Gender, Employment Patterns and Poverty: Basic Trends

The poverty of women is intrinsically linked to the pattern of their employment. A vicious circle occurs as a disadvantaged position in the labour market means the inability to generate a sufficient and regular income. On the basis of available data, this section shows how women are still excluded from wage employment, despite increasing female participation in the formal labour market. It also sheds light on problems within the labour market: concentration of large sectors of women in jobs and economic activities that bring low earnings, are irregular and insecure, and are beyond the effective reach of labour and social protection laws. Finally, it shows how significant numbers of women with scarce resources have engaged in self-employment as a survival strategy.

Increasing Numbers of Women in the Labour Force

Women's share of the labour force in developing countries is rising, although still smaller than that of women in the industrialized market economies (31 per cent versus 60 per cent in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries in 1990).

Between 1970 and 1990, the labour force participation rates of women rose in North Africa, West Asia, East Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, but declined slightly in the other regions. East Asia posted the highest rate of economic activity for women (59 per cent); sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia showed high average rates ranging from 45 to 50 per cent:

However, there are wide gaps between women's and men's recorded participation rates. They are widest in North Africa (16 per cent vs. 80 per cent), West and South Asia (21-24 per cent vs. 83-85 per cent), and Latin America and the Caribbean (32 per cent vs. 80 per cent):

Invisibility of Women's Work

Labour force participation figures hugely underestimate women's economic activities in the informal sector and in agriculture where large numbers of women are concentrated. For example, in India, the use of a wider definition of the term "economic activity" resulted in an upward revision of the estimated 13 per cent of economically active women to 88 per cent. Some of the highest (unofficial) participation rates for women are in Africa where women make up 80 per cent of food producers in some countries.

But women's contributions to the economy are masked not only by inadequacies in current statistical systems but by the very nature of a large part of women's productive work. Most are carried out within the household subsistence production system and are therefore often regarded as an extension of women's household duties. The produce from this work is largely consumed directly by the household and thus never assigned a monetary value and, in fact, has been undervalued in a market-oriented economy.

Even home-based work which may be destined for the market is hidden from public view and statistical accounting because it does not take the formal character of either wage employment or independent enterprise. Women's subsistence and intermittent activities, though generating income, have no social status as a "real job".