70% of world's poorest are women - REALLY??!!

There is a starting figure that has been circulating in major media outlets – a startling 70% of the world’s poorest-those who earn 1 dollar or less- are women. Which one is startling, that 70% of world’s poorest are women, or that such counter-intuitive and obviously flawed figure circulates major media without any doubts?

The figure, originally advocated by Ms. (do anyone think this would come from Mr.?) Fareda Banda, a law professor at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in her report prepared for UN Human Right Commissioner (Ms.-again) Louise Arbour in 2008. Since then, it has become an accepted figure, and repeated by senior UN officials and most major media outlets as a fact.

70% of the world’s poorest are women. Hmmm, it really shows the depth of discrimination women face worldwide, isn’t it? OR IS IT? ISN’T THERE SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE NUMBER?

Okay, there is 1.5 billion people in the world who earns less than a dollar a day, who qualifies as the world’ s poorest in the report’s definition. If 70% of them are women, and 30% of them are men, that’ll be 1.05 billion women and 450 million men qualified as the world’s poorest. That’s 600 million more women than men. That’s more than two women for every man who earns less than a dollar a day.

Now most of the world’s poor (not just the poorest living under 1$ but poor who are slightly better off than that) live in developing nations, where people have large families, with many children, unlike western states where families have more or less disbanded and individuals are living on their own as individuals. That means that in developing countries, poverty is family-based, that it affects entire family, that if a husband is poor, then his wife is poor, and so are his boys and girls. It is hard to imagine and highly improbable that just a husband or one member of family living an affluent life while the rest of his family living in dire poverty.

Now, how can you get 600 million more women living in dire poverty than men? 600 million is not a small number? - it is twice the population of the United States!! Just thik about these for a few seconds and immediately it becomes clear that there is something wrong about this number.