Today’s girl child is tomorrow’s older woman worker, and it is her opportunities and experiences now that will shape her ability to obtain and maintain decent work throughout her adult life, and enjoy security and protection in her old age. If girls, compared to boys, face negative cultural attitudes and practices and discrimination from birth, they will grow up to be women with greater constraints and few choices and opportunities. In turn, they will be less able to influence positively the lives of their daughters and sons, so that poverty is likely to be passed on from one generation to the next.
The links between a vicious cycle of poverty and gender discrimination against the girl child start at the earliest stages of life within families.
Throughout life, from birth to old age, gender discrimination contributes both to the feminization of poverty and to the perpetuation of poverty from one generation to the next.
About half a million women die each year as a result of pregnancy and childbirth – the vast majority of them in developing countries. Young women face greater difficulties finding employment than young men, with unemployment rates sometimes 50 per cent higher. The school-to-work transition is harder for young women than for young men, but more and more women have been entering the labour force – as much out of need as of choice.
About two-thirds of the female workforce of the developing world, outside agriculture, are active in the informal economy, with the figure reaching 84 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa. Most are own-account workers involved in home-based work or street vending, which are generally the most insecure and unremunerative forms of informal work. Informal women entrepreneurs similarly have fewer assets than their male counterparts and face even greater problems in gaining access to credit or title to their property.
For those in wage employment, a large gap persists between male and female earnings, despite the increasing adoption of equal pay legislation.
There has been a tremendous rise in dual-income families and singleparent households, but societal perceptions of work and family have changed little.
Women continue to have primary responsibility for housework, childcare and unpaid work, so that increasing participation in paid employment in many cases simply means women work extra long hours.
To balance work and family responsibilities, women tend to move in and out of the labour force several times over the course of their lives. Here again, they lose out to men, not only in terms of accumulated social security but also in terms of opportunities for lifelong learning and continuous training – without which they have lower employability. Ageist and sexist discrimination in the world of work appears to be occurring at earlier ages. In a growing number of countries, women over 35 years of age are finding it increasingly difficult to get jobs or be rehired – and thereby fall into poverty.
For the many female-headed rural households, remittances from the wages of urban-based family members are often an important but unreliable source of income. Compared to those in urban areas, rural families are large, increasing the number of people dependent on low and intermittent incomes.
Women marry at an earlier age, and infant and maternal mortality is higher than in urban areas. In addition to suffering discrimination in pay and access to land, legacies and credit, women also carry the double burden of care of the elderly and children and household tasks, as well as being expected to work in the fields.
To learn more about this author, visit International Labour Organization's Website.
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