Triangle Of Poverty

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Triangle of Poverty

Poverty defined by Merriam’s Webster is, “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions,” it is where the level of personal or family income is below the standards made by the government. Money is just one of the causes of poverty, another cause is access. Access is the basic necessities people need in order to survive, such as food, clothing and shelter, education, proper health care, and clean water - rights which most of us take for granted. Poverty is a problem all over the world, “half of the worlds---nearly three billion people---live on less than two dollars a day” (http://www.globalissues.org/). In this paper, I am going to focus on areas such as Mexico, California, and Texas. It is clear through my research that unemployment rates, and discrimination of women in the workforce affect poverty rates across the world.
What I found during my research was very interesting. Women are the majority in each state, but men make up the majority of the workforce. There are 11,479,705 women 16 years and older, and 6,622,034 of these women are involved in the workforce. Of these women 16 years and older 435,414 of them are unemployed. This means that only 57.6% of women are involved in the workplace (Graph 1). What are the rest of the women doing? The problem caused by the women’s absence in the workforce is children living in poverty. Of all the children living in California, 28.7% live in poverty (Graph 3). What increases women’s chance of living in poverty is where she works. It is seen that the majority of jobs held in California are low paying jobs such as retail work and clerical work. Places where advancements are minimal, and the starting rate is usually the minimum wage of $5.75 an hour (National Center for Children and Poverty). Children suffer a great deal in such a situation, whether the children live in poverty because thei...