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Scarica is there a feminization of poverty? e più Tesine universitarie in PDF di Sociologia solo su Docsity! Is There a Feminization of Poverty in Latin America? MARCELO MEDEIROS and JOANA COSTA * International Poverty Centre, UNDP, Brasilia—DF, Brazil Summary. — We propose two different concepts of the feminization of poverty and analyze house- hold survey data to verify if there is an ongoing feminization of poverty in eight Latin American countries according to each of these concepts. We also verify if our results respond to changes in values of poverty lines and to different scenarios of intra-household inequalities, concluding that poverty may be higher among women, but there is no clear evidence of a recent and widespread feminization of poverty in the countries studied. ! 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — feminization of poverty, gender inequalities, poverty, female headed households, Latin America 1. INTRODUCTION Until recently, the idea that there is an ongo- ing feminization of poverty in the world was widely accepted among women’s advocates. For instance, the Beijing Platform for Action (1995) postulated that the number of women living in poverty was increasing disproportion- ately to the number of men, particularly in the developing countries. The same idea was re- stated in at least two United Nations resolu- tions, in 1996 and 2000, and again in a report by the UN Commission on the Status of Wo- men in 2003 (United Nations, 1996, 2000, 2003). From the equity point of view, the feminiza- tion of poverty should be fought against be- cause it is related to two negative phenomena, poverty and gender inequality. There is little doubt about the importance of precise informa- tion about this issue for policy design and implementation. The occurrence of a feminiza- tion of poverty has several implications for this process. One of them is that an increase in the levels of poverty among women or female headed households can lead to the conclusion that existing anti-poverty measures may not only be ineffective but actually have negative ef- fects for women. On the other hand, if this fem- inization is not occurring, research and egalitarian policies would gain from focusing on related but different issues, such as the deter- minants of the economic autonomy of women. The existence of poverty in any group is mor- ally unacceptable and its increase sets priorities for public policies. The occurrence of a femini- zation of poverty would require actions to pro- mote gender equality focusing primarily on anti-poverty measures. However, if feminiza- tion is not occurring, focusing on poverty will immobilize resources that could be otherwise used in other strategies for gender equality pro- motion. Given that political, human, and financial resources are scarce, to a certain extent, anti- poverty measures can conflict with a broader pro-equity strategy. As Baden and Milward (1997, p. 4) put it, ‘‘Collapsing gender concerns into a poverty agenda narrows the scope for a gender analysis which can fully address how and why gender inequalities are reproduced, not just among the ‘poor’, but in society as a whole.’’ Therefore, despite the limitations we face in terms of data availability and the lack of a consensus on how to define ‘‘feminization,’’ empirical research on the issue may help the policymaking process by giving informa- tion about the existence or not of an ongoing * The authors would like to thank Nanak Kakwani, Eduardo Zepeda, Alejandro Grinspun, Sergei Soares and Fábio Veras for comments and Rafael Osorio, Cristina Queiroz and Luis F. Oliveira for data process- ing. Final revision accepted: February 26, 2007. World Development Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 115–127, 2008 ! 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 0305-750X/$ - see front matter doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2007.02.011 www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev 115 process of feminization of poverty in Latin American countries. The objective of this paper is twofold, we want to contribute to the debate over the defi- nition of the feminization of poverty, and we also want to examine if this feminization is occurring in Latin America. In order to do this we analyze the feminization of poverty litera- ture and we establish two different definitions of ‘‘feminization of poverty,’’ which are used at the country level to search for the empirical evidence of this phenomenon. The countries included in the study are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela. 2. THE CONCEPT OF THE FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY The term ‘‘feminization of poverty’’ 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 (Pearce, 1978). In her research, she used two concepts for the feminization of pov- erty, the first being ‘‘an increase of women among the poor’’ and the second ‘‘an increase of female headed households among the poor households,’’ the latter becoming the core defi- nition in Pearce’s work. Using both definitions, Pearce chose to look at a group among the poor and not at poverty inside a group, which, from the methodological point of view, makes a substantial difference. For instance, a measurement based on her ap- proach would not change if the impoverish- ment of female headed households was neutralized by a reduction of the numbers of fe- male headed households in the population. For that reason, subsequent studies adopted the ‘‘poverty inside a group’’ approach, as does most of the research in the field nowadays. This approach is a better way to analyze issues such as differentials in the incidence, intensity, and severity of poverty. Although some studies accepted, at least par- tially, Pearce’s original concepts (Goldberg & Kremen, 1990), part of the subsequent research used a modified version of Pearce’s main defini- tion and related ‘‘feminization’’ to ‘‘increases in poverty in female headed households in relation to the levels of male headed households’’ (Northrop, 1990; Peterson, 1987; Pressman, 1988). Other studies adopted a different approach and defined ‘‘feminization’’ as ‘‘increases in poverty among women in relation to poverty among men’’ (Fuchs, 1986; Wright, 1992). Given the existence of multiple concepts, recent studies are assuming more than one def- inition. For instance, Dooley (1994) and Davies and Joshi (1998) test the hypothesis of the fem- inization of poverty simultaneously against the relative rise in poverty among ‘‘women,’’ ‘‘adult women only,’’ and ‘‘female headed households.’’ In spite of its multiple meanings, the femini- zation of poverty should not be confused with the existence of higher levels of poverty among women or female headed households. By ‘‘higher levels of poverty,’’ we mean a higher incidence, intensity, or severity 1 of poverty at some point in time. The term ‘‘feminization’’ relates to the way poverty changes over time, whereas ‘‘higher levels of poverty’’ (which in- cludes the so called ‘‘over-representation’’) fo- cuses on a view of poverty at a given moment. Feminization is a process; ‘‘higher poverty’’ is a state. Being time-dependent, the first refers to a trend in the evolution of poverty measures while the second is related to the lev- els of those measures at a single point in time. The idea of feminization does not necessarily imply an absolute worsening in poverty among women. An absolute worsening of poverty is a women–women comparison taken over time. One may easily argue that such an absolute worsening does not constitute a feminization of poverty since by such a definition a feminiza- tion can occur simultaneously with a ‘‘mascu- linization’’ of poverty. If poverty increases for all, it will always imply a ‘‘feminization’’ by that definition. The feminization of poverty should rather be understood as a relative con- cept based on a women–men comparison, where what matters are the differences (or ra- tios, depending on the way it is measured) be- tween women and men at each moment. Consequently, if poverty in a society is sharply reduced among men and is only slightly re- duced among women, there would be a femini- zation of poverty. Therefore, two definitions of feminization of poverty arise. The feminization of poverty may be defined as (a) an increase in the differ- ence in the levels of poverty among women and among men; (b) an increase in the differ- ence in the levels of poverty among female headed households and among male and couple headed households. Of course, the definitions of feminization of poverty discussed so far are not exhaustive. 116 WORLD DEVELOPMENT (1978) found an increase of both women and fe- male headed household members among the American poor between the 1950s and the mid-1970s. Subsequent research (Fuchs, 1986; Goldberg & Kremen, 1990; Northrop, 1990; Peterson, 1987; Pressman, 1988) reached the same conclusions for the 1960s in the United States, but Fuchs (1986) rejects the hypothesis for the years after 1970 and Northrop (1990) and Pressman (1988) also reject it for the 1980s. Peterson (1987) and Goldberg and Kre- men (1990) maintain that there was a feminiza- tion of poverty in the United States after the 1970s. Wright (1992) and Davies and Joshi (1998) examined data from the United Kingdom from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s and did not find any feminization of poverty. In Canada, Doo- ley (1994) found a feminization of poverty dur- ing 1973–90 when ‘‘feminization’’ was understood as an ‘‘increase among female headed households,’’ but not when the ‘increase among women’ definition was used. Goldberg and Kremen (1990) analyze gender inequalities in Canada, Japan, France, Sweden, the Soviet Union, Poland, and the United States, but show empirical evidence of the feminization of poverty only in the United States. To the best of our knowledge, no analogous research was conducted in other parts of the world; there- fore, determining the existence or not of a fem- inization of poverty in Latin America is a matter of empirical analysis. 4. METHODOLOGY (a) Data The study was conducted using unit record data (microdata) available from household sur- veys of Argentina (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares, 1992 and 2001), Bolivia (Encuesta de Hogares-Programa MECOVI, 1999 and 2002), Brazil (Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Dom- icı́lios, 1983 and 2003), Chile (Encuesta de Caracterización Socioeconómica Nacional, 1990 and 2000), Colombia (Encuesta Nacional de Hogares—Fuerza de Trabajo-Programa MECOVI, 1995 and 1999), Costa-Rica (Encu- esta de Hogares de Propositos Multiples, 1990 and 2001), Mexico (Encuesta Nacional de Ingre- sos y Gastos de los Hogares, 1992 and 2002), and Venezuela (Encuesta de Hogares por Muestreo-Programa MECOVI, 1995 and 2000). All these surveys were conducted by national statistical institutes and present national coverage, except for the Argentine one, which is representative only of urban areas. These countries represent the majority of the population in Latin America. To a certain ex- tent, what happened in terms of the feminiza- tion of poverty in the countries studied is representative of other countries in the region, although this would be less valid for Central America, which is under-represented in the study. In spite of this, one must bear in mind that more detailed results, such as poverty lev- els or growth rates, are country-specific, and therefore, cannot be generalized. If seen as a structural problem related to sta- ble gender inequalities, the feminization of pov- erty would be best analyzed by looking at trends of poverty over long periods. For some countries, such as Bolivia, we are looking at rel- atively short periods. In such cases, the results should be treated with caution, despite the fact that trends observed over longer periods for other countries are reproduced in short period analysis. We believe that our study indicates the changes in the levels and composition of poverty in the 1990s–2000s fairly well. The feminization of poverty depends this only on what is ‘‘feminization’’ but also on the definition of ‘‘poverty.’’ In this regard our study is quite limited: although there are several different ways to define poverty (Spicker, 1998), we only look at poverty as income deprivation. This limitation can be of particular importance in the case of gender studies; for instance, a multidimensional approach could indicate that less relative income deprivation of women is being achieved at the cost of more relative time deprivation, that is, two dimensions of poverty with opposite trends. We believe that it is important to highlight this limitation and men- tion that the data we have do not allow us to proceed differently. At any rate, it should be noted that, if data are available, the methodol- ogy used to test the hypothesis of feminization can be applied both to more than one dimen- sion of poverty and to synthetic indexes of mul- tidimensional poverty. A great effort was made to use the same type of data in each country. Firstly, we could not use consumption expenditure data since this kind of data is not available for all countries, so our measurement of poverty is based on in- come data. Secondly, to have similar variables for all countries, we decided to use income from all sources and from all household members (including children). This includes income from IS THERE A FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY IN LATIN AMERICA? 119 any type of paid work, self-employment, pen- sions, transfers, rents, capital gains, in kind payments (their monetary value as imputed in the survey), and any other sources, for the pop- ulation aged 10 or more years. All the values re- fer to gross income (before taxes, deductions, and bonuses) but discounting production ex- penses, when they apply. We used the total in- come data exactly as provided in the survey files, with no transformations or adjustments. Although there are methodological differences in the way each survey was conducted in the respective country, no cross-country analyses were conducted in the study; therefore, the lack of full comparability among countries should not be seen as a major problem. (b) The measurement of the feminization of poverty The feminization of poverty is defined as an increase in the levels of poverty among women or female headed households relative to the lev- els of men or male headed households. This could be measured either as ratios or as differ- ences. We believe that differences are more appropriate than ratios for this purpose. In this study we use Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke’s (1984) Pa measures of poverty, which are al- ready ratios themselves. The use of ratios can mislead some interpretations since small per- centage point differences can lead to large ratio differences, which is not an adequate result in a study such as this. To examine the feminization or not of pov- erty, two tests can be applied, one for each type of definition of the feminization of poverty: (a) an increase in the differential of poverty between women and men P atðfpÞ # P atðmpÞ < P at0ðfpÞ # P at0ðmpÞ : ð1Þ (b) an increase in the differential poverty be- tween female and male headed households (‘‘male’’ headed households includes couple headed households). P atðfhÞ # P atðmhÞ < P at0ðfhÞ # P at0ðmhÞ ; ð2Þ where Pa stands for the Foster, Greer and Thorbecke (1984) measures of poverty (FGT), t and t 0 for the initial and final points in time (that is, t<t 0), (f) for the female subgroup, (m) for male, (p) for persons, and (h) for headed households. Therefore, P atðfpÞ represents the poverty among female persons at the initial mo- ment, and so on. (c) The poverty line The Pa measures, and therefore, the test of the hypotheses, depend on the value of a pov- erty line z. According to the shape of the distri- bution of the income of a population, changes in the value of z can affect the results of any poverty study. To avoid this ‘‘poverty line ef- fect,’’ we initially performed a sensitivity analy- sis, testing all the hypotheses for different values of poverty lines. As the results were fairly robust, we concluded that the exact value of the poverty line was of secondary impor- tance for the study of the process of the femini- zation of poverty and decided to adopt a poverty line based on a simple methodology. We proceeded by determining a rather arbi- trary value for z in the latest survey available for each country and deflating its nominal value to obtain the line for the initial period. We set the poverty line z as the value of the 40th per- centile of the family per capita income distribu- tion in the latest survey available ðzt0Þ, as in many of the countries studied, the poverty inci- dence calculated with local absolute poverty lines in the 1990s was a little lower than 40% (UNDP, 1995). Then we used a consumer price index in each country to transform zt0 and esti- mate the absolute value of the poverty line in the initial period (zt). The sensitivity analysis was performed using poverty lines that varied from the real values of the cutting points of the 30th to the 50th per- centiles of each population in the latest surveys available. Given the stability of results after the sensitivity analysis, we chose to present our conclusions using, for the most part, the inter- mediate 40th percentile poverty line. (d) Intra-household inequalities and equivalence scales Although the concept of poverty is frequently related to individual well-being, its measure- ment often occurs at the household (family) 3 level. Poverty is usually measured using house- hold per capita income, that is, under the assumption that the income in the household is equally distributed. This assumption can be disputed. There is no reason to believe that the factors that determine gender inequalities in the public sphere will not act within the fam- ilies. On the contrary, despite the scarcity of data to support such research, there is some evi- dence that intra-household inequalities in con- sumption occur at relevant levels (Haddad & 120 WORLD DEVELOPMENT Kanbur, 1990; Quisumbing & Maluccio, 2000; Sen, 1997a, 1997b). These differences in con- sumption can be taken as an indicator of an un- equal distribution of the total family income among family members. Still, the mere existence of intra-household inequalities between men and women does not affect feminization as defined here. This would occur only if these inequalities change during the period of analysis or in case of changes in the demographic composition of the house- holds. A similar rationale would apply if adults and children (or any age groups) or men and women were weighted differently to reflect a differentiation in consumption needs or if econ- omies of scale were considered. Adjusting data with constant equivalence scales would affect the estimates only if relevant demographic changes in the households occur. There is no data available to determine the actual trends of intra-household inequalities in the eight countries studied. Neither it is pos- sible to establish empirically if any type of equivalence scales in these countries should be changing over time. Any arbitrary assumption about the behavior of either intra-household inequalities in the distribution of incomes or the way different family members should be weighted could bring an undesired bias to the results. For the sake of parsimony and pru- dence, we assumed both to be constant during the period of our analysis. Yet, certain changes in household composi- tion would still be a reason for adjusting data with equivalence scales and assumptions about inequalities in the distribution of income within the families. There is, however, little reason to believe that these changes would be enough to alter the patterns of the feminization of pov- erty. Despite the impressive fall in fertility levels in some Latin American countries during the 1980s, changes in the composition of the house- holds were of smaller proportions during the 1990s (Eclac, 2002). We tested the hypothesis of the feminization of poverty using a square root equivalence scale (Atkinson, Rainwater, & Smeeding, 1995, p. 18) as well as assuming inequalities in the in- tra-household distribution by simulating that individuals distribute within their families only a fraction (from 0% to 100%) of the income they receive, this second approach being simi- lar to the one used by Findlay and Wright (1996). The income adjusted by the equivalence scale is determined by ~yij ¼ 1 nej Xnj i¼1 yij; ð3Þ where ~yij is the adjusted income of the individ- ual i in the household j, yij is the observed in- come of each individual of the household, n is the size of the household, and e is the parameter that represents economies of scale. We set e = 0.5 (square root) following Atkinson et al. (1995, p. 21); e = 1 corresponds to per capita income. The assumption of different levels of inequal- ity in the distribution of income within the households can be expressed as ŷij ¼ ð1# kÞyij þ k nj Xnj i¼1 yij ð4Þ for k = (0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1), where ŷij is the simulated income an individual i is entitled to, in the household j, yij is the observed personal income of this individual, k is the parameter for the proportion of personal income of this individual distributed within the household (varying from zero to one) and n is the size of the household. Using data from the household surveys, we tested the two feminization hypotheses with three different FGT poverty measures, P0, P1, and P2 (incidence, intensity, and severity of poverty). The outcomes were quite robust with regard to variations in the values of the lines, use of equivalence scales, and assumptions about intra-household inequalities, so we decided to present the main findings in summa- rized tables, showing the values of the poverty measures in the countries only for the ‘‘40th percentile in latest survey’’ poverty line and using household per capita income. 5. RESULTS There is no relevant difference in the inci- dence, intensity, or severity of poverty among men and women in the Latin American coun- tries studied (Table A-1, Appendix). 4 We find differences in the levels of poverty according to the types of families, but not necessarily showing a disadvantage in female headed households. These differences are much more related to the existence of children in the fami- lies than to the type of family headship. The absence of higher levels of poverty does not exclude, however, the possibility of a femi- nization of poverty in these countries. Table 1 IS THERE A FEMINIZATION OF POVERTY IN LATIN AMERICA? 121 in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, or Venezuela. Broadly speaking, these findings are insensi- tive to variations in the values of the poverty lines, the use of equivalence scales, or assump- tions about inequality in the distribution of household income. If we ignore variations of minor importance, we may conclude that there is no clear evidence of a recent and widespread feminization of poverty in the Latin American countries studied. This conclusion is in line with the existing studies carried out in developed countries, but we do not believe it could be straightforwardly generalized to other coun- tries and regions. Our conclusions are not enough to allow us to prescribe any anti-poverty policy, but some implications for public policies could be men- tioned. First, we must differentiate over-repre- sentation (and higher intensity and severity) of poverty from the feminization of poverty, as these are not just conceptual details, but phe- nomena that are moving in different directions. Over-representation informs us about the size of the problem that has to be solved; the latter provides information about the progress of the status of women over time that allows us to evaluate how changes in society are reducing or increasing gender-biased poverty. Our study shows that female poverty is not increasing. Therefore, from a political perspective, the con- cerns about a feminization of poverty should not overshadow the debate on gender inequal- ity. The definitions of the feminization of poverty we anal‘d are not exhaustive, but they cover a large portion of the definitions used in the liter- ature in this field and in the public debate about the issue. Yet, we did not directly examine one important aspect of the feminization of pov- erty, the increase in the direct role that gender inequalities in education or the labor market may have as a determinant of poverty. We be- lieve that future studies could pay attention to that, although our evidence does not give any indication that this kind of feminization of pov- erty is occurring in Latin America. We are not sure if our conclusions would hold true for dimensions of poverty other than income or family-consumed goods and services. Poverty understood as the deprivation of health, for example, does not share the same determinants as income deprivation, and there- fore, may exhibit a different behavior from that which we found in this study. It would be inter- esting if future research could analyze other dimensions of poverty not directly related to the ones examined here. NOTES 1. 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Review of Income and Wealth, 38(1), 17–25. APPENDIX 1 See Table A-1. (See Overleaf) 126 WORLD DEVELOPMENT