Developing News by Jairo Lugo-Ocando An Nguyen

Author:Jairo Lugo-Ocando, An Nguyen [Jairo Lugo-Ocando, An Nguyen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367427238
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

The feminisation of poverty

Gender in development discourses has moved in a more or less positive direction alongside a process called the “feminisation” of poverty in the past decades (Fukuda-Parr, 1999; Pearce, 1978). Introduced in the 1970s, this feminisation refers to the recognition in both policy discourses and practices that women and women-headed families constitute an increasingly disproportionate percentage of the world’s poor due to gender inequality in resources, property rights, opportunities, capabilities and freedoms (Medeiro & Costa, 2008). Prior to its introduction, according to Kabeer (1994:1–2), women were hardly seen as a ‘constituency of development’: the UN declaration of the First Development Decade (1961–1970), for example, “was devoid of any specific reference to women”. They got a brief mention in the declaration for the second international development decade’s strategy and were “further spelt out in the strategy for the 1980s”, in which they were declared as “agents and beneficiaries in all sectors and at all levels of the development process” (1994:1–2).

The feminisation of poverty took off in the 1990s thanks to the work of the agencies of the UN, which vowed to better understand women’s problems in altered priorities and to empower them with more opportunities to produce economic outputs, social progress and equality. A crucial landmark is the call for women’s empowerment in the fifth annual report on human development by the UN Development Programme, which urges the UN system and the rest of the international community to recognise and address the extraordinary contribution to society that women make through “unpaid work” and informal labour (UNDP, 1995). The report introduced the Gender Empowerment Measure index, with three dimensions: political participation and decision making (e.g. women’s access to parliament seats); economic participation and decision making (e.g. women’s access to administrative, managerial, professional and technical jobs); and power over economic resources (e.g. women’s household income share). In the same year, according to Sylvia Chant (2012), “the adoption of gender equality as a strategy for development effectiveness reached an apogee” through the World Bank’s Enhancing Women’s Participation in Economic Development publication (1995). This publication promotes a “smart economics” approach to gender equality, setting the stage for most of the Bank’s gender and development agenda and action since then (Chant, 2012). Accordingly, “investing in women is critical for poverty reduction” because “it speeds economic development by raising productivity and promoting the more efficient use of resources; it produces significant social returns, improving child survival and reducing fertility, and it has considerable inter-generational pay-offs” (World Bank, 1995:22, as quoted in Chant, 2012:3).

Feminisation brought gender issues to an increasing presence in development news. For example, a simple search for news on women’s empowerment in all UK broadsheets found a total of 996 relevant stories, with the first appearing in 1991. Such coverage has gradually increased over time and become a more present news subject in recent years, with one-fifth of stories (196) being published in 2015 alone. Thanks to the feminisation of poverty and its associated development policy, gender justice has been used extensively in the news to signify and justify the need for intervention.

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