Gendered Poverty and Well‐being: Introduction

This article presents the relationship between gender disadvantage and poverty in connection with its effects on well-being. The tendency to equate female hardship with poverty has been queried on both empirical and methodological grounds. Contrary to the conventional conception of poverty that gives priority to income and/or consumption poverty is multidimensional. Work on social indicators has demonstrated that fertility decline has an impact on sex ratios; this impact is heightened by the spread both of such practices as prenatal sex selection techniques and of traditional postnatal ones creating double jeopardy for daughters. Power relations are visible not only in the exercise of agency and choice but also in the types of choices made; these choices are essentially disempowering and detrimental to health and well-being. The intra-household social processes of contestation and negotiation which are significantly influenced by the personal experiences of the pleasures and pains of work mediate the gendered connections between work and well- being. The evidence of participatory exercises is crucial for gender analysis. The processes leading to poverty are analyzed through regressions and correlations of a few variables abstracted from a more complex scenario according to which wide ranges of institutions interact. The linkages between poverty and the labor process show that the New Poverty Agenda remains wedded to an abstract theory of labor markets and can not explain the dynamics of female employment nor can it explain how labor market arrangements can perpetuate poverty and discrimination. Thus feminist analyses of factory work must constantly move beyond poverty issues into the wider domain of power and subordination: gender analyses of poverty cannot be collapsed into a welfare agenda.