ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a review of the gendered perspectives on the current conceptualizations and measurements of poverty starting with the feminist critiques of conventional income-based poverty measures, overlaps of these critiques with alternative nonmonetary measures, and focuses on a relatively recent advance in a gendered measure of poverty that integrates time-poverty and caring labor. In many contexts discriminatory gender norms and structures lead to women’s deprivation beyond access to income and consumption, through illiteracy and lack of access to basic rights. This feminist critique overlaps with Sen’s capability approach to poverty, which is the primary alternative to the conventional monetary approach. The intra-household gender allocation of unpaid work determines the intra-household gender inequalities in access to time for paid work (and for leisure); this gender distribution of labor underlies the gender differences in income and consumption poverty as well as time-poverty.
