Feminist Approaches to Poverty

The feminist approaches advance an understanding of the phenomenon of poverty as linked to gendered identities of people. These studies highlight how poverty affects men and women differently, as the social and cultural roles and positions of people are gender-differentiated. An understanding of these differences allows for better and more targeted policy formulation on various fronts to deal with the reality of poverty.

Since the 1980s there has been a surge of literature on the gendered dimensions of poverty. This literature showed that an increasing proportion of the world’s poor are female. While the focus of feminists in First World countries is the disproportionate poverty of female-headed households (FHH), studies of poverty from a feminine perspective in the developing world have highlighted intrahousehold disparities between males ...