Does anyone have a solid source for the poverty statistics of men, IE the percentage of men living in poverty compared to women?

Diffident-Dissident · 2015-12-10T12:42:19+00:00

From here :

The UK government, the European Union and many other countries use 60 per cent of median household income as the poverty ‘threshold’

but note that :

The 60 per cent level is chosen as an indicator of the income at which those below are likely to be suffering hardship. As such, it is a proxy measure of poverty and, without validation from direct measures of people’s living standards, is essentially arbitrary.

This site shows results from UK national data.

This site shows results from US national data, by state. (Note. this site does not specify the 60% median poverty line, but specifies a $19,055 poverty line. Whether these are synonymous is not known to me.)

Taking the UK data for the latest year (2008/2009), the percentage of those below the poverty line who are women is 21%/(21%+19%) = 52.5%.

Taking the US data for the whole US, the percentage of those below the poverty line who are women is 15%/(15%+11%) = 57.7%.

KrisK_lvin · 2015-12-10T13:26:21+00:00

I don't, no, but bear in mind that any figure you are quoted needs to take into account mortality.

Pensioners around the world tend not to be very wealthy and many fall under the definition of living in poverty. As men around the world tend to die earlier than women - usually by only a few years, but sometimes with dramatic differences e.g. in Russia life expectancy for men is 63; for women 75¹ - more women live in poverty as a percentage of all women.

I therefore think any figure that doesn't acknowledge and take into account that life expectancy gap that will inevitably result in more women living in poverty than men overall.

¹ Edit: Forgot to mention, I got that from Wikipedia (I know, I know) but that Wikipedia page is citing the WHO report from 2013.

Demonspawn · 2015-12-10T15:08:02+00:00

Another thing to remember is that child support doesn't count as "income", so a women who doesn't work, but gets $40k/yr in child support is considered a poor person.

TechnoSam_Belpois · 2015-12-10T20:20:09+00:00

For the US, these stats are really really hard to pin down.

Child support isn't counted as income. Government benefits (including housing) are not counted either. So there are a lot of women making less than the poverty line because they simply don't need to make any more.

Also, homelessness does not count. So if you have no place to live and an income of $0, you're not in poverty by the stats.

All these things work together to inflate the number of women "in poverty" to justify giving them even more and ignoring men.

I'm sure someone has the skills and resources needed to fully organize all of this, but I haven't found them yet.

Title	Does anyone have a solid source for the poverty statistics of men, IE the percentage of men living in poverty compared to women?
Author	SantasPanties20
Upvotes	7
Comments	13
Date	December 10, 2015 9:20 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3w7a9h/does_anyone_have_a_solid_source_for_the_poverty/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/does-anyone-have-a-solid-source-for-the-poverty.965445 https://theredarchive.com/post/965445

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