Feminization of Urban Poverty: Causes and Policy Responses

The feminization of urban poverty is the trend by which women make up a growing share of the poor in cities and experience poverty more intensely than men in the same setting. The sociologist Diana Pearce coined the term in 1978 for the United States, and two researchers of urban development have since reworked it in depth: Sylvia Chant of the London School of Economics and Caroline Moser, a pioneer of gender-aware planning. Their work shows that female poverty is not only a matter of income but of time, responsibilities and unequal access to what the city offers.

Wage gaps and informal work in the city

The first cause lies in the labour market. Women earn less for equivalent work and are concentrated in precarious sectors such as domestic service, street trading and paid care, often without a contract or social protection. In cities of the Global South, where the informal economy absorbs most working women, that precarity means irregular earnings that block access to formal housing, credit and pensions. The city offers more jobs than the countryside, but it distributes them unequally.

Caroline Moser and women's triple role

In Gender Planning and Development (1993), Moser described the triple role that low-income women take on: productive work that earns income, reproductive work caring for the home and children, and community management, that is, organising the neighbourhood to obtain water, electricity or a school. Neither of the last two is paid, yet they consume most of the day. Moser also distinguished practical gender needs, such as a nearby nursery, from strategic gender needs, such as changing the division of labour at home, and demanded that urban planning address both.

Sylvia Chant and the feminization of responsibility

Chant critically reviewed the slogan that 70 percent of the world's poor are women, a figure with no sound statistical basis, and proposed talking instead about the feminization of responsibility and obligation. Her argument, developed in Gender, Generation and Poverty (2007) and in Cities, Slums and Gender in the Global South (2016, with Cathy McIlwaine), is that what grows is not so much the number of poor women as their burden: they take on ever more work, more household management and more responsibility for family survival, while men withdraw or migrate. Measuring poverty by income alone hides that inequality of effort.

Housing, basic services and female-headed households

In informal settlements the lack of water, sanitation and street lighting punishes women hardest, since they carry the water, nurse the sick and face violence when using latrines or walking at night. Chant warns that female-headed households are not always the poorest, as is often assumed, but they are the most vulnerable to any shock, because they depend on a single income and on fragile support networks. A city designed without these everyday uses in mind perpetuates the exclusion it claims to fight.

Effective responses combine urban and social measures: safe, affordable public transport at the hours care work demands; nurseries and centres for older people inside neighbourhoods; housing titles in women's names in regularisation programmes; lighting and public spaces designed with women; and cash transfers that do not reinforce their role as sole household providers. Moser and Chant agree that the goal is not to assist poor women but to redistribute time, resources and decision-making power over the city they live in.