Measuring Poverty As If Gender Matters: Perspectives from Fieldwork in Fiji

This paper presents empirical findings on one aspect of the work of a transnational feminist research project, based in Canberra, Australia, whose goal was to produce a better standard or metric for measuring poverty across the world. I was a team member on this project for Fiji-based fieldwork from 2010 to 2012. The research project was aimed at synthesising and integrating various experiences and perspectives on poverty held both by poor women and men and by professional poverty experts. The project team began with a review of the professional knowledge contained in the vast multidisciplinary literature on gender and poverty, gender and development, and gender-sensitive measures of poverty. Fieldwork was carried out in six countries — Angola, Fiji, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique and the Philippines — in order to understand how the poorest people in some very poor countries viewed poverty and related hardships, and to what extent they saw these as gendered. This discussion paper will focus only on fieldwork conducted in Fiji.