Gender, Poverty and Development

Gender equality
• Gender refers to the social, behavioral, and cultural attributes,
expectations, and norms associated with being a woman or a man.
• Gender equality refers to how these aspects determine how women and
men relate to each other and to the resulting differences in power
between them
• Three key dimensions of gender equality:
• Accumulation of endowments (education, health, and physical assets);
• Use of those endowments to take up economic opportunities and generate
incomes; and
• Application of those endowments to take actions, or agency, affecting individual
and household well-being.
Women and poverty
• Women make up a substantial majority of the world’s poor.
• Women and children are more likely to be poor and malnourished and
less likely to receive medical services, clean water, sanitation, and other
benefits
• The prevalence of female-headed households, the lower earning
capacity of women, and their limited control over their spouses’
income all contribute to this disturbing phenomenon.
• In addition, women have less access to education, formal-sector
employment, social security, and government employment programs.
• These facts combine to ensure that poor women’s financial resources are
meager and unstable relative to men’s. A disproportionate number of the
ultra-poor live in households headed by women
Women and work participation
Women’s Labour
Participation Rate (LPR):
the section of working
population in the age group
of 16-64 in the economy
currently employed or
seeking employment

In India Female LPR is

36%(2008) was extremely
low, whereas male (85%)
Labour Force Participation Rate in India: Female- Male
Gender Wage Gap
Average difference
between the
remuneration
received by
working men and
women.
Unadjusted pay gap
and the adjusted pay
gap.
Women earn 24%
less than men for
the same work
 Why Gender Pay Gap?
• Differences in pay are caused by occupational segregation (with more men in
higher paid industries and women in lower paid industries), vertical segregation
(fewer women in senior, and hence better paying positions), ineffective equal
pay legislation, women’s overall paid working hours, and barriers to entry into
the labor market (such as education level and single parenting rate).
• A second factor driving segregation in employment and earnings gaps is
differences in human and physical endowments (including access to assets and
credit)
• Educational attainment and educational choices
• In agriculture and entrepreneurship, large and significant gender disparities in
access to inputs (including land and credit) and in asset ownership are at the
root of the gender productivity gap-For example, in Brazil, women own as little
as 11 percent of land.
• Labor markets often do not work well for women, especially if their presence is
limited in some sectors or occupations. When few women are employed,
employers may hold discriminatory beliefs about women’s productivity or
suitability as workers
Where do women work? In India
• Less than 15% of all employed is
currently working in the formal
sector
• Just over half of the total labour
force is self-employed.
• In 2008-09 about 50% of all
employed worked in agriculture, 20%
in manufacturing, and 30% in
services.
• In recent years unemployment for
women has gone up. Unemployment
is highest among youngsters, for girls
and young women in 2006 official
unemployment rates between 17
and 22%.
Source: WDR 2012
 Women’s
unpaid work:
Across the
world, women
spend more
hours per day
on care and
housework than
men

Source: WDR 2012

 Slow progress in
Female Education
 Female disadvantage within
countries is more marked at
low incomes

School
attendance
varies
across
income
quintiles

Source: WDR 2012

 Over four million missing women
Excess female deaths in the world, by age and region, 1990 and 2008 (thousands)

Source: WDR 2012

Societal and Household decision making
• Women have less input than men in decision making in their
households, in their communities, and in their societies.
• Consider women’s underrepresentation in formal politics, especially in
its upper reaches. Fewer than one-fifth of all cabinet positions is held
by women.
• And women’s lack of representation extends to the judiciary and labor
unions. These patterns do not change much as countries get richer.
• The share of women parliamentarians increased only from 10 percent
to 17 percent between 1995 and 2009.
• Women’s ability to own, control, and dispose of property still differs
from that of men—sometimes legally, often in practice.
• Discrimination in work places and households
Women’s agency and violence
• many are caught in a
productivity trap: working
hard on an uneven playing
field with unequal access to
productive inputs-
constrains women’s agency
• A manifestation of the lack
of agency is domestic
violence. Violence is the
opposite of freedom

Women are at far greater risk of violence by an intimate partner or someone

they know than from violence by other people.
Gender Development Index
• The Gender Development Index (GDI) measures gender inequalities in
achievement in three basic dimensions of human development:
• health, measured by female and male life expectancy at birth;
• education, measured by female and male expected years of schooling for
children and female and male mean years of schooling for adults ages 25
years and older;
• and command over economic resources, measured by female and male
estimated earned income
• HDIfemale= (Ihealth_f X Ieducation_f X Iincome_f )1/3
• HDImale= (Ihealth_m X Ieducation_m X Iincome_m )1/3
• GDI= HDIfemale /HDImale
• The GDI groups are based on the absolute deviation of GDI from gender
parity, 100 . |GDI–1|.