WUNRN
MEASURING POVERTY – INDIVIDUAL
DEPRIVATION MEASURE, NOT JUST HOUSEHOLDS – IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
NETHERLANDS & DUTCH WOMEN
By Catherine Bij de Vaate, Policy Advisor at Atria
Institute on Gender Equality & Women’s History in Amsterdam.
26/03/2015
- 1,2
million Dutch people (7,6% of the population) live in poverty. Since 2007,
poverty of children strongly increased: one out of nine children live in a
situation of poverty today in The Netherlands. Women are more often in
precarious financial situations. Yet, little is known about the gender aspects
of poverty. Is the face of poverty feminine? Probably,w but difficult to know
for sure if measurements of poverty keep focusing on households, not
individuals. A side event at CSW 59-2015 organized by the Permanent Mission of
Australia to the United Nations, introduced an innovative measurement tool of
poverty, enabling sex-disaggregation of data, based on the views of both poor
women and poor men: “The Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM): Transforming how
we measure poverty.” Have we been measuring poverty in the wrong way until now?
The
Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM)
Scott Wisor, Lecturer and Deputy Director, Centre for the Study of Global
Ethics, University of Birmingham, explained that currently the world only
measures the poverty of households, not individuals, making us blind to the
circumstances of individuals within households. Besides, poverty
measurement also mainly focuses on money when there are other factors
that also matter to poor men and women. Consequently, we do not understand
poverty as well as we could, which means that we are not doing everything
possible to fix it.
The Individual Deprivation Measure (IDM) is a new tool that measures the
poverty of individuals, not just households. It also measures the differences
in how women and men experience poverty. The IDM recognizes that escaping
poverty requires more than just money. This is why it assesses 15 keys areas of
life for each individual:
Food Water Shelter
Health Education
Energy/Fuel
Sanitation Relationships
Clothing Violence
Family
Planning Environment
Voice Time-use
Work
The IDM reveals which factors make people poor, and the extent of their
poverty. By measuring the poverty of individuals instead of households, the IDM
can show differences by gender, age, disability and ethnicity, including within
households. Any differences between women and men in each area of life can also
be added up to generate a new gender equity measure that is relevant to poor
people. The IDM seems cost effective and practical: an individual survey takes
60 minutes and requires no special equipment for data collectors. It can help
measuring success or failure of policy, revealing what aspects of poverty are
changing, by how much and for whom.
The panel, composed of Scott Wisor, Jeni Klugman, Fellow, Women and Public
Policy Program, Kennedy School, Harvard University and Joanna Hayter, Chief
Executive Officer, International Women’s Development Agency Australia, further
outlined the methodology of the IDM and discussed how governments and policy
makers can use the tool to address poverty more effectively.
Implications
for The Netherlands
Three million women in the Netherlands are not financially able to provide for
their own livelihoods. In short, they are not financially independent. Within
the group of women who are not economically independent, we find women who have
no personal income, women who receive government benefits and women in paid
employment whose take-home pay (net pay) is less than €900 per month. The
official definition states that a person is economically independent if her/his
income from employment (or self-employment) is equal to at least 70 percent of
the net minimum wage. This is approximately € 900 per month, or the level of
government unemployment benefits for a single person. Women who receive
government benefits are not economically independent because they are dependent
for their income on the benefits agency. According to this definition, almost a
third of working women are not economically independent, due to a.o part-time
work.
Their financial dependence makes these women vulnerable to financial setbacks
in situations such as divorce, death of partner or unemployment. In situation
of divorce, if both partners earn approximately as much, both also suffer as
much financially. In most divorce situations, though, the income of the man is
(considerably) higher than the income of the woman. In average women are faced
with a financial setback of 23% in case of divorce, while men progress
financially by 7% in average.
Merely 53% of the women in the Netherlands are financially independent, in
comparison to 73% of the men (2013). Yet measurement of poverty in the
Netherlands occurs only at household level, not taking into account eventual
differences between men and women within households. I wonder how the
Individual Deprivation Measure would translate in the Dutch context. It might
be an idea to explore the possibilities of using IDM in the (preparations
of the) next Poverty Survey (Armoedesignalement) to be published by
Statistics Netherlands (cbs) and The Netherlands Institute for Social Research
(SCP)…
EIGE's
Gender Equality Index
The IDM is also interesting for international measurements. The Gender Equality
Index, developed by EIGE, the European Institute for Gender Equality, provides
a measure of how far (or close) each EU Member State was from achieving gender
equality on a given gender indicator in 2010. The domain of money includes
indicators measuring gaps between the financial resources and economic
situation of women and men. The Netherlands have the second highest score
(82.5) in the EU on the Gender Equality Index in the domain of money, far above
the average at EU level (68.9). According to the Gender Equality Index
Report(p.71), the indicator for poverty, one of the four concepts measured in
the domain “money”, is defined as the percentage of individuals that are not considered to be at -risk-of-poverty. Given
that the calculation of this indicator is based on dividing income among
household members, using an equivalized scale, it also presents shortcomings in
that it may underestimate the true extent of the existing gender
gap.
Far from being an expert on statistics, still I wonder how the IDM could relate
to and complement the Gender Equality Index with regard to the challenges in
measuring poverty at individual level, and how it could contribute to improving
measurement of the true extent of gender gap. I wonder too how it would affect
the current high score of the Netherlands.