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Shine YOUR Light ~ Learn More About Women's Poverty

Poverty The majority of the world’s population is poor. Women are the majority of he world’s poor. The poorest of the poor are women. More so than men, women lack the resources either to stave off poverty in the first place, or to climb out of poverty – they have limited ownership of income, property, and credit. Women not only bear the brunt of poverty, they b ear the brunt of “managing” poverty: as providers and caretakers of their families, it is women’s labor and women’s personal austerity that typically compensate for diminished resources of the family or household. Official poverty rates underestimate actual deprivation, and “poverty” is hard to measure. What is clear, though, is that since the early 1990s the gulf between rich and poor has widened dramatically on scales from the global to the local. The total income of the richest one percent of the people in the world is now about the same as the total income for the poorest 60 percent.

 


From The Atlas of Women in the World (3rd edition 2003) by Joni Seager, © MyriadEditions.com
© Paola Gianturco 2007-2010 All Rights Reserved