Poverty Has A Woman's Face

Jennibeth D. Baculna Why does Poverty has a Woman’s Face? Globally, women are over represented amongst the poor. We ignored the feeling of this but when the time comes that it would almost cover closer to our home, it will be less comfortable. The government talks about the eradication of the poverty among children but obviously they have also to consider that children are poor because their mothers are also poor. Did they ever think about it? It is a sad fact to think that during elections they made a special treatment to the poor yet after that they could not even touch the hands of those poor ones who have voted for them. Poverty has a women’s face because of 1.3 billion people living in poverty, 70 percent of it comprises by women. Inspite of efforts carried out in post decades; in general, women live under conditions of inequality and with fewer opportunities. Worldwide data shows that people that live in conditions of extreme poverty are the women and that 2/3 of them are illiterate. The need for women to have an independent income is not just about equality; it is also about poverty. The society is changing as well as the demographics. The men are no longer the sole providers. Gender plays a major role in the poverty profile and women are more likely to be poor than men. There are factors which is associated with the high rate of women being poor. Mothers raising children are the hardest hit with poverty which makes family status the main factor. Those to be considered as young mothers, they emerge as a subgroup with the most critical need. Another factor is that the single-mother who raised the child alone, this can also be associated to why women are poor. Race is another significant factor related to women’s poverty. According to the United States Bureau of Census, The Current Population Survey, there are larger numbers

of White women in poverty but Black and Hispanic women have a higher poverty rate than the White. The Black females are 31.7 percent poor, the White female populations are only 12.6 percent in poverty and the total Hispanic female populations are mainly 32 percent poor. One which contributes to women’s poverty is the working status. There are instances that women are being forced to choose between working and being the full-time homemaker. Getting into job depends on the level of education. Often, women have low levels of education and they get low skill level jobs that pay low wages. To worsen the financial stress many jobs pay women 60 percent of the income they pay men doing the same job (Shaw, 1996 and Rapers, 1991). The World Food Programme has this special commitment in helping women gain equal access to life’s basic necessity. According to them, in one out of three households around the world, women are the sole breadwinners. It is said that seven out of ten of the world hungry are women and girls. It has long believed that women are the first and fastest solution to reducing hunger and poverty because women not only cook food. They sow, harvest and reap it. Geethika Jayatilaka points out that there are two groups of women are particularly likely to be poor; the lone parents and pensioners. This is because both are disadvantaged by a system which fails to value women who care for others. It is traditionally assumed that women’s income and work are unimportant because their partners will provide for them. Women past the age of retirement are particularly likely to be poor especially the single older women. The pension system is an example of a policy made with the men in mind, assuming that a long unbroken work history was the norm. Women were screwed on as an after thought. It was taken for granted that women who did not work or cared for family instead of engaging in paid employment would themselves be taken care of in their old age by their husbands pension.

However, husband may be gone in a seconds through separation or widowhood and women left without recompense for the valuable work they undertook. The feminization of poverty is also occurring that the poverty among women is rising faster than poverty among men. The suppression between being poor and being female has been extended to draw a relationship between lack of representation of women in political system and the disproportionate poverty of women. So are women poorer than men? Feminization of poverty according to Cagatay, used to mean three distinct things that the women have a higher incidence of poverty than men, women’s poverty is more severe that than of men and there is a trend to greater poverty among women particularly associated with rising rates of female headship of household. The burden of poverty falls heavily on single women, even though many are working hard. Putting in another way, a single mother with two children would need to work 80 hours a week at minimum wage to climb out of poverty. Mothers who are struggling with poverty report routinely missing meals themselves in order to provide food for their children that is how poor we are! Although women are not always poorer than men because of the susceptible and, once poor, may have less option in terms of escape. This suggests the need for policy responses to poverty to incorporate a gendered understanding of poverty and its causes in order to be effective in addressing women’s as well as men’s poverty. It also suggests a need for specific measures which reduce women’s vulnerability to poverty. Jayatilaka said, “Improving maternity leave and providing good quality, affordable childcare will make it easier for women to spend time at home with their children without comprising their ability to provide for themselves and their families.”

For the United Nation Population Fund report, “The war on poverty cannot be won unless greater efforts are made to give women equality.” It meant education to all girls, end violence against women and granting of full social, economic, cultural and political rights to women. In World’s rural population, more than 500 million women live in poverty. What is intriguing with this is why the poverty would relate to a woman’s face. In the Philippines perspectives, as a citizen of this country I have lived all throughout my life seeing people, observing them and I have seen that most of the people live a life which is undesirable. Women will took any steps even if it is hard as an example of the prostitution. Here, I consider prostitution as part of poverty of women because it does not only degrades the morality of the women in the Philippines as well as the other women in the world but if one will be on that kind of action part of her life will be missing and that she could not anymore back the respect on herself. A life of a dignity is every person’s human life. Women's poverty results in widespread violations of their human rights. When a woman faces a lack of access to adequate housing, food, or health care, her human rights are violated. When she lives in an unsafe and unhealthy environment or lacks access to clean water, she is not enjoying her fundamental human rights to a life of dignity and to an adequate standard of living. Due to poverty, individuals especially women do not have anymore a connection to education. I remember before when I was watching a television it flashed out the children living in poverty and they are mostly of women it showed there that while the garbage truck is still running to a place where it is supposed to dump all the trash it carried, young children climb to that huge truck just to get some garbage for them to sell it. On my part, during that day I feel so down to see that those young people that would eventually be the “pag-asa ng bayan” as what normally we call to the young generation, now striving for survival. It made my heart cries to see them like that. What I was thinking during I

saw that documentary is that where is the government that should provide the needs of the poor. Did they ever know what is happening to their citizens in whom they are supposed to serve? I mean where is the service that they are talking about before? There are instances that I could see where it shows the inequality of men to the women. I have this personal experience that has been shared to me. That they go for a male winner during oratorical so whenever that person will participate in the upper level, they will not have much expenses in terms of the hotel or the place where they will be staying especially if the person in charge is a man because he will prefer to be in the same place thus lessening the expenditure. In conclusion to this, I will end with a short quote, “If one does not have money, it means he is nothing.” Everyone must have equal treatment whether one is neither a man nor a woman. The socio-cultural analysis emphasizes that, currently as a consequence of an economic model that widens social differences, one can observe what is called the polarization of wealth that is, few rich and many poor.