index of 2005 conference papers

The Feminization of Poverty: A Global Problem

Mercedes Valdés Estrella
University of Havana, Cuba

In the book "The Invisible Adjustment" of the UNIFEM Regional Program of Training of Women for Development, poverty is considered part of a group of exclusions within areas such as: the marketing of goods and services, the technological environment and the decision-making processes. Thus, poverty is expressed not only in purely economic terms, which reveals the complexity of this analysis.

In the definitions of poverty studied, we observe a substantial nucleus of "exclusion" of individuals from social processes to a certain degree. At the conceptual level, I start from the definition of poverty given by the World Bank: "The impossibility of reaching a minimum level of life", but adding to that, its complex and multidimensional character, expressed in diverse manifestations in the material and spiritual realms, and in the multiple causes that involve dissimilar aspects of reality. This integral vision of the phenomenon is often absent in the emphases and approaches of poverty studies.

Women’s poverty is increasing. The specificity of women’s poverty should be explained and defended. Women become impoverished because of problems different from those of the men; among them, those related to giving birth (single mothers); affective ruptures (abandonment of families, divorce and widowhood); social problems derived from other types of separations (hospitalization, emigration, imprisonments of husbands or partners); loss of the husband’s or partner’s work, and definitely, in many instances, problems deriving from affective-economic dependence upon men, which accounts for the greatest intensity in conditions of poverty suffered by the women (in the sense of perceiving less social protection and fewer resources with which to confront poverty).

The rediscovery of the traditional situation of poverty that the women experience (the traditional poor, the hidden poor, the elderly, immigrants, gypsies) along with the so-called new poverty (single-parent families), reconverted (women whose husbands have suffered the industrial re-conversion and are not working, etc.) has given rise to what is called the feminization of the poverty. The works of Hilda Scott in 1984 mark the beginning of the discussion of the feminization of the poverty. It is a concept that has been widely diffused in recent times and this term encompasses several different concepts. For this author, the current economic system engenders pauperization, which, though it moves to different rhythms, is a continuous, progressive pauperization for women as a whole, in developed as well as underdeveloped countries. The allotment of remunerated and non-remunerated work, the redistribution of the work based on technical progress, and the increasing transfer to women of the economic responsibility for children -- these factors lead to a specific kind of poverty that has never been analyzed as such.

An analytical trend represented by English, American, and Canadian researchers considers main cause of the poverty of women to be the inadequacy of women’s own revenues due to labor and salary discrimination as well as discrimination in the income security systems of the State.

Another point of view put forth in European countries emphasizes ruptures with the husband. Separation, the divorce and widowhood mean for many the loss of economic support. The situation is aggravated when in most cases women have responsibility for the children and the nonpayment of the husband’s contributions is not uncommon; this has transformed the single woman with family responsibilities into the prototype of the impoverished women. This situation affects all the social classes in some way, which relates to the discourse about the new poverty. The true cause of women’s poverty is that they don't have own revenues. Divorce or separation hides the real problem (that the married woman did not have her own income). Divorce or separation only unveils this reality.

Another current of thought sustains that marriage impoverishes the women. Each spouse enters the marriage with their economic, social-cultural capital and it is in the course of the marriage that the woman’s diminishes and the man’s increases.

These focuses should not be seen as completely opposed but rather that in some basic elements they coincide, independently placing emphasis on one or another aspect. Among the common elements are the problem of the invisibility or near invisibility of women’s poverty and the fact that a good part of the research and statistics ignore the real work of women.

Although the economic dependence of women has its roots and is organized within the institution of the family, which is socialized for the sexual division of labor and the respective allotments of roles and women are impoverished from marriage, economic globalization and neoliberal politicians have impacted the sexual division of labor and have made worse the poverty of the women. Woman's poverty is not a phenomenon of poor countries alone, it also exists in the industrialized countries and is expressed in multiple ways: insufficient revenues, lack of access to education and the health services, discrimination and low participation in the decision-making processes. Poverty is the result of the lack of power, impossibility of access to economic, political and cultural resources.

Economic globalization and the neoliberal politicians are manifested in the labor market, which minimizes or eliminates state protections for workers, increases unemployment and underemployment, and marginalizes large masses of workers. It is evident in the excluding character of the neoliberal model and the reinforcement of the situation of poverty in which millions of people live in the world, mainly women and in particular the divorced, separated, elderly, single mothers, immigrants, underemployed, unemployed, those employed in the informal economy, blacks and indigenous people.

This is reflected in:

1. a decrease of access to positions of skilled work. At the present time ¾ of the work of women in most of the industrialized countries is in the service sector - administration, education, health -. the sector that is being cut with a doubling of damage for women; on one hand, loss of remunerated work and on the other, increase of domestic and "caretaker" work when the State does not assume it (the privatization of the services doesn't guarantee the care of the elderly, children, sick, handicapped, and women have to take on or substitute for the State in providing these services).

2. a greater access to unskilled work and under worse conditions of exploitation and inequity.

3. the number of women working part-time is increasing. They are the main candidates for this type of work, socialized to alternate productive with reproductive work; they are always willing to accept this type of work, even though they are not well remunerated and part-time work decreases their chances for professional development and access to management positions.

4. another effect of economic globalization is the participation of the women in transnational production. This is production characterized by the search for minimum costs and maximum benefits, hiring a work force that is willing to accept what another, with years of experience and tradition of union achievements, would not accept. An important part of transnational production in underdeveloped countries is concentrated in the free trade zones, created to attract foreign capital. These are areas that usually get fiscal incentives, the suspension of customs charges, and other benefits. The sizeable participation by women is explained by factors that facilitate the control of the labor force related to: the supposed submission and docility of women; non-participation in union and political work in order to devote time to reproductive work; the flexibility of the feminine workforce because they are willing to enter and exit the labor market with more ease than males, in order to carry out the two types of work, both the domestic and remunerated.

The place that women occupy in the social structure and especially in the sexual division of labor as those who are responsible for the relations of reproduction, makes her entrance into the relations of production of any occupation subordinate to the necessities and requirements of the home. In many cases, the double workday also prevents women from unionizing and carrying out activities to re-assert their rights.

According to the figures of the latest European employment report on the topic of the Feminization of the Poverty, presented in the Public Hearing of the Commission on Women of the European Parliament, in that continent more than 40% of women work part-time or on limited-term contracts. From this Public Hearing it was deduced that policies to increase employment, if not accompanied by policies of salary equality for both sexes and of better employment conditions, will not guarantee the exit from poverty by women.

The lack of a gender focus in the statistics related to the problem of the women’s poverty limits the possibilities of understanding the magnitude of this scourge. Nevertheless, it is necessary to emphasize what international organisms as UNICEF and the International Conferences on Women (Mexico 1975, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995 and in the Summit on Social Development 1995) have accomplished along these lines in order to reveal the characteristics that this process assumes.

The poverty has woman's face: in the world around 1300 million people live in the absolute poverty, the majority are women.

- The effects of the neoliberal programs of structural adjustment on women are very much conditioned by the situation of women's disappearance from those programs. The "excluding logic" of neoliberal capitalism, as is well known, impoverishes in greater measure the poorest, in this case: women and children. According to figures revealed by United Nations in their report on human development, in 1996 between six and seven out ten impoverished people are women. The neoliberal policies impact more severely on women, because women occupy a weaker position in or are excluded from the productive apparatus. Women do not have access in the same way to the market with regard to resources and mobility, for which reason they cannot compete under equal conditions. Women’s access to the market depends on what feminist economist Ingrid Palmer calls "the reproductive tax" that is levied in the domestic sphere.

- In all the regions of the world the rate of female unemployment is greater than male unemployment.

- Women receive a disproportionately small amount of credit from current banking institutions. For example, in the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, women comprise between 7% and 11% of the beneficiaries of credit programs.

- In underdeveloped countries women continue to represent less than one-seventh of administrative officials and executives. Power and poverty are two interdependent phenomena. Poverty is the result of the lack of power, the impossibility of gaining access to economic, political and cultural resources.

- If to this situation are added the existing inequalities as regards education and health, we will see that recent estimates of the number of adult illiterates in the world is 905 million, of which 587 million (65%) are women. Illiteracy implies a lack of preparation to compete in the work market; illiterates are excluded from the advantages of scientific and technological development. Diverse factors, among them, educational, have an impact on the lack of the woman's advancement. The percentage of women school drop-outs, from adolescence to higher education, is significant, a situation that many times is a result of economic difficulties or the partial or total lack of infrastructure.

Lacking education, women register in social scenarios in a situation of absolute disadvantage; the privatization of the educational services diminishes more and more the possibility for training of impoverished women and of their children. In this century the exploitation of child labor continues to be a very serious problem in numerous countries. Many of these children live in countries of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Their conditions of life are terrible and their literacy possibilities are almost null. However, their small incomes are indispensable for the survival of their families. For example, in Nicaragua 600,000 minors carry out some work type against their own Constitution and a recently approved Law of Childhood and Adolescence. In this Central American country, child labor is practiced in a brutal and inhuman way. In Honduras, more than 2000 children are officially counted as working in the street.

The complications of pregnancy continue to be the main cause of women's death during her childbearing years. In underdeveloped countries, every year a half million mothers die for this reason.

The feminization of poverty is not only defined in terms of income and consumption, but also expressed in low access level to health services and to education, lack of control over the necessary resources for life; in short, the inability to access the decision-making processes that determine the human existence itself.

According to Guadalupe Espinosa, officer of the PNUD, to be poor means: "only not to lack the minimum conditions of life, but also the indispensable resources to exercise the elementary rights that constitute social citizenship."

Poverty affects men and women, but the historical conditions of inequality and discrimination in which women have lived create the framework to situate them in disadvantageous conditions with respect to the men. The artificial, psychological and structural barriers that prevent the women access to decision-making positions are increasing in regions like Latin America, Africa and Asia, places where more urgent problems associated with the violation of the women's elementary rights are addressed, such as having a stable employment that provides enough revenues for the satisfaction of one’s own and one’s family’s elementary necessities, to enjoy independence and dignity and of a situation of general well-being.

What possibilities for access to decision-making positions do women have in the developing countries when their educational levels and literacy are lower than those of men? What can be expected from the single-mother heads of households, which are struggling in situations of permanent poverty, social figures that today constitute an important sector of the poor in that part of the world?

In conditions of underdevelopment and poverty, the domestic day becomes longer, the woman's presence in the home becomes more urgent; there is a lack of time and mobility that certain occupations demand. A great number of women resort to domestic service as means of sustenance. In Argentina 23% of the economically active population are employed as servants; in Lima 11.2%, the vast majority of whom those work under conditions of uncertainty and without legal protections.

In the countryside, working conditions are even worse for women. Poor rural women are the most impoverished and vulnerable in the world, because without abandoning traditional roles, they carry out hard labor in the fields. In the face of this situation they opt, in some cases, to move to the city, becoming immigrants in their own country, their homes located in the unhealthy slum outskirts of the city, thus increasing their social marginalization.

Another edge of the feminization of poverty is the sexual harassment of women by employers that force many women to endure to sexual innuendos as the only way to keep their jobs. This situation almost always remains secret because of the moral implications that it has for women.

Poverty is also a latent source of sexual degradation, because many women work in the sex-market as an alternative means of survival, and prostitution becomes another job, with other risks for the health and integrity of the woman. And child prostitution in boys and girls of 5 to 10 years old constitutes one of the scourges that humanity faces today.

Poverty, and in particular women's poverty, is a global problem, the result of unjust economic, political and social relationships that dominate the world. It is not possible to alleviate this situation if social policies are not implemented from a gender perspective. Humanity cannot continue maintaining a considerable part of the world population under conditions of life so degrading. More than a fifth of the world population's is considered poor, unable to cover their fundamental necessities and of that, 3/4 are women whose natural function is to procreate, without the which the human species would be extinguished. Poverty is, by definition, result of the irrational distribution of existing wealth and of the globalization of the capitalist system that excludes from its benefits whole populations and increasingly broad sectors of the developed countries.

Although poverty is not a new phenomenon, but consubstantial to the society divided into antagonistic classes, capitalism has made it worse by elevating it to its maximum expression with neoliberal policies of structural adjustment that has not only thrown the poor into abject poverty, but also has brought poverty to wide sectors of the middle class in many countries of the world. Poverty as a social phenomenon has deep economic roots, but its effects transcend and invade the individual's spiritual life, with negative consequences from the moral point of view.

index of 2005 conference papers