Women still coming up po’

UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) found (again) that there is a connection between women’s work and poverty rates. I think we already know this but…

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.

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