Global estimates of poverty, especially those comparing its incidence among men and women, are based on very shaky data; per capita and "adult equivalent" measures do not offer answers to questions which they were not designed to address. Intra-household distribution issues need to be specifically built into questionnaire design. But there is persisting reticence on the part of administrative structures to probe this arena.

The category of households labelled "female-headed" is highly heterogeneous, with lone-female units, households in which women earners receive significant remittances from absent males, homes of single women wage earners with young dependants, and so on. Some of these, such as the last category, may constitute what can be reasonably thought of as poverty-risk factors; others, such as the second, may be among the better-off. So how -- through what processes -- do men and women slide into poverty, and what are the conditions and modalities through which some women, at least, manage to interrogate and challenge prevailing arrangements?

One of the main messages emerging from research, especially in South and East Asia, is the complex and contradictory relations between household opulence and the well-being of the female household members. Evidence from some parts of north-west and more recently even south India suggests that discrimination against female children may be particularly acute among landed/propertied households, rather than the poorer landless, raising questions about whether disadvantaged women and girls can be reached by "targeting" poor households; or if transfer of land to male household heads, through land reforms, settlement schemes or social forestry, would benefit them, given increasing work burdens and nutritional risks that they experience under such conditions. Current policy dogma assumes that labour-intensive agricultural and industrial strategies are pro-poor because labour is "the poor's most abundant asset".

Many questions can be raised about this from different perspectives, both macro and micro, including important gender concerns. In some contexts and among some social groups, powerful social norms regarding female seclusion, for example, reinforced through familial and conjugal relations, impose severe constraints on women's ability to access labour markets. But, even where social norms do not inhibit such access and physical mobility in public spaces, as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, rural women are often bound by the labour demands placed by their male kin, particularly husbands, making them unable to freely dispose of their own labour for their own account or for leisure.

Men can draw on the labour of wives and children for farming; women's ability to do so is far more limited, although they may exchange labour with other women. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the difficulty of commanding the labour of social superiors means that women can never mount the large exchange work parties which are so important for male farmers, raising the question about whether women, in particular from smallholder households, can benefit from labour-intensive, and often export-oriented, agricultural strategies.

Women's groups have repeatedly emphasized that women stand at the crossroads between "productive" activities and nurturing human beings (the care economy). Subsidized child care and elderly care facilities, public health care programmes, public transport and piped water/electricity help them meet their dual responsibilities. When State resources are not channelled to such services, women must work more to compensate for the shortfall. In theory, their work in the care economy is central to economic activity and should therefore carry economic rights or entitlements. But there are many competing claims on budgets; while young unmarried and childless women have been able to benefit from labour-intensive industrial strategies (albeit under working conditions far from ideal) in countries where those strategies have been successful, these opportunities have been far less open to older women with dependants, in the absence of adequate social provision of child care and other services.

Finally, the kinds of mechanisms that determine the value of labour in labour markets, how "skills" are defined and labour is categorized, very often carry implicit gender biases. Lower wages that women often command cannot be adequately accounted for simply in terms of experience, skills and levels of education; there are both implicit and explicit exclusionary and discriminatory processes at work which cannot be tackled through female education alone. Gender-aware trade unions and women's non-governmental organizations must contest the seemingly "objective" mechanisms through which women's labour is devalued in labour markets and "used up" in the labour process.

These are some important considerations that need to be kept on the agenda if labour-intensive strategies are to meet needs and interests of poor women who, as we have argued, are in significant ways distinct from those of poor men.

Dr. Ravazi is project leader at the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD), Geneva. The project she is currently coordinating, "Gender, Poverty and Well-being", has been generously funded by the United Nations Development Programme and SIDA.