Anti-poverty campaign leaving women behind

Many women fall through the cracks of the global campaign against poverty because they are more likely than men to hold jobs that pay less and offer less job security, a U.N. report said on Wednesday.

In developing nations, 60 percent or more of women workers outside of the agricultural sector are in so-called informal employment. This means they work at temporary or part-time jobs or are self-employed, according to the new report by the U.N. Development Fund for Women UNIFEM.

In the farm sector, the proportion is even higher, said the report, UNIFEM’s third biennial study tracking women, poverty and gender inequality.

Women also tend to be concentrated in the more precarious informal jobs “where earnings are not only meager but highly unreliable,” the report said. “The average earnings from these types of informal employment are too low, in the absence of other sources of income, to raise households out of poverty.”

“The working poor are both men and women. However the further down the chain of quality and security, the more women you find,” said Noeleen Heyzer, the UNIFEM executive director.

To help correct the inequities, corporations should provide safe and health working conditions for all their employees, and governments should ensure that informal workers have the same rights and are provided the same legal and social protections given other workers, the report said.

Governments must also ensure that their economic policies take into account the size, composition and contribution of both formal and informal labor forces, it said. 

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