities and confirms the gender segmentation of the informal economy:
The rise of export-oriented manufacturing, particularly garments, has provided an opening into the formal economy for women, many of whom come from poor households. It has also made some degree of improvement in their circumstances possible (see box 5.3). However, the extent to which women’s contributions have changed their position in the household is severely limited by differences in female and male earnings, obstacles to their advancement and men’s control over whether they work outside the home or not.
Gender Inequality and Household Poverty in Sub-Saharan AfricaThere are fewer cultural restrictions on women’s mobility in the public domain in sub-Saharan Africa and consistently high estimates of female labour force participation. The biases that have led to women’s work being underestimated in national statistics in other regions do not seem to have done so here. However, due to various constraints, poor women have a far more limited set of economic options than men from equivalent social groups. The kind of work that women do may thus be a more powerful indicator of poverty than the fact that they work. Once again, though, flawed models, inappropriate concepts and unreliable statistics fail to reveal all their different productive activities. Moreover, while its low density of population leads to the region being characterised as ‘land-abundant’, this is misleading. Only a third can be classified as ‘land-abundant’ and even this is declining. These flaws have also obscured how the poor earn their livelihoods in general. There has been an overemphasis in the region on subsistence farming combined with a lack of attention to markets. There appears to be a view among many economists that labour markets in rural Africa are very thin and are only now emerging in some areas in response to population growth and external trade opportunities. There are, of course, variations across the subcontinent that reflect differences in the climate and in ‘local histories of impoverishment and accumulation’. Yet it can be safely said that most people in rural areas cannot depend for their livelihood on farming alone. The poorest groups are thus those without access to off-farm income (see box 5.4).
The very poor have long diversified their activities because no single source of income can sustain household members. Unable to buy the inputs needed to improve farm yields, their only option is to enter off-farm activities that require little capital and few skills. Off-farm activity can also be driven by the need for capital to invest in farm productivity or to smooth seasonal ups and downs in agricultural production. More recently, it has been accelerated by the economic liberalisation that led to the removal of seed and fertiliser subsidies and of government-regulated food pricing. This undermined peasant production of food and cash crops, particularly in regions with poor transport links. At the same time, the price of consumer goods went up and there were cut-backs in public funding of various social services. Rural households therefore had to search for new, more remunerative activities outside agriculture. Men appear to be moving into the off-farm sector faster than women, leading to a higher concentration of women on the land. In most of the region, men make up the majority of migrants to mines and cities in search of employment, leaving women to take up male tasks in agriculture. With the spread of market relations, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa, as in South and West Asia, is becoming increasing ‘feminised’. Gender and economic activity in the rural economyWhile it is widely acknowledged that women play a major role in agriculture in Africa, there has been a tendency to associate them with food crops and men with cash crops. The reality is much more varied not only across the region but also often between neighbouring areas. In some parts of the sub-continent, women grow the staple food crop for family subsistence while men grow food for sale; in others, men grow industrial or export crops, perhaps in addition to the food staple. There is also a range of other possibilities. Women certainly contribute a high percentage of labour in food production – for household consumption as well as for sale. This ranges from 30 per cent in Sudan to 80 per cent in the Congo. The percentage of women in the economically active labour force in agriculture ranges from 48 per cent in Burkina Faso to 73 per cent in the Congo. This means that men are often heavily involved in food production. Women also produce and sell crops to buy other food. The poorest households often have a deficiency of cereals because of the small size of their holdings. A ‘time-honoured’ survival strategy is thus the sale of higher economic and nutritional value foods, such as pulses and legumes, in order to purchase lower-value cereals. If women grow secondary crops while men grow the staple cereal, their production may be more market-oriented than men’s. Livelihoods based on land in the region depend on other factors of production, including labour and various productive inputs, animal traction and improved implements. They also depend on the ability to cultivate high-value crops and have access to marketing outlets. While women may have access to land, they do not usually have title to it, resulting in insecurity of tenure. This leaves widows, divorced and deserted women in a difficult position, particularly in patrilocal societies. Lack of access to agricultural credit by rural farmers affects both men and women. However, state marketing boards and agricultural co-operatives have tended to buy from – and distribute supplies, credit and extension services to – male household heads. Women often need husbands’ permission before being granted loans.
Women picking tea in Tanzania Contract farmingThe problems of women farmers have been worsened by the increasing commercialisation of agriculture. New non-traditional agricultural export (NTAE) crops are mainly produced in large-scale plantations and packing plants. However, certain export crops – particularly horticulture – are grown by smallholder farmers, often on a contract basis. Generally it is the better-off farmers who have benefited because land, equipment and other capital requirements were needed to qualify for the contracts. In Kenya, for example, smallholders growing export vegetables were found to own twice as much and better quality land those that did not, and their land was also more likely to be irrigated.
The contracts are also provided on the understanding that male household heads can mobilise the labour of women and children in the family. Men have thus taken on the management of cash crops, while women are expected to contribute labour to these crops as well as their own. For example, women in Kenya provide the primary labour in the production of French beans for export, and experience an increase in their workloads, but men sign the contracts and hence receive the payments. In addition, men have begun to encroach on land that had previously been used by women for household food production and for sale in local produce markets, thereby eroding independent spheres of activity by women. Off-farm activitiesThere has been limited research on women’s off-farm activities because of the strong association of women with subsistence farming. However, there is evidence of significant levels of involvement. A study in Zimbabwe, for example, that looked at the income from activities in 12 villages found 58 per cent of men and 42 per cent of women engaged in home-based industries. The work undertaken was gender specific, however, and women’s was generally less remunerative. For example, the lowest annual income for a male home industry – brick-makers – was at least seven times as much as that for beer brewing, a female occupation. A re-study in 1989 of an area in north-east Ghana originally studied in 1975 found many more women engaged in generating income through off-farm activities than previously. However, the actual range of activities had not changed much. The most important source of income was trading, primarily in cooked food and various kinds of petty trade. Women’s contribution to household livelihoods thus combined their reproductive work, their productive work for male household members and some independent economic activity. Waged labourThe other under-reported, and under-researched, aspect of women’s work is wage labour, particularly casual wage labour on smallholder farms. This is part of the larger failure noted above to recognise the importance of rural labour markets in Africa. Nevertheless, employment by the day, for cash and for payment in kind, is widespread. It is a critical source of labour supply to the more successful farmers in smallholder areas. Female waged labour is also of growing importance for very poor households, though to a varying degree across the sub-continent. For example, a study in Zambia in the late 1980s found that around two-thirds of the sampled households hired labour for growing hybrid maize and that the regular supply of locally hired casual labour was largely female. On the other hand, studies in Uganda found wage labour mainly provided by men, particularly younger, single men. They entered the labour market to establish themselves financially or to support a young family, and left it when their households were more established. Women seeking waged employment were generally divorced or widowed. Wage labour opportunities have expanded in many parts of the region as a result of the increased cultivation of NTAE crops. Women make up a significant percentage of the workforce in the large-scale enterprises organised along quasi-industrial lines. In Kenya and Zambia, for example, over 65 per cent of workers in vegetable packing plants and on farms are women. In Zimbabwe, women make up 91 per cent of horticultural employees. These women tend to be young and often unmarried, but there is also a high proportion of women heads of households. In Kenya, for example, they made up over half of those participating in export vegetable production. Ninety per cent of women working in South African fruit production were married. The majority of women who take up these jobs have few asset holdings and limited wage-earning opportunities in agriculture. The export horticulture industry attracts large numbers of individuals from landless and land poor households who migrate from rural areas to work in packing sites in the cities. A recent study in Kenya found that 100 per cent of wage workers in packinghouses and 86 per cent of those on farms had migrated from other parts of the country, often leaving their children behind. One major difference for women working as waged labour in the NTAE sector is that they are paid cash in direct exchange for their labour in contrast to the unpaid labour they provide on family farms. Household poverty and women’s economic activityGiven the generally high rates of female labour force participation in sub-Saharan Africa, there is no clear-cut association between household poverty and women’s labour force participation of the kind noted in South Asia. Nor, however, is there necessarily any relationship between the income of the household and the poverty of its women members. Indeed, since income pooling is not practised in many parts of Africa, it is quite possible for married women to be much poorer than their husbands if they do not receive any support from them. They must then survive largely through their own efforts. The gendered structure of authority and incentives within the household has been shown by several studies. For example, a study in Cameroon noted women’s reluctance to provide their labour to crops when the proceeds would be controlled by men. They preferred to use their labour on crops that were under their control. It also pointed to the use of violence by men to coerce their wives into providing the necessary labour. A number of well-known studies in the Gambia also highlight struggles in the household over the allocation of women’s labour and provide examples of project failures that resulted from this. Analysis from Burkina Faso shows how senior males in the household control labour and other inputs on holdings, to the relative neglect of holdings controlled by junior men as well as female members. These studies have drawn attention to ‘allocative inefficiencies’ (i.e. the fact that resources are not distributed in an efficient way) because of inequalities in household relations. However, they generally neglect gender inequalities external to the household. These include a lack of agricultural inputs (fertiliser, plough, etc.) that is more common among female-headed households. Moreover, as noted earlier, poverty in the region is increasingly associated with the inability to obtain an income from off-farm activities. These often provide the funds to invest in raising agricultural productivity. With their smaller holdings, women farmers are unlikely to generate enough surplus from their farming activities to provide the start-up capital for off-farm enterprise and many rely on male household members to assist them. However, poorer women are least likely to have such support. With little start-up capital and poorer access to land, the kinds of options available to them are likely to yield low returns. Women’s scarce labour time is thus spent in low productivity, low-income activities. This may also be true for men to some extent. However, men tend to have more capital, skills or education, which enable them to escape. For example, research from rural Tanzania shows that men were far more successful than women in translating educational achievements into off-farm employment. A 36-year-old man with secondary education had a three in four chance of such employment while a woman of the same age and educational level had only half that chance. With completed primary education she had a quarter of the chance, and with partial primary education only a fifth.
Research in Ghana, where off-farm opportunities for women were few and poorly paid, highlights how poverty might be unequally distributed in the same household (see box 5.6). Labour markets appeared to be very underdeveloped in this area, although many women worked for others for in-kind returns. Where wage labour markets were more developed, studies suggest that women’s participation in agricultural wage labour – particularly casual wage labour – can be taken as an important indicator of both household and female poverty. While casual wage labour is generally poorly paid, women receive between one third and half the male rate for a day’s work. Women’s lower wages in Uganda, for example, reflected a combination of their domestic workloads, their responsibility for the food needs of the family and their lack of bargaining power, given the lack of or limited alternatives. There was a higher frequency of ‘distress’ sales on the part of women due to their responsibilities for meeting basic needs within the household (i.e. they accepted less than the going rate of pay because of urgent need for food or income). This undermined their bargaining position. Small farmers in Nigeria, some of them women, generated less employment per farmer than large farmers but paid higher daily wages. One reason was that small-scale farmers hired their close female relatives and friends and needed to keep their good will while larger farmers had less personalised relationships. However, the lowest wages and strictest terms of work were found in agribusiness units. Consequently, agribusiness workers tended to be poorer, foreign migrants or in urgent need of cash. None of these women had a farm of their own so land shortages may have been developing in the area. In areas of rural Zimbabwe, female wage labour was low paid because it tended to be undertaken by female household heads who had no source of male support and less bargaining power with employers. There was a difference between de jure and de facto female heads.1 The former were much poorer, less likely to receive remittances and owned less land and assets than male-headed households or de facto female-headed households. The overwhelming majority of the women in casual labour in the country’s largest agri-industrial enterprise were de jure 1In Africa, de jure female heads are those who become heads of their own households as a result of divorce, widowhood or abandonment or else as wives in polygamous marriages while de facto female-headed households are those where male family members are absent, usually because they have migrated in search of work. household heads (while the majority of male casual labourers were married). The children of female casual workers suffered from higher than average levels of malnutrition.
A more recent study of rural poverty in South Africa selected a sample of households based on female involvement with wage labour. These households were compared with a national survey of rural households and found to have higher levels of poverty. However, there were variations in their poverty levels. Households that had ratios of adult resident men to women below the mean for all black rural households were also poorer, and households made up entirely of females were the poorest. Very few of these women were able to earn a living through
A woman does the family washing in a river in Zimbabwe self-employment in cultivation or livestock-raising. Instead, they relied for survival on selling their labour, with agricultural wage labour accounting for around 60 per cent of such employment. This and domestic service were the least well-paid jobs in the labour market. According to the national survey, 58 per cent of households received 90 per cent or more of their income as wages or remitted wages. The study explores variations in the levels of poverty among sample households to identify: (a) the characteristics of poor women who had been able to escape from the worst aspects of deprivation; and (b) barriers that blocked the escape routes of others. The former were mainly women who earned relatively high wages in stable employment on large-scale, state-run farms. They had:
They thus had longer and less interrupted work experience. Part of their success stemmed from advantages derived from parents, particularly from highly motivated mothers. Gender and economic activity in the urban economyIn general, evidence from urban areas in sub-Saharan Africa shows that women are more likely to be found in the informal economy than in the formal, and in self-employment within it. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to be found in the public sector and in various forms of formal as well as informal waged employment. Education has an important role to play in access to better-paid jobs outside farming in many parts of the region. However, it appears to have a greater significance in formal rather than informal employment and in urban rather than rural contexts. It has been found to increase the likelihood for both men and women to enter public sector employment. Yet studies in several countries (Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea and Uganda) show that, for every level of education, men were more likely to obtain public sector employment than women, and to earn higher wages. The effect was least in evidence in the self-employed sector where most women were located. Schooling in Ghana was found to be positively associated with entry into wage employment and, among wage employees, with entry in the public sector. Similar findings were reported for Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea and Uganda. While women gained more limited entry into public sector employment than men in much of Africa, many more women were also affected by the cuts in public sector employment as a result of structural adjustment policies (SAPs). This is because they were concentrated in the lower skilled and lower paid jobs where the majority of the cuts were made. For example, women made up 26 per cent of public sector employment in Ghana but 35 per cent of those downsized. Moreover, a study from Guinea noted that of the thousands who were retrenched from public sector employment, women were less able than men to find jobs in the private sector. However, this is likely to refer to formal sector employment as their share of informal employment appears to be on the increase. Earlier ideas about the urban informal economy in Africa saw it as made up of those who had not been able to find more better paid formal employment with possibilities for upward mobility. However, these have had to be revised in the light of a dramatic decline in real wages in the urban formal sector (from an index of 100 in 1975 to 52 in 1985) and the emergence of a highly profitable ‘parallel’ economy. The share of the female labour force in the informal sector rose from 10 per cent in 1970 to 18 per cent in 1990 (and consequently the percentage of women from 29 to 35%). At the same time, increasing numbers of men are also seeking opportunities in the informal economy because of the higher earnings there. However, men and women from poorer households – who lack skills, education and capital – have always been found in the informal economy. There they engage in a wide range of income-generating activities. As noted earlier, women are particularly concentrated in the self-employed sector. This offers not only relative ease of entry to those with little or no education but also some degree of flexibility in managing domestic activities. Male enterprise tended to be more capital-intensive, although returns to capital inputs were positive and significant for both men and women, and perhaps more so for the latter. Vocational training had little effect on productivity but may have eased entry into certain sectors. Within the category of self-employed workers, women make up 62–87 per cent of those in trading. As traders, aside from market women in areas of West Africa, they tend to be confined to the less profitable niches. For instance, one study found that 75 per cent of traders in urban food markets in Tanzania were men and that they controlled almost all the maize wholesale and intermediary trade. Women were generally concentrated in the low-profit retail trade. Similarly, a study of the rice market in eastern Guinea found that female traders tended to be small-scale whereas male traders were generally wholesalers. Gender also differentiated the scale and type of products. Women were more likely to trade in perishable goods (fresh fruit and vegetables) and in smaller quantities. This is seen as an extension of their role in household food provisioning and so does not challenge prevailing gender ideologies. According to one study carried out in Burkina Faso, there is a clear correlation between income and scale of trade. Wholesalers in fruits and vegetables earned five times more income than retailers. Data from South Africa showed that the net monthly income of self-employed women in 1990 was about 44 per cent of that earned by men in the same category. In Abidjan, women heads of business in the informal sector also earned less than half of the amount earned by men. Among independent marginal workers (i.e. those with no capital) women earned half that of men in the same situation in Burkina Faso, 30 per cent in Cameroon, 38 per cent in Côte d’Ivoire and 68 per cent in Mali. However, in Guinea they earned 60 per cent more. Gender differences in returns to business activities are illustrated by a 1992 study of the informal sector in a town in northern Nigeria (see box 5.8).
Other insights into the link between household poverty and women’s work can be found in studies that explore household responses in times of crisis. One such study looked at Tanzania in 1988 at a time when the country was undergoing crisis and economic reform. This had led to sharply declining real wages in the formal sector and increasing pursuit of informal income-generating activities, primarily by women. That women’s increased involvement in income generation was largely a response to crisis is shown by the fact that 80 per cent of them had started their businesses in the five years prior to the survey compared to 50 per cent of the men. The number of self-employed urban women had risen from 7 per cent in the 1970s to over 60 per cent. In many cases, it was their husbands who provided them with start-up capital. Households maintained their attachments to formal employment where possible because of the security, rather than the amount, of earnings. Women were more likely to combine activities, the most common being small businesses and urban farming, usually on plots in peri-urban areas. A focus on urban formal employment obscured a major consequence of economic reform: the role of women’s informal incomes in the widening gap between income groups and the reasons for it. Such a focus suggests that women from upper and middle-income households earned only two or three times the income made by an average working woman. A look at these same women’s earnings in the informal economy, however, shows them making about 10 times what poorer women made from their small businesses, and an average of 10 times their own formal salaries as professionals. Their advantage lay in their access to greater capital, know-how and resources to enter major businesses. Links between Gender Inequality and Income Poverty: The Wider PictureThis chapter has drawn largely on material from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to highlight:
This final section makes some generalisations about the links between gender inequality and household poverty and their implications for the goal of poverty reduction, and includes examples from other regions. Women’s work and household survivalIt is clear that women’s work is critical to the survival and security of poor households and an important route through which they are able to escape out of poverty. Women from poor households engage in a variety of income-generating and expenditure-saving activities. In some cases, these supplement male contributions while in others they are the primary, or sole, source of household livelihoods. However, the relationship between women’s paid work and household poverty reflects variations in both local economies and local structures of patriarchy. In regions with female seclusion, women’s involvement in paid work outside the home may itself indicate household poverty. In other regions, the kind of work that women – and men – do is then a more powerful indicator of poverty than the fact that they work. The type of work connected with female poverty varies, however. For example, a study comparing livelihood strategies in the north and south of Vietnam noted that different occupations were associated with greater poverty in the two study locations. The north had a far more egalitarian distribution of land and very little landlessness. Households in which women had not been able to diversify out of the cultivation of rice and various low-grade staples into other higher-value crops or off-farm activities tended to be poorer. In the south, where landlessness was more widespread, households where women (but not men) engaged in agricultural wage labour tended to be poorer. Over the last half-century, employment in Latin America has become predominantly urban and primarily export-oriented. While women’s employment has been rising consistently, public employment has shrunk in the wake of economic crisis and restructuring, deteriorating working conditions, increased numbers of people seeking work and the mounting informalisation of labour markets. While household poverty is associated throughout the region with underemployment and unemployment, women in Chile face a higher than average risk of unemployment and/or entering precarious forms of work. According to a study based on data from Argentina, Chile and Mexico, women who worked as unpaid family labour reported the greatest degree of insecurity about both their work and their family needs. In many parts of the region, poor, unskilled women – particularly those who have migrated from rural areas – are found mainly in domestic service, often ‘living in’ with employers. In the early 1990s, 25 per cent of women workers in Honduras and 14 per cent in El Salvador were estimated to be in such work. A study of low-income settlements in urban Mexico found it to be the single largest category (32%) among working female household heads as well as spouses. While conditions of work within domestic service vary, wages tend to be very low for those who live in. Hours of work are long, with few opportunities for social life. It has been observed for Peru that domestic service is only slightly better than begging or prostitution. In the Caribbean, women have always worked outside the home and this is an integral part of their identity. Here it is the absence of paid work, rather than its presence, that signals female poverty. In particular, poverty is associated with the unemployment or underemployment of female household heads. In fact, a recent Family Life Survey carried out in Trinidad and Tobago revealed that 16 per cent of female heads had never been employed. While men in poverty generally resorted to drugs and violent crime, women were more likely to get involved in prostitution. Women’s work and household responses to crisisA second link between household poverty and women’s participation in paid work relates to household responses to crisis and insecurity. As seen in Chapter 2, SAPs put pressure on women to earn more income. This chapter has also pointed to the ‘distress sale’ of labour by women when usual sources of household income fall short or dry up and noted the use of women’s labour as a means of smoothing household income flows.
Women take gravel from a river bed for the construction industry in Indonesia Women’s labour plays a key role in helping households manage various kinds of contingencies. Studies following the East Asian crisis in 1997–1998 provide other insights into the gendered nature of impacts and responses. In Indonesia, for example, a study found that 46 per cent of the unemployed were women, although they made up around a third of the labour force. In Thailand, between January 1997 and February 1998, women made up 50–60 per cent of the unemployed. In the Republic of Korea, women were 75 per cent of ‘discouraged workers’ and 86 per cent of those retrenched from the hard-hit banking and financial sectors. Their overall employment rate fell by 7.1 per cent, compared to 3.8 per cent for men. Export processing zones laid off their regular workers, mainly women, and re-hired them on a piece rate basis. However, as men were laid off, the percentage of women in paid and unpaid work increased. There were also knock-on effects of the crisis on children. For example, entry into school was deferred for young children in Indonesia while older ones, particularly girls, were withdrawn in order to contribute to household livelihoods. The crisis appeared to lead to an increase in child labour, prostitution and domestic violence. In Jakarta, it is estimated that 2–4 times more women became sex workers in 1998 than in 1997. Interestingly, the effect of crisis in some cases may be breaking down earlier barriers. One of the impacts in Indonesia, along with many more women seeking paid work in order to avoid taking older children out of school, was a break down in the normal gender division of occupations. Women entered traditionally male occupations, such as fishing in the open sea, while men took up ‘female’ occupations such as oyster shucking and fish salting. It is clear from these studies that responses to crisis, shocks and insecurity are likely to take gender differentiated forms and to have gender differentiated effects because women and men face different constraints and opportunities. While men generally have wider labour market choices, they may also have to take up physically demanding forms of manual labour or travel long distances away from their homes and families in search of work. Women, on the other hand, face more restricted options that include personally humiliating forms of work such as domestic service, begging or prostitution. Res- ponses to crisis also have gender-differentiated effects on other family members. For example, the withdrawal of children, particularly girls, from school is one mechanism behind the inter-generational transmission of poverty. A concern with risk, insecurity and vulnerability has entered the policy discourse on poverty in a central way, as seen by comparing the 1990 and 2000 WDR. While the former gave a residual place to ‘safety nets’, the latter included ‘security’ as one of its three key themes. However, the extent to which the design of social protection and safety net measures seek to benefit women as well as men from poor households varies considerably. In some cases, as noted in Chapter 2, such measures may deliberately or unconsciously target men on the assumption that they are the primary breadwinners. Female headship and household povertyThe relationship between female headship and household poverty is not clear-cut. However, looking at the kinds of processes that give rise to the association between them can help reveal the interactions between gender and poverty in different socio-economic contexts (see box 5.9). It seems that what is important is not female headship per se but the processes by which women become heads of households. These are only partly captured by the distinction between de jure and de facto female headship. While de jure forms of headship might be expected to be associated with greater poverty – given the likely absence of a male breadwinner – this is not always the case. For example, a comparison of households in Malawi and Kenya often found the reverse. In Kenya, this was because de jure female heads were often wives in polygamous marriages who received contributions from husbands towards the care of their children. In the area of Malawi studied, it was due to local marriage practices under which husbands moved in with their wives’ lineage who held the family land. Most de facto female-headed households were the product of male migration due to household poverty. They were the poorest category in both cases, except those whose male members had migrated to South Africa at a time when high remitted wages made receiving households the most prosperous in the sample.
Male support, therefore, is important for distinguishing poor from less poor female-headed households. However, the presence of adult able-bodied male members in the household does not necessarily signify male support. Indeed, it may be a drain on household resources and lead to greater poverty for women and children. In Costa Rica, Mexico and the Philippines, de jure female-headed households were found to be better off than male-headed households for this reason. These households were often set up by women to avoid the demands made on the household budget by irresponsible husbands and partners. In many of these cases, contributions by adult sons compensated for the absence of male partners. Female-headed households in urban Mexico found it easier to defend basic consumption levels in the face of economic crisis because females controlled basic needs. Finally, it is worth noting that evidence from Bangladesh, Vietnam and South Africa suggests that female-only membership appears to be an unequivocal indicator of household poverty.
Gender inequality and returns to women’s workThe final link between gender inequality and poverty reflects inequality in returns to labour, widely recognised as the key asset at the disposal of the poor. It is clear that these inequalities are not static. They can change in response to market forces or they can be addressed through public policy. In addition, they can also be addressed through various forms of bargain and protest, most effective when they are undertaken collectively (see Chapter 7). Explanations for gender inequalities in returns to labour reflect a combination of the gender-specific, gender-intensified and imposed gender constraints discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter has provided various examples of gender-specific constraints, including:
These various limits on women’s mobility in relation to market opportunities help to explain why location appears to be far more important in explaining returns to women’s labour than men’s. For example, female-headed households in more remote areas were least responsive to price signals in the study on supply response to increases in maize prices referred to earlier. This was because they would least be able to transport their goods to the market. The importance of proximity to commercial areas also helped explain levels of women’s entrepreneurial activity in urban areas in Africa. A study in Nigeria noted that improvements in transportation had vastly reduced the unpaid porterage (head-carrying) duties that women owed to their husbands and male kin. It has allowed them to take up paid work in agriculture as well as to start their own farms. Labour-saving technologies that addressed women’s domestic workloads would have a similar effect. Gender-intensified forms of disadvantage that have featured in the discussion relate to:
Finally, various examples have been given of imposed disadvantage that help to reproduce, and often intensify, existing forms of gender disadvantage in the household and community. These include:
ConclusionA key policy message emerging from the findings in this chapter relates to:
Improving women’s access to economic opportunities, as well as returns to their efforts, will clearly be critical to the goal of halving world poverty. However, a commitment to labour-intensive growth strategies will not achieve these objectives on its own. Unless economic growth is accompanied by a genuine effort to address the constraints that undermine returns to women’s labour, women from low-income households will not be able to take advantage of the opportunities generated. This means dismantling various forms of discrimination in the public domain. It also means greater attention to women’s workloads in the domestic domain. This includes support for their child-care responsibilities and the promotion of labour-saving technologies to reduce the burden of low-value, routine but necessary forms of domestic labour. It could, of course, be argued (and frequently has been) that it is not important to focus on women’s earning capacity since they are the secondary earners. Priority should instead be given to improving the earning capacity of the primary male breadwinner, since he has fewer constraints in taking up economic opportunities and his income is the main basis for meeting basic needs in the household. However, as argued above, this assumption of the primary male breadwinner has long had a detrimental influence on the design of development policy – including the design of measures specifically aimed at addressing poverty. It has been shown that households are not, in fact, necessarily egalitarian. Rather, there is evidence of stark inequalities in the distribution of basic welfare in the household. Greater importance should therefore be given to women’s economic contributions in the design of policy because of: (a) the demonstrated significance of this contribution to the livelihoods of low-income households; and (b) evidence that improving male earnings does not necessarily lead to an equivalent improvement in the welfare of household members. Equalising economic opportunities to improve women’s economic agency and earning capacity may be an effective way of addressing the income poverty of households as well as the human capabilities of its members (including, of course, its female members). The evidence for this is discussed in the next chapter.
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