Gender and poverty: what we know, don’t know, and need to know for Agenda 2030

Abstract

Drawing on historical debates on gender, poverty, and the ‘feminisation of poverty’, this paper reflects on current evidence, methods and analysis of gendered poverty. It focuses on initiatives by UN Women, including the Progress of the World’s Women 2015–16. Our analysis of the data compiled by UN Women raises questions about what might account for the over-representation of women among the poor in official accounts of poverty, and how this is plausibly changing (or not) over time. The paper highlights that analysis of what is measured and how needs to be understood in relation to who is the focus of measurement. The lack of available data which is fit for purpose questions the extent to which gender poverty differences are ‘real’ or statistical. There is a continued reliance on comparing female with male headed households, and we argue the move by UN Women to adopt the notion of Female Only Households reflects available data driving conceptual understandings of women’s poverty, rather than conceptual advances driving the search for better data. Wider UN processes highlight that while sensitivity to differences among women and their subjectivities are paramount in understanding the multiple processes accounting for gender bias in poverty burdens, they are still accorded little priority. To monitor advances in Agenda 2030 will require more and better statistics. Our review suggests that we are still far from having a set of tools able to adequately measure and monitor gendered poverty.

Keywords:

• Agenda 2030
• female-headed households
• feminisation
• gender
• poverty
• UN Women

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support provided by a Cluster Seed Fund award from the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2015–2016 entitled: Measuring and Accounting for Gendered Poverty in the post-2015 Era. We would also like to thank Yara Evans, Kings College London, for her assistance in redrawing Figure 1, and the anonymous referees who reviewed earlier drafts of this paper for their useful comments.