”Even though they make up half the population, women and girls have endured discrimination in most societies for thousands of years. In the past, women were treated as property of their husbands or fathers – they couldn’t own land, they couldn’t vote or go to school, and were subject to beatings and abuse and could do nothing about it. Over the last hundred years, much progress has been made to gain equal rights for women around the world, but many still live without the rights to which all people are entitled.”–Robert Alan Silverstein
‘‘We’ll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.’ – Gloria Steinem
‘Feminization of poverty is a phenomenon in which women represent disproportionate percentages of the world’s poor. It as “the burden of poverty borne by women, especially in developing countries”. This concept is not only a consequence of lack of income, but is also the result of the deprivation of capabilities and gender biases present in both societies and governments.This includes the poverty of choices and opportunities, such as the ability to lead a long, healthy, and creative life, and enjoy basic rights like freedom, respect and dignity. In many countries, the feminization of poverty and the masculinization of wealth is still the status quo.’
*Women are poor. Women lack control over their income. Women lack power and voice. Women are missing out because they are undercounted, undervalued, underserved, and underrepresented.
*Women bear a disproportionate burden of the world’s poverty. Statistics indicate that women are more likely than men to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the systematic discrimination they face in education, health care, employment and control of assets.
*It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent.
*Poverty implications are widespread for women, leaving many without even basic rights such as access to clean drinking water, sanitation, medical care and decent employment. Being poor can also mean they have little protection from violence and have no role in decision making.
*Women’s nominal wages are 17 percent lower than men’s.
*More than 1.2 billion still subsist on less than $1 per day. women make up the majority of the world’s poor — owing to unequal access to resources and opportunities, discriminatory land and inheritance laws, and unequal distribution of household resources.
*7 out of 10 of the world’s hungry are women and girls.
*Of the 37 million people living below the poverty line in the US, 21 million are women, according to US Census Bureau figures from 2006
*More than two-thirds of the world’s unpaid work is done by women — the equivalent of $11 trillion, according to a global UNDP study from 1995. “women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 10% of the world’s income and own 1% of the means of production.”
*If the average distance to the moon is 394,400km, South African women walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day to supply their households with water,according to a 2006 UNDP report.
*Women are missing from poverty statistics that measure poverty by household, rather than individual: systems of national accounts do not include unpaid domestic work as “productive.”
*Women make up some 60% of the world’s working poor, people who work but do not earn enough to lift themselves above the $1 per day poverty line, According to a 2004 report by ILO (reaffirmed in 2006)
*Women in the US earned only 77 cents for every $1 earned by a man in 2005, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. In the developing world, the ratio is just 73 cents, according to World Bank estimates. For women of colour, the gap is even worse — African American women earn 63 cents and Latinas 53 cents (IWPR 2004).
*At the rate the wage gap is closing, women in the US will not see equal earnings until 2050. Women account for 64% of minimum-wage workers in the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2007.
*Elderly women are 70% more likely to be poor than elderly men.
*In some regions, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, women provide 70% of agricultural labour, produce over 90% of food, and yet are nowhere represented in budget deliberations, noted the World Economic Forum in 2005.
*Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls and 75% of the world’s 876 million illiterate adults are women, reports the Millennium Campaign in 2007.
*Gender inequality in education and employment in Sub-Saharan African has reduced per capita growth by 0.8% per annum, according to recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates.
*The global average proportion of women in Parliament in 2007 is just 17.3%, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union; the US ranks 67th with a mere 16%.
*In Mexico, women in paid employment devote an additional 33 hours to domestic chores per week, while men’s weekly contribution six hours.
*In Arab states, only 28 percent of women participate in the workforce.
*Women are concentrated in insecure jobs in the informal sector with low income and few rights; they tend to have few skills and only basic education. They are the first to be fired.
*80 percent of women workers are considered to be in vulnerable employment in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.
*In many countries around the world, women’s property rights are limited by social norms, customs and at times legislation, hampering their economic status and opportunities to overcome poverty. Even in countries where women constitute the majority of small farmers and do more than 75 percent of the agricultural work, they are routinely denied the right to own the land they cultivate and on which they are dependent to raise their families.
It seems women are forced to be poor, illiterate and unemployed because they are women. Whether women are black, white, yellow or brown, they are poor. They have black eyes or blue eyes or brown eyes or green eyes, they are poor. There are women who are made poor only because they do not have dicks!
Poor and dependent women are depressed, afraid, anxious, fearful, vulnerable, weak. They are having low self esteem and lack of self confidence. Women must not be poor. They must not be shy and silent. They must have a loud voice. They must refuse to be shackled, chained, threatened and beaten. Women must have money. They must have their own houses. Women must be independent and must be powerful.
Thanks for the nice article. woman should come out of home.
I have said that for years, women are the most discriminated of our species and the darker the shade of the skin the harsher the treatment.
“*More than two-thirds of the world’s unpaid work is done by women — the equivalent of $11 trillion, according to a global UNDP study from 1995. “women do two-thirds of the world’s work, receive 10% of the world’s income and own 1% of the means of production.””
But sexism doesn’t exist–remember?? Equality is achieved! Feminism is over! Woo-hoo!
Waiting for Gorbachev to arrive and start wailing on the lines of “how Taslima is making this a feminist issue, when it’s so clearly not…. how both men and women suffer, yada yada yada…”
It is a feminist issue, but misogyny hurts both men and women.
Finally a sensible post—except for the generalization.
Money = Freedom.
No money = No freedom.
Terrible statistics. How can Women beat these odds ? Apart from redefining work and money to reflect real life rather than neo-liberal economic theories.
Improvements in women’s working lives came from Babbage (computers) and Bell (telephones). My own mother worked as a calculator operator for a while, and she also worked for a couple of years operating electronic
fire control systems (Radar, for AckAck).
@d4maths
Thanks for this collection of stats, Taslima!
You may want to re-check this one:
I guess you meant that women walk 16 moon distances in the course of their life times in the course of their daily trips to get water, and not not every single day.
But even then, the numbers don’t quite seem to work out:
(Wikipedia has the distance as 384,400 km, but that’s just a little typo and doesn’t really make much of a difference here, but I’ll use this smaller number here just for accuracy’s sake.)
Assuming that these women walk for water every day for 70 years, of their life, there are 70 * 365 = 25,550 walks (let’s just forget about leap years, one day off in 4 years is probably not too unrealistic to assume). On the other hand, 16 moon distances are a total distance of 6,150,400 km. So on average, a woman would walk ~240 km per day — that’s running for 24 hours straight at the speed of an average marathon participant.
Could it be that there’s a forgotten decimal point here somewhere? Could you quote the source so I could check their assumptions/reasoning?
Even a tenth of the quoted figure, an average 24km walk for water, is a huge amount of work for a basic necessity, and this is a very important example for how women in developing countries have to struggle and waste their energy on extremely basic things. I’d love to have it correct.
Thanks @cswella: The source says “South African women together walk the equivalent of a trip to the moon and back 16 times a day”, which makes the figure a bit of a show effect, and does not say much about typical walks. 🙁
In case anyone was curious on sourcing, I think I found the site where Taslima gets the statistics.
http://www.unifem.org/gender_issues/women_poverty_economics/facts_figures.php
“*It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent.”
Could someone with a good understanding of economics please break this down to a Fisher Price level for me? I don’t understand how shifting money that’s already present in the GDP would increase it.
I’m not arguing this point, I’m just genuinely confused because economics (and mathematics in general, really) is like sorcery to me.
I am happy to report that I am trying to make a difference here. The majority of my best pupils are girls. And several of them have very dark skins.
What’s more, this is a national trend in Suriname. The majority of students at the AdeK, the only university of the country, is also female.
This is all old news. It’s not 1970.
Among 20-30 year olds, women now make more than men.
The wage gap appears to be directly related to female choices. When differences in overtime and hours worked are factored out, amaong younger people, women seem to earn exactly as much or even more than men.
Lots of studies now confirm this. Thw wage gap is an artifact of an earlier age.
This has been concomitant with the other changes in the West; The loss of the manufacturing base and its gradual replacement with service-sector jobs. Women utterly dominate in these.
The last recession was largely a “mancession”: mostly men lost jobs, though some women did.
This is about to change and balance out, though.
The result will be due to public service budget cuts, which have to come, as the tax bases in most Western countries have been eviscerated and debt levels are too high.
This will start cutting public sector jobs in vast numbers very soon.
It’s true women need money. But in the West, this is not a huge problem.
I would suspect this is more of a global than a Western problem. The troubles facing third-world women are truly immense.
*It is estimated that if women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, America’s GDP would be 9 percent higher; the euro-zone’s would be 13 percent higher, and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 percent.
-are you saying if they equalized the rates, or just raised women? Either way that is silly 1.) how would replacing men with women add to the GDP 2.) you cannot just add new jobs, and of course the GDP would rise if the opened.
Two-thirds of children denied primary education are girls and 75% of the world’s 876 million illiterate adults are women, reports the Millennium Campaign in 2007.
-This is a good point, in many places women are denied education, but it isn’t so much about poverty.
The global average proportion of women in Parliament in 2007 is just 17.3%, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union; the US ranks 67th with a mere 16%.
-Can you find statistics showing the percentage of women that run, if only 20%ish of people that run for parliament are women it is not the system’s fault.
Spot on with this write-up, I really believe
this web site needs far more attention. I’ll probably be back again to read more, thanks for the advice!