page_title: Gender
section_title: Poverty
hierarchical_section_title: Gender / Gender and society / Poverty
caption_attribution_description: English: A bar graph comparing poverty differences based on gender in 2012.
context_page_description: Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex, sex-based social structures, or gender identity. Most cultures use a gender binary, having two genders; those who exist outside these groups fall under the umbrella term non-binary or genderqueer. Some societies have specific genders besides "man" and "woman", such as the hijras of South Asia; these are often referred to as third genders.
  Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories. However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences and documents written by the World Health Organization.
  In other contexts, including some areas of the social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it.
context_section_description: Gender inequality is most common in women dealing with poverty. Many women must shoulder all the responsibility of the household because they must take care of the family. Oftentimes this may include tasks such as tilling land, grinding grain, carrying water and cooking. Also, women are more likely to earn low incomes because of gender discrimination, as men are more likely to receive higher pay, have more opportunities, and have overall more political and social capital then women. Approximately 75% of world's women are unable to obtain bank loans because they have unstable jobs. It shows that there are many women in the world's population but only a few represent world's wealth. In many countries, the financial sector largely neglects women even though they play an important role in the economy, as Nena Stoiljkovic pointed out in D+C Development and Cooperation. In 1978 Diana M. Pearce coined the term feminization of poverty to describe the problem of women having higher rates of poverty. Women are more vulnerable to chronic poverty because of gender inequalities in the distribution of income, property ownership, credit, and control over earned income. Resource allocation is typically gender-biased within households, and continue on a higher level regarding state institutions.
  Gender and Development (GAD) is a holistic approach to give aid to countries where gender inequality has a great effect of not improving the social and economic development. It is a program focused on the gender development of women to empower them and decrease the level of inequality between men and women.
  The largest discrimination study of the transgender community, conducted in 2013, found that the transgender community is four times more likely to live in extreme poverty (income of less than $10,000 a year) than people who are cisgender.
caption: A bar graph comparing poverty differences based on age and gender in 2012.
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