Journal Articles:
Gender & Equality
An article with video with a startling title “Just 8 Men Own Same Wealth as Half the World.” The video shows a Kenyan village and highlights one woman’s story. Her wish is to end the inequality in supply chains. Her small village is poor and only receives water 3 days a week.
Interview with Cindy Berman. She discusses how vulnerable populations (disabled, women, children, migrant workers, minorities) that are desperate for income are the perfect target for low wage and exploitation in the work place.
A website, with multiple categories, tackling the issues of education and what the rights to this universal education entails. On the topic of women and girls, the website speaks upon the issues of gender, age, ethnicity, poverty and other related barriers to the quality of education women and girls face.
Linking poverty and social exclusion, this summary of EU policies over the past few decades highlight the ways that these issues have been approached. To promote both poverty reduction and social inclusion, programs were put in place to help increase employment in several demographic groups.
This website states that although more women are in school, statistically an estimated 131 million girls worldwide remain out of school and fall under harsh barriers to education. Some examples of these barriers include cultural norms and practices, school-related gender-based violence, and early or forced marriages.
An article that argues that women are essential stakeholders in the health care industry, serving as workers, caregivers, and consumers; however, face inequality within the work place. According to their statistics, women only hold 22% of the Fortune 500 health care executive teams and only 1/3 of hospital executives are women.
This article brings forth an interview of Maya Dusenbery, the author of Doing Harm: The Truth about How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick. According to Dusenbery, women’s well-being has been hampered by gender disparities. These disparities include diseases that disproportionately affect women; such diseases have been under researched, and develop a “trust gap” that negatively affects women’s health care.
This article talks about how inequalities between men and women hurt global development. Reasons for this include the following: Families may decide they cannot afford to send all their children off to college, so they decide to send their sons off to school instead of the daughters.
This article argues against what they call “questionable facts” against extreme poverty. From existing data, women account for about 50% of the world’s extreme poor. However, they argue that even though it is only 50%, it does not mean that poverty is gender neutral.
This article is written about International Women’s Day and 2019’s theme of “#BalanceforBetter.” Gender-balanced world benefits everyone in an economic and social way.
Starting on page 23 of the State of the Union report in 2018, the authors examine the gender gap in poverty. Trends in Poverty: a main source of the gender gap within poverty will be differences in the economic circumstances of women or men who are not married because it is measured by household.
This webpage states that women in America are still 35% more likely than men to be poor, with single mothers facing the highest risk. The legal momentum has brought a “gender lens” to the work of national anti-poverty groups, with the goal of keeping women and children, at the center of policy-making.
An article on the strike against gender inequality on June 14, 2019, in Switzerland. Surprisingly enough, it was the 28th anniversary of the historical women’s strike of 1991, to put pressure on the government to implement a constitutional amendment on gender equality, which led to the passage of the Gender Equality Act five years later.
This source looks to discuss the subtleties of the issue of child labor. The author points out that poverty and child labor, while linked in some cases, are not always influence each other the way people think. Focusing on Ghana, the author explores this idea by comparing child labor in rural areas, and child labor in urban areas. To reduce child labor, the author recommends several things. One is to have school be closer to communities, as distance from home is often cited by parents as a reason not to send their children to school. Additionally, education for parents is recommended to inform them of the benefits of education for their children and different options for said education.
Brazil has been recognized for their efforts to end poverty in their nation. One program, Bolsa Familia Program, gives cash transfers to families if they meet certain requirements. It is aimed to ensure the youth of Brazil maintain healthy lives. The program requires that all members of the family meet the requirements set. This ensures inclusion. The rate of girls in school has risen by 21% since the new requirements were put in place. The cash transfers are preferentially given to the female head of household. This is a form of female empowerment and gender equality. There have been criticisms of the program, but it has significantly helped in reducing poverty in Brazil and growing equality.
This article took a different approach to analyzing the effects of sweatshop labor on workers in the developing world. The authors conducted field interviews in El Salvador to see what actual sweatshop workers had to say about their working conditions. Though none of the workers seemed to enjoy working in the sweatshops, there was a consensus that working in sweatshops was far more desirable compared to the alternatives, such as farming or street vending. Though increased wages was a reason cited for the favorability of factory work, other reasons were largely non-monetary. These included things like intergenerational mobility, increased possibilities for education, and greater opportunities for women outside the home.
This source discusses China’s experience in growing wealth over the past few decades. While the economy has been growing every year for decades, this wealth has not been distributed equally. Also, the authors point out that China’s poverty is largely regional, with some regions being largely poor as a whole and others being wealthier.
In this article, authors Basu and Zarghamee discuss the desirability of consumer boycott as a means to produce change in the sweatshop industry. The focus of their research is showing how consumer activism can actually have an adverse reaction and cause the incidence of child labor to rise rather than fall in certain situations. Through extensive modeling, Basu and Zarghamee show that child labor can be illustrated by an inverted-U curve. Often, children are involved in sweatshop labor because of poverty and a lack of other opportunities. When boycotts are introduced, children become less desirable as workers; and, as a result, their wages fall. Because of the lack of other opportunities, children now have to work more to compensate for the decrease in wages.
This article talks about the phenomenon in Latin America that while overall poverty has decreased, extreme poverty has increased. The source also discusses the role of women in the Latin American economy. The number of women working compared to the number of men is less, and the jobs women tend to have are paid less. This is largely because women do the work required to maintain the home, which leaves little time for other work.
A website, "Poverty USA" that provides the bills enacted to help fight poverty within the United States. Some of the bills include: The Farm Bill, SNAP, the Criminal Justice Reform, and more.
This source looks to improve data gathering and mapmaking relating to the study of malnutrition in Africa. This method includes both prevalence and head counts. In addition, it combines data on chronic and undernutrition. The authors also took care to include data that discounted national borders. This resulted in a highly comprehensive map that displays a gradient color scheme identifying where the issue of malnutrition is the worst.