Gender Inequity and Poverty: why gender

1
Gender Inequity and Poverty why gender?
2
International consensus on development

• Reduce and eliminate poverty
• Stop preventable disease, promote health for all
• Build capacities across the population support
  universal literacy and education
• Sustainable environment/resources

3
What has gender got to do with development?

• Poverty
• Health
• Education

4
Poverty

• Disaggregation of the poor
• Across the world, women and children represent a
  disproportionate percentage of the worlds poor.
• Feminization of poverty
• growing phenomenon
• refers to the large and increasing proportions of
  women in agriculture, casual wage labour and
  unpaid labour
• Assetlessness
• Fewer women than men own assets necessary to earn
  a living or to offer collaterals to get loans.

5
Gender differences and poverty

• Gender intersects with economic deprivation to
  produce more intensified forms of poverty for
  women than men poor women are disadvantaged by
  being women as well as by being poor and the
  effects of poverty are therefore worse.
• Gender makes poverty harder to escape since women
  face gender bias in markets, barriers to labour
  market entry and poor access to productive
  resources including information.
• Womens experience of poverty is different to
  that of men, for example women might experience
  time poverty as a particularly acute aspect of
  their deprivation.
• Gender makes women vulnerable to certain
  processes of poverty which do not apply to men,
  for instance, poverty resulting from marital
  breakdown, death of a spouse, or social exclusion
  resulting from sexual behaviour considered
  inappropriate.

6
Why women are poorer than men

• Time poverty and reduced mobility due to unpaid
  work and responsibilities for domestic tasks and
  care of the household members
• Biases in labour markets producing low returns to
  labour
• Lack of access to resources such as credit,
  property and education, the latter in particular
  reinforcing womens low returns to labour
• Lack of control over earned income producing
  disadvantage within households
• Limitations on access to public space producing
  restrictions in access to labour markets,
  restrictions on mobility limitations on
  legitimacy in spaces where resource distribution
  is negotiated and limited access to information.

7
Health

• Half a million women die and eight million women
  are disabled annually from pregnancy related
  causes (WHO et al 2000).
• Maternal mortality ratios (maternal deaths per
  100 000 live births) in 2000 standing at 830 in
  Africa and 330 in Asia
• In Africa and Asia over 40 percent of births are
  not attended by skilled health professionals
  trained in pregnancy, childbirth and the
  immediate post-natal period.
• About 25 percent of children are born with low
  birth weight due to the health problems suffered
  by the mother during pregnancy leading to long
  term poor health

8
Education

• the number of out-of-school children is declining
• But
• girls still accounted for 57 percent of the
  out-of-school children of primary school age of
  primary school age worldwide in 2001 and for more
  than 60 percent in the Arab States and in South
  and West Asia (UNESCO 2005).
• amongst 83 developing countries with available
  data, only 16 have gender parity in enrolment at
  secondary level, and only four at tertiary level
  (UNESCO 2005)
• In 2002, about 800 million adults in the world
  were illiterate, most of them in sub-Saharan
  Africa and East and South Asia. Of them, 64
  percent are women.

9
Why should NGOs address gender?

• Global gender gaps
• Lessons learned in development objectives of
  poverty reduction, better health and universal
  basic education cannot be achieved without
  addressing gender inequities
• Gender inequity and poverty are inextricably
  linked and mutually reinforcing

10
So what is gender?

• Gender is the social definition of what it is to
  be a man or woman in a given society.
• Gender refers to the rules, norms, customs and
  practices through which the biological
  differences between males and females is
  transformed into social differences between men
  and women, boys and girls.
• This process results in girls/women and men/boys
  being valued differently, having unequal life
  chances and opportunities