IN SEARCH OF GENDER-SENSITIVE CONCEPTS AND MEASURES OF POVERTY, INEQUALITY AND WELL-BEING.

• Author: Briar, Celia

INTRODUCTION(1)

Despite many decades of feminist research, it is still not possible to obtain a full picture of women's levels of economic well-being. Throughout the twentieth century feminists drew attention to the large and persistent gap between men's and women's average incomes from paid work. More specifically, feminist research provided information from the 1980s onwards about women and poverty (Millar and Glendinning 1987), including the poverty and economic inequality experienced by women within heterosexual partnerships (Pahl 1980, Vogler 1989, Vogler and Pahl 1993), the effects of poverty on women's health (Payne 1991, Graham 1993) and the feminisation of poverty (Scott 1984). However, researchers have pointed out that they have been and continue to be hampered by a shortage of useful and reliable national and international data on women's economic position (Payne 1991:46, Graham 1993:17). This is to a large extent because of major deficiencies in the ways in which data on poverty and inequality have been conceptualised and gathered by governments and international organisations.

Well-established ways of conceptualising and measuring poverty, such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP), have been strongly criticised for their narrowness (their primary focus on market income, production and consumption) and the difficulties of making meaningful comparisons between the richer OECD nations and countries with very low GDP. In particular, some critics of these measures of poverty focus on their gender blindness (Waring 1989). Because these conventional measures of poverty and inequality focus on market-based activities, whereas much of women's work continues to be unpaid, such measures provide at best only a partial picture of women's economic situation.

In the 1990s, partly as a response to some of the inadequacies of established conceptualisations and indicators, there was a growth in the number and type of ways of understanding and measuring poverty, inequality and well-being. In this paper I briefly look at Genuine Progress Indicators, the United Nations Human Development Index and the concepts of social exclusion, time-poverty and health variations. Some of these have already been adopted by governments to varying extents, whilst others have so far been used primarily by critics wishing to illustrate the deficiencies in existing ways of looking at poverty, inequality and well-being. What the newer measures have in common is that they not only measure income or market production and consumption, but also look at a wide variety of indices such as mortality, health, leisure, opportunities, the environment and participation in social life.

This paper examines the extent to which both established and newer conceptualisations and measures of poverty, inequality and well-being are capable of taking greater account of women's material situation.

GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT AND GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT

The most commonly used indicators of the wealth of nations have been per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, to a lesser extent, Gross National Product (GNP). GDP, the more commonly used measure, is defined as the monetary value of final goods and services provided in a country. GNP is defined as the total value of wages, rents, interest and profits of a nation's residents (Hamilton 1997). The difference between them is that GNP includes interest from overseas investments and excludes dividends paid to foreign capital. Usually it is assumed that growth in GDP and/or GNP (also known as economic growth) results in improvements in well-being. Seldom is this assumption challenged. It is often assumed that if a country slips in its rate of GNP per capita, its residents must be becoming poorer or worse off compared with those in countries that can boast faster economic growth.

In fact, however, economic growth can be occurring in terms of per capita GNP and/or GDP, whilst at the same time people are becoming worse off. This is partly because of what GNP and GDP actually measure, as Waring (1989) has pointed out. The current concept of economic growth gives value to disasters (or at least the clean-up operations), arms production and wars, environmental pollution and any market-based work. It accords no value to clean air and water, native flora or fauna, or indeed to any non-market activity, including essential work like bearing and raising children and household work. In 1993 the United Nations Commission, which is responsible for the System of National Accounts, recommended that the value of goods produced by households, including for their own consumption, be included in GDP. However, the value of services produced in households for use by household members, such as childcare and cooking (work done chiefly by women) is still not included in the main accounts (Fleming and Spellerberg 1999:9).

The use of GDP and GNP becomes especially problematic in countries where inequality is increasing, and where there are significant numbers of people at the extremes of wealth and poverty. This is because GNP and GDP provide measures of averaged data and so are unable to capture income inequality. In New Zealand, between 1984 and 1998, the richest 10 per cent of the population became substantially better off, whilst the majority became poorer, and those on the lowest incomes became substantially worse off (Podder and Chatterjee 1998). Women have long been the majority of those on low incomes, and in recent years structural adjustment policies world-wide have been increasing women's poverty relative to men's and increasing the amount of unpaid work performed by women (Sparr 1994:21-8). The use of GDP and GNP as measures serves to disguise this transfer of income away from poor women. As a result of shortcomings of this kind, GDP and GNP as measures have been increasingly criticised and there has been a search for more useful and sensitive measures of the wealth of nations.

GENUINE PROGRESS INDICATORS (GPIS)

Like the conventional measures described above, Genuine Progress Indicators (GPIs) aim to measure the economic progress of nations or their decline over time. However, in other respects they differ sharply from GDP and GNP.

GPIs have been developed by alternative economists in the USA (Daly and Cobb 1990), the UK (Jackson and Marks 1994) and Australia (Hamilton 1997). Their main aim is to question the value base of the conventional measures used by governments, and in particular GNP and GDP. The underlying assumptions of GPIs are at variance with those of conventional measurements. According to Hamilton (1997:2), "They are based on the assumption that we live in a society rather than an economy; and further that society is embedded in and depends on the natural environment".

GPIs include items which GDP and GNP leave out, such as the value of unpaid work in the home and community (Hamilton 1997:8). In addition, GPIs include a debit account for "bads" such as crime, unemployment, environmental pollution and "defensive spending" (for example on extra policing, burglar alarms, vitamins and health care) which conventional measures do not. The concept of sustainability is also central to GPIs, so that whilst some increases in consumption are regarded as good, environmental costs (for example the costs of commuting) are debited. Like GDP and GNP, however, GPIs do not measure inequalities such as the difference between women's and men's earnings known as the "gender pay gap". It is not their role to measure inequality within nations (although the existence and consequences of inequality, captured by other measures, may be used in the debit accounts of GPIs). However, because GPIs place value on non-market contributions to the national well-being, they are more likely to lead to a valuing of unpaid household work, around 70 per cent of which is performed by women (Bittman 1991:32).

Nonetheless, systems of accounting, even alternative systems, which measure the economic well-being of whole nations, fail to capture gender inequality. Therefore it is necessary to look at ways of conceptualising and measuring poverty, inequality and well-being within nations, and which can also be used as a basis for comparison between nations. The most accessible of these is measurement of incomes.

INCOME POVERTY

How well do measurements of income provide an accurate picture of women's poverty, inequality and well-being? The answer seems to be that, in the OECD nations at least, it is probably the most accurate way of measuring poverty and inequality and one of the best predictors of other aspects of well-being such as health. Measuring incomes is vital because most women (and men) in the OECD nations do not usually have access to...