One of the critical issues that I identified early on in this course is poverty. In all countries women make up the majority of people living in poverty. As they strive to escape from this situation, they travel many roads to try to earn money to feed their families and themselves. In the first chapter of the text for this course, we offer a description of poverty that goes well beyond simply a lack of financial resources. It states, poor people live without fundamental freedoms of action and choice that the better off take for granted. They often lack adequate food and shelter, education and health, deprivations that keep them from leading the kind of life that everyone values. And they are often exposed to ill treatment by institutions of the state and society, and are powerless to influence key decisions affecting their lives. That being said, financial resources are vitally important. Access to money matters. Poverty is directly correlated with poor health at all levels of he socioeconomic status hierarchy. Those who are richer and more educated will enjoy better health. In other words, if we are interested in women's health, then we would want them to move up the socioeconomic ladder, presumably by being able to access the cash economy. Women's work is underpaid and undervalued. It includes whatever a woman is asked to do or is expected to do for no money, as well as what she may be coerced into doing in order to have money to care for her family and herself. More than a third of the world's households depend solely on women for all income and necessities. It is estimated that women perform 66% of the world's work, yet women earn just 10% of the world's income, and own a mere 1% of its property. Gita Sen and Caren Grown stated this situation clearly in their book. Women's work, under-remunerated and undervalued as it is, is vital to the survival and ongoing reproduction of human beings in all societies. In food production and processing and responsibility for fuel, water, health care, child rearing, sanitation, and the entire range of so-called basic needs, women's labor is dominant. For all their hard work, however, women are the majority of the 3.3 billion people living on less than US $2 a day. Measurements of countries' economic progress for the most part ignore the contributions of women in households because women's domestic labor is not recognized as wage work. Even though many women do get paid for domestic work, cleaning houses, babysitting, and doing other tasks for wealthier families, such work is, for the most part, not included as contributing to a country's gross national product. If such unpaid labor were included in statistics measuring economic transactions, the world's economy would increase by about $11 trillion US. Marilyn Waring, a political economist, author, and feminist activist from New Zealand, in her book, If Women Counted, provides examples of the unpaid labor. She writes of women in richer countries who spend their days in such supposedly unproductive activities as cleaning house, tending children, providing healthcare, doing laundry, and so on. She also describes women and girls in poorer countries, who spend long days fetching water, providing food to families, fetching firewood, cleaning the home, foraging for wild vegetables, and tending children, among other tasks. All such work goes completely unmeasured in the System of National Accounts, which is an international system that measures output income and expenditures of countries. Being unmeasured, such work is almost completely undervalued
