Feminisation of poverty

The creation of gender identities and the gendered division of labour starts from within a household – a classic reflection of essentialism lying at the centre of our value as basic socio-economic units. The socio-economic significance of a household, combined with the labels of "male" and "female" to specific roles within a household, leads to a hierarchy of power where men are considered superior. Traditionally, men have been  perceived to lead households, whereas women were responsible for more "homely" roles. Since households are regarded as the fundamental socio-economic unit of society, any transformation at the household level creates impacts at the aggregate level of a country. For instance, changes in household composition and structure will have an impact on accessibility, resource distribution, healthcare planning etc. Traditionally, a nuclear family is headed by an adult male and regarded as the “standard’’ composition of a household. However, in the last few decades, there has been a significant rise in other types of household composition, such as female headed and single-person households. Female headed households can be very vulnerable to poverty due to the marital status of the household heads (widowed, divorced, separated, single mother), lack of ownership of assets, access to credit, lack of proper and regular income, lack of remunerative employment opportunities, gender inequalities in distribution of income, lack of access to services like healthcare, education, transportation and social exclusion in economic and political participation. In a patriarchal society like Bangladesh, it is still not very common for women to take the position of authority in a household. It can happen in two ways – either the women of the house is the de jure head of the household in the absence of any earning male member, or the de facto head with husbands’ and sons’ absence due to migration on inability to work. In Bangladesh, occurrences of women becoming household heads are mostly because of widowhood, abandonment/separation, divorce and migration. Regardless of the processes through which a woman finds herself becoming the key decision-maker of the house, the problems they face in Bangladesh can be grouped into certain categories:Poverty and economic insecurityThe most obvious problem faced by female household heads is economic. According to studies, monthly household income of female-headed households is only 55% of that of the average monthly household income.Lack of assetsWomen usually sell all or some of their land after their husband’s death, and some can lose almost everything they have, selling even their utensils to make ends meet. Even if they manage to keep their lands, many from this group are not always able to retain control of it. They can get cheated of the full proceeds, but are powerless because they “couldn’t go to see the crops” - that is, they are unable to work the land themselves, and as a result are unable to keep it.Lack of employment and income-generating opportunitiesFemale household heads are as constrained by their gendered roles as mothers and women as their female counterparts in male-headed households. Work locations that require travelling a distance raise issues of purdah and safety, which restrain many women from working outside because they have no one to bring them back late at night, or else they have no one to look after their children while they are away. Obtaining social approval for working outside the household is a huge challenge, and there are limited paid positions for women who want to enter the market. Excluding NGOs and GOs, the kind of work available to women are the poorest paid and most insecure. Finally, even where work is available, many poor women are unlikely to have the education, skills or training required for it.