Missing Women: Gender and The Extreme Poverty Debate

A Paper Prepared for USAID under Award #AID-OAA-0-13-00103 Mod 01  

The discourse on extreme poverty has been remarkably gender-blind – not only in the measure that was chosen (reducing the income poverty headcount) but in the policy and programmatic priorities articulated for achieving this goal. This omission is particularly striking in light of compelling evidence that women and girls are often poor for different reasons than males, experience poverty differently than males, and have different capacities to withstand and/or escape poverty than their male counterparts, as a result of gender norms and values, intrahousehold and economy-wide divisions of assets, work and responsibility, and relations of power and control. 

This paper discusses these issues in greater detail. It first summarizes the important measurement issues.  This is followed by a section that describes how gender inequalities and divisions of labor make females more vulnerable to extreme poverty than males. The last section discusses the implications for policy and programming.