Mediating the Meaning of Market Opportunities-Gender, Caste and Class in Rural South India

Research on poverty that focuses solely on access to employment runs the risk of implicitly being an approach that neglects the gender dimension of poverty, In the context of inequitable gender relations within households, poor women may have access to employment, but still be sharply subordinated, so that they have very little control over their earnings. Women's control of their earnings or of credit cannot be awarded to them by development agencies. Such control over resources is intimately connected with gendered power relations and with perceptions of gendered needs and rights.