Poverty from the perspective of Latin American Women (September 2003)

Poverty from the perspective of Latin American Women
AIS - 09/23/2003

Translation. Helga Heidrich Coorditrad

The expectations and norms widely accepted in society about masculine
and feminine conduct, role and characteristics in general lead to a
minor access of women to the economical resources and to
decision-making authority, which in turn leads to an unequal balance
in favour of men in gender relationships. According to the report of
the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) under the title "The State
of World Population 2002" the number of women living in poverty is
worldwide higher than that of men, and this disparity has increased
in the last decade, besides the further increase of disparity
regarding health and education amongst the poor.

In Latin America the situation isn't much different, but there are
some peculiarities worth to be analysed. On past August 25, the UN
Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean presented its
annual report about the Social Panorama of the region, dedicating in
this edition a chapter to the relationship between Poverty and Gender.
The main revelation of this study is that Latin American women,
contrary to what happens in the rest of the developing world, have a
higher education level that men, but, in the same measure as in the
rest of the world, they are poorer.

According to this document, Latin American women have reached higher
educational levels than men, and women in the workforce average have
more years of education. Nonetheless they suffer more from severe
unemployment, from wage discrimination and from restricted working
hours than men. During the 1900s, the index of women's participation
in the workforce rose more quickly than men's. But while male
unemployment rates rose by 2.9 percentage points from 1990 to 1999,
female rates raised by 6.1%. This leads to the fact that more women
than men live in poverty and that the female household heads have less
monetary income than men, both in poor and in higher income
households. Besides this, single parent households, mostly headed by
women, also suffer from additional disadvantages associated with the
lack of recognition to unremunerated domestic work, which is socially
ignored.

In households where women count on their own income, their
contribution stands for the basis of the familiar sustenance, and
according to the analysis, poverty would raise by 10 points in at
least 8 countries of the region if it were not for female monetary
contributions. In contrast to this fact the percentage of incomeless
women is twice as high in urban areas and three times as high in rural
areas compared to men in the same situation.

Furthermore, the report points out that in the majority of Latin
American countries a "slow and uneven evolution of female
participation in both elected and political decision-making posts" can
be observed. Facing this situation, it gets clear that governments
have to take measures of positive action in order to grant women the
exertion of their rights, their access to productive resources and to
eliminate every form of discrimination in the world of labour and
politics as an indispensable condition to overcome poverty. On the
other hand, policies against poverty should foster the harmonisation
between household and reproductive tasks with men and women's labour
lives, including childcare and parent leave in favour of masculine
participation in familiar life.

Unfortunately, there are only few regional programmes that include
this kind of focus on their projects. To give an example, the
grandiloquent Plan Puebla - Panama, conceived as the "hinge" of
development in the south-southeast of Mexico and of the countries of
the Central American isthmus, doesn't include any element to provide
gender equity and for its formulation and didn't try any kind of approach
to women representing organizations. It is worth mentioning that the
committee members indicated by each country to participate in the
Plan's Executive Commission are all male.