Women and the Debt Burden

In Jamaica today, low-income women – the majority of women – are forced to carry an increasingly unequal share of the cost of social services in the face of government’s inability to provide these services.

Invariably, the burden of finding the money to pay for these services falls to women. Why? A brief look at some of the statistics will help:

• 42.8% of all Jamaican households are headed by single women

• households headed by women are generally larger

• unemployment statistics for women are double that for men

• male-headed households can and do consume more.

What the statistics reveal is that there are more than twice as many women as men who are unemployed but they still have larger families to look after. If single women who have larger families than men to look after, while they are earning smaller incomes than men, head nearly half of our households the burden on these women is greater.

As a reflection of its commitment to the development of the social infrastructure, from its recurrent budget (the part used for day-to-day expenses), the present government spends 32% on education, 16% on health and 17% on national security. The problem is that after spending 54% on debt servicing (taking care of its debt, both internal and external), there is very little left to pay for all the other expenses that the government should cover – health, education, roads, water, etc.

The longer government cannot spend sufficient money in these sectors, the more rapidly they deteriorate. The same women who earn less than men, who have larger households to provide for, and who have the higher rate of unemployment – they are the ones to carry the burden.