Over the last decade, poverty analysis has moved from a focus on women and poverty to gender-aware anti-poverty programming. Rather than focusing on female-headed households only, recent thinking is informed by a more holistic understanding of the linkages between gender, poverty and vulnerability. Quantitative money-based indicators of poverty may not always reveal significant differences between men and women. But policy makers and practitioners need to be aware of the multiple channels through which women may become impoverished and disempowered. Here we focus on the social discrimination trap, which highlights the ways in which men and women’s, girl‘s and boys’ experiences of poverty differ in important ways.
We discuss how understanding the gender dimensionsof chronic poverty is important not only for tackling the greater levels of deprivation and vulnerability that girls and women routinely face in many country contexts, but also for tackling poverty more broadly. Given women’s central role in producing, maintaining and reproducing the population (child bearing and raising, care of the family, sick and elderly), policy measures to support women’s empowerment can have multiple positive spill-over effects on women’s wellbeing as well as childhood poverty and household poverty in general.
Julia Brunt, CPRC Programme Manager No. 12 July 2008