Feminization of poverty, Evidence of a Feminization of Income Poverty

Feminization of poverty

The idea of a ‘feminization of poverty’ dates back to the 1970s but was popularized from the 1990s on by some United Nations documents. The concept became renowned as a result of a study by Diane Pearce which focused on the gender patterns in the evolution of poverty rates in the United States between the beginning of the 1950s and the mid-1970s. It was initially used to mean “an increase of women among the poor” and “an increase of female headed households among the poor households”.


This approach was abandoned because the measures of feminization of poverty based on them can be affected by changes in the demographic composition of population - for instance, the impoverishment of female headed households can be neutralized by a reduction of the numbers of female headed households in the population. For that reason, subsequent studies adopted an alternative approach, comparing the evolution of the levels of poverty within each gender group.


Evidence of a Feminization of Income Poverty

The overrepresentation of women among the income poor at a given moment seems to be a much more common phenomena than the process of the feminization of income poverty. Actually, despite the enormous political controversy around the issue, there is little support to the claim that there is a systematic feminization of income poverty in the world. It seems that feminization occurred in the United States between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, although some reject the hypothesis for the years after 1970 and the 1980s.


Data from the United Kingdom indicates that from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s there was no evidence of a feminization of poverty. In Canada, it was found a feminization of poverty between 1973 and 1990 when ‘feminization’ was understood as an ‘increase among female headed households’, but not when the ‘increase among women’ definition was used. Little is known about developing countries, but the existing research reports no evidence of a feminization of income poverty after the 1990s in Latin America.