Assessing Development

Designing better indices of poverty and gender equity (2009-2011)

Is there any country where US$1.25 a day (or even $2 a day) would buy you enough of the basic ‘stuff’ you need (for example shelter, food, water, sanitation, security, transport, health services) to keep you out of poverty? If you are sceptical, then you share one of the concerns at the core of this major three-year international research collaboration.  

It is widely acknowledged that there is no country in which women and men enjoy complete equality, and that in many contexts and dimensions of life, gender inequalities are very significant indeed.  So it is no surprise that men and women have different needs and interests, roles and responsibilities, circumstances and priorities.  It would make sense, then, if poverty was defined and measured in a way that captures the deprivations that define poverty for both women and men, and reflects what is actually needed by poor women and by poor men to be not poor.

Currently, however, global poverty measures rely on data about households, which assumes all members experience the same level of deprivation.  We know that very often this is simply not true.  As IWDA’s research and policy adviser, Jo Crawford, notes: 

Household-level information might be OK if you want to consider the standard of housing that men and women share as one indicator of whether or not they are poor.  It might be reasonable to assume that the materials from which the housing is constructed will have approximately the same impact on the women and men, girls and boys who live in the house.  But in areas such as access to food, education, health care or appropriate water and sanitation facilities, the circumstances, needs and interests of women and men, boys and girls in the same household may be very different. 

Understanding the situation of individuals, rather than households, is critical to knowing who is poor, in what ways they are poor and how particular deprivations effect their lives and opportunities.  And knowing this is essential if we are to target development resources where they are most needed, and understand the key factors that enable women, men, girls and boys to move out of poverty.   

This research project aims to:

1.  Develop a gender sensitive measure of poverty that illuminates the ways in which poverty is experienced differently by women and men (rather than one which focuses on household poverty levels, ignoring those things that might be exclusive to one sex).

Many critics consider that ways of measuring poverty that focus just on income, such as the World Bank’s International Poverty Line, leave out important dimensions of poverty and have a range of other fundamental flaws:

 i)        they are insensitive to different costs — for example, a sandwich in Sydney costs more than a sandwich in Ballarat. Also, a person may have to do much more to acquire the same good in one place than another —say walk a kilometre to get the sandwich in Ballarat, but walk a block to get it in Sydney.

iii)     they are insensitive to the different needs of individuals — for example, a manual labourer might need to purchase 3,000 calories to be adequately nourished, whereas someone whose work is not physically intensive might need 1800 calories. 

iv)     they take the household as the unit of analysis — ignoring how resources are distributed within the household and questions of power and control — who gets to determine access to resources — and the differential deprivations that might be experienced by men and women, girls and boys.  Taking the household as the unit of analysis also means that poverty information cannot be disaggregated by sex.

v)      they lack justification and are arbitrary — they do not explain why measuring income is the best way to capture the deprivations that constitute poverty, or why the poverty line is set at a given point. 

vi)     they are incomparable over time and across context — the difficulty of comparing incomes over time and across contexts, in particular because of the flaws in the current approach to reducing different currencies at different times to a single ‘purchasing power parity’, makes income-based approaches meaningless for purposes of international comparison.

 2.    Work towards a measure of gender-based disadvantage that better reflects the circumstances of poor women 

Current composite measures of gender equality such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) and the Gender Development Index (GDI) include data about areas that are relevant mostly to the more privileged (eg. representation in parliament, women in higher education). Improvements in these dimensions, which affect relatively few women, can suggest reductions in gender inequality in a country, even when the situation for the poorest women has not changed.  

They also focus on deprivations that anyone can suffer (eg income poverty), neglecting deprivations that are specific to, or experienced as more significant by, one or other sex.  For example, unemployment may bring a great deal of shame to a man who is expected to be the ‘breadwinner’, while the inability to wash or adequately clothe oneself may have worse impacts for a woman, if social norms disproportionately govern women’s appearance.

Partners

IWDA is the industry partner in this research project, contributing significant funding and staff time, alongside the Australian Research Council through its Linkage Grant program.  The project is housed at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the Australian National University (ANU). Other partners are Oxfam Great Britain (Southern Africa Regional Office), University of Colorado at Boulder, and Philippine Health Social Science Association.

About the researchers…

About the approach & methodology…

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