Feminisation of Poverty: How Globalisation Impacts Women-Headed Households

Across the world, poverty wears an increasingly female face. As globalisation has redrawn economies, opened borders to capital, and pushed workers across cities and continents, the people left holding the responsibility of families, farms, and homes are often women. This shift, captured by the term feminisation of poverty, is not just an economic statistic. It is a story about who earns, who owns, who migrates, and who is left behind when traditional support systems break down.

What is the feminisation of poverty? 🔗

The feminisation of poverty refers to the growing share of women among the world’s poor, and the widening gap in economic security between women and men. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995) placed this concept on the global agenda, noting that women carry a disproportionate burden of poverty across both developing and developed economies.

The term emerged in the 1970s in the United States to describe how poverty was becoming concentrated among women, especially single mothers. By the 1990s, as globalisation accelerated, scholars and agencies like the United Nations Development Programme began using it to describe a worldwide pattern. According to UN Women’s Gender Snapshot 2022, by 2030 an estimated 8 per cent of the world’s female population will still be living in extreme poverty, with women in the prime working ages of 25 to 34 facing the highest risk.

Three trends that define it 🔗

The feminisation of poverty rests on three interconnected patterns. First, women experience poverty at higher rates than men in most countries. Second, the gap between women and men in economic well-being is widening rather than closing. Third, an increasing proportion of poor households are headed by women alone. These trends are reinforced by structural barriers in education, employment, and ownership of productive assets like land.

How globalisation deepens women’s poverty 🔗

Globalisation has expanded markets and created new jobs, but its benefits have not been gender-neutral. The reorganisation of economies, especially in the Global South, has pushed many women into precarious work while removing the safety nets they once relied on.

Economic restructuring and informal work 🔗

Structural adjustment programmes promoted by international financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s cut public spending on health, education, and food subsidies in many developing countries. Women, who depend more heavily on such services, absorbed the shock. At the same time, liberalisation pushed labour into the informal economy. The International Labour Organization reports that women are over-represented in informal employment in most low- and lower-middle-income countries, with informal work accounting for the bulk of female employment in regions like sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

In India, this pattern is stark. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey 2023-24, women’s labour force participation has risen, yet a significant share remains in agriculture, domestic work, home-based enterprises, and gig platforms with low wages and minimal social protection. The work published in Discover Sustainability on India’s informal sector finds that women face income insecurity, no legal protection, and limited access to benefits, all of which exacerbate gender inequalities.

Population pressure and shrinking household resources 🔗

Rapid population growth in many low-income regions has stretched household resources thin. When families are large and incomes irregular, daughters are often the first to be pulled out of school, married early, or directed into unpaid care work. This curtails their lifetime earning potential and locks them into dependency. UNESCO data cited in several Indian policy analyses shows that India’s female literacy rate trails the male rate by more than 14 percentage points, a gap that translates directly into lower-paid work and weaker bargaining power within the household.

Male migration and the breakdown of traditional support 🔗

Globalisation has accelerated male migration in search of better wages, particularly from rural to urban areas and across international borders. In Punjab and Kerala, in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, men move to cities or the Gulf, leaving wives, mothers, and sisters to run farms and households. Remittances can help, but they are often irregular and rarely enough to cover the full cost of running a family.

Alongside migration, traditional joint-family structures are weakening under urbanisation, rising divorce rates, and the simple fact that elders increasingly live separately. Women who once had in-laws, brothers, or extended kin to fall back on now manage alone. The result is a sharp rise in the number of female-headed households.

Female-headed households: A vulnerable category 🔗

A female-headed household is one where a woman is the primary or sole earner and decision-maker, usually because she is widowed, divorced, separated, unmarried, or because her husband has migrated for long periods. These households are not always poorer than male-headed ones, but they face a distinctive set of vulnerabilities.

Why these households face heightened risk 🔗

Women heading households juggle income generation with unpaid care work, leaving them less time and energy for higher-paying jobs. They typically earn less for comparable work, own fewer assets, and have weaker access to credit. In rural areas, customary inheritance practices often deny women land rights, even where statutory law grants them. The Food and Agriculture Organization notes that women’s limited control over land and productive resources is one of the most persistent obstacles to rural poverty reduction.

Informal employment compounds the problem. With no contract, no maternity protection, and no pension, illness or pregnancy can push a female-headed household into deep poverty within weeks. The absence of childcare facilities means women either bring children to work or leave them with older daughters, perpetuating the cycle into the next generation.

The diversity within female-headed households 🔗

Not all female-headed households are alike. A widow with adult earning children differs from a young divorcee with toddlers. A wife receiving steady remittances from a husband in the Gulf differs from an abandoned mother with no support. Researchers distinguish between de jure female-headed households, where a woman is legally the head with no resident male partner, and de facto households, where a woman manages day-to-day affairs because her husband is absent. Analysis from Zimbabwe shows that de jure households, like those led by widows and divorcees, often experience greater deprivation than de facto ones.

Global snapshots: Zimbabwe, India, and Morocco 🔗

Examining three very different contexts shows how the feminisation of poverty plays out under varying social and economic conditions.

Zimbabwe: Migration, land, and the feminised village 🔗

Zimbabwe offers one of the clearest examples of how labour migration reshapes gender and poverty. Data presented to a United Nations expert group meeting found that female-headed households made up 34 per cent of households in Zimbabwe but owned only 29 per cent of national income, while male-headed households held 71 per cent. Poverty rates among female-headed households climbed from 48 per cent in 1995 to 68 per cent in 2003, outpacing the rise among male-headed households.

The roots lie partly in colonial-era labour systems that separated families by pulling men into mines and cities, leaving women to farm marginal land without authority to make key economic decisions. Today, women form the backbone of Zimbabwe’s informal economy, with one analysis finding that around 67 per cent of informal workers in Zimbabwe are women, and that women shoulder roughly 70 per cent of household responsibilities in rural areas.

India: Informal work, unpaid care, and missing assets 🔗

In India, the feminisation of poverty is shaped by occupational segregation and the heavy load of unpaid work. Estimates citing ILO data indicate that over 60 per cent of women in India work in the informal economy, where wages are low and protections scarce. Women also perform a vastly disproportionate share of unpaid domestic and care work, limiting their ability to take on full-time paid employment.

Female-headed households in India tend to be concentrated among widows, deserted wives, and women in migrant-sending regions. Studies of urban poverty in India find that educational attainment is one of the strongest predictors of vulnerability for these households, with lower schooling sharply increasing the risk of chronic poverty. Government schemes, from the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana to widow pensions and self-help group programmes, recognise this gendered dimension, though coverage and benefit levels remain uneven.

Morocco: Urban migration and exclusion 🔗

In Morocco, rapid urbanisation and economic liberalisation in the 1990s drew large numbers of women, especially rural migrants and divorcees, into precarious urban work. Research on women and poverty in Morocco published in Feminist Review describes how female-headed households face social exclusion on multiple fronts: limited literacy, restricted property rights, weak labour protections, and persistent cultural stigma against women living without male guardians. Many work as domestic servants, street vendors, or home-based piece-rate producers, with no contracts and no recourse when wages are withheld.

Why this matters beyond the individual household 🔗

The feminisation of poverty is not just a women’s issue. Children in female-headed households are more likely to drop out of school, marry early, and enter low-paid work, transmitting disadvantage across generations. National economies lose productive potential when half the workforce is underemployed or stuck in low-value sectors. UN Women estimates that closing gender gaps in employment and reducing the disproportionate burden of unpaid care would significantly accelerate progress on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Addressing it requires more than charity-style schemes. It calls for legal reforms that secure women’s inheritance and property rights, public investment in childcare and elder care to free women’s time, social protection that reaches informal workers, and education systems that keep girls in school through secondary level and beyond.

What do you think? If male migration is reshaping rural India into a landscape of female-managed households, what kind of policy support would actually make a difference in your home state? And do you think the language of “female-headed households” risks treating women’s leadership as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be supported?

References

1. https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/beijing/platform/poverty.htm
2. https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-release/2022/09/progress-on-the-sustainable-development-goals-the-gender-snapshot-2022
3. https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/women-and-men-informal-economy-statistical-update
4. https://www.thestatesman.com/opinion/women-at-work-2-1503515280.html
5. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43621-025-01398-0
6. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/feminization-of-poverty/
7. https://www.fao.org/4/y4308e/y4308e05.htm
8. https://www.theindependent.co.zw/opinion/article/200039763/multi-dimensional-poverty-gender-sensitive-approach
9. https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/meetings/egm/genderstats06/DOC%2014.2%20Zimbabwe.pdf
10. https://indialeadersforsocialsector.com/gender-pay-parity-india-diverse-landscape/
11. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Women-and-Poverty-in-Morocco:-The-Many-Faces-of-Skalli/3e5bcc94ae8572a834767aa77cd08233066ba257