Link between poverty and gender
Answers
As countries around the world attempt to lessen the financial and political woes caused by the global economic crisis, discussions by policy makers and development organisations have again focused on the ‘feminisation of poverty’. Most recently in the UK this has been visible in a focus on pension poverty, which many women may come to experience due to not having been able to save enough over their lifetime.
The term ‘feminisation of poverty’ is usually associated with research conducted by Diana Pearce, who in the late 1970s used it to refer to a growing (post-1950) concentration of income poverty among women relative to men in the USA, and especially among African-American female-headed households. Use of the term went global in the mid-1990s, largely as a result of the Fourth Women’s World Conference at Beijing in which alarm about an alleged 70 per cent of the world’s poor being female led to the ‘persistent and increasing burden of poverty on women’ to be adopted as one of the Beijing Platform for Action’s twelve critical areas of concern.