1. Introduction
In contemporary societies, the concept of family has evolved or diversified into different models that suggest we reconsider the meaning, structure, and relationships that are established in the current family context. All these cultural, social, economic, and normative changes are, in certain societies, shaping these new modalities and roles in the family scenario. The logics of the new models of production, the relationships established in the globalization, or the incorporation of women into the labor market—and thus the establishment of conciliation measures—would be some socio-economic phenomena that could explain the changes to which we refer to in the sphere of the family.
In the context of center-periphery relations, and taking into account the scenarios of structural poverty, the family is also considered as one of the cultural institutions affected by the logic of the hegemonic economic systems in each historical moment [
1,
2]. In this sense, we can observe how the so-called traditional family, the modern family, or the different current family modalities would be linked to different historical moments of predominance of the domestic or agrarian economy, the industrial one, and that of services or new technologies, respectively [
3]. On the other hand, in this poverty scenario where we aim to analyze data, we should point out the existence of strategies of self-provision and of family economies—male/female roles, care, food supply—differentiated in relation to the peripheries and not so much to the center, thus revealing the existence of significant gender roles in the same context of the family economy.
At this point, we must refer to the concept of the articulation of different modes of production in a given social formation, so that we can speak of the co-existence between different modes, with the hegemony of one of them that would mark the guidelines and logics in structural terms [
4,
5,
6]. In the so-called underdeveloped/developing countries, where the phenomenon of structural poverty occurs, we can also attend to this co-existence between informal economies and markets linked to capitalist logic. Among these informal economies, the family economy is presented as a scenario where gender roles and the articulation between informal and formal activities occurs: a combination of obtaining benefits in the productive sphere and the deployment of unpaid activities that allow subsistence and/or self-sufficiency [
7].
We must mention the implications that the United Nations 2030 Agenda will have in our object of study as well as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that have been proposed as concrete action scenarios. The commitments that bind the countries attached to the achievement of these objectives point toward the complex task of eradicating poverty in all its forms including extreme poverty. As we know, these objectives replace the Millennium Development Goals, with the intention of completing what they were not able to satisfy. In this task, the SDGs consider action in a triple dimension: social, economic, and environmental. From the social and economic sphere, we must point out the importance of taking into account these SDGs and the link to our study interest.
Therefore, in the context of structural poverty, we are interested in addressing the idea of family economy in terms of its meaning, scope, and implications. More specifically, we pay attention to gender relations, that is, to the roles established within the framework of family economy, and, specifically, attend to the role of women linked to the field of informal economies. The role of women in care activities and their relevance is a key element in the social reproduction of the family as a socio-cultural institution [
8,
9,
10,
11]. At this point, we should mention that we understand socio-cultural reproduction as the social process through which culture is reproduced across generations, especially through the socializing influence of major institutions [
12]. We think that this review will allow us to offer a perspective on present and future lines of research where women appear as key figures.
In this regard, we aim to offer a review of the main literature that will allow us to observe a distinction between formal and informal economies in the family nucleus, and in this case, a distribution of tasks by gender, where the role of women would be linked to informal and unpaid spheres. This analysis, as we mentioned, will lead us to consider the relevance of opening lines of research that deal with studying the phenomenon of gender and family economy.
Therefore, we advance the relevance of establishing future lines of research that deal with the gender issue in contexts of poverty. This would imply the relevance of attending to the role of women in the family context and in scenarios of poverty, so that works are proposed in which the participation of women, the scope of their activity, and the relationship established between women is reinterpreted, and unpaid tasks (linked to the reproductive and care sphere) and formal economies linked to the market. Furthermore, it is precisely in these terms that the effectiveness of the gender perspective that the 2030 Agenda requires in the interrelation of some of its Sustainable Development Goals would be justified.
Therefore, in order to analyze these questions, we studied a sample of a total of 2182 articles. The sample was obtained from the Scopus database, in which the final versions of articles, books, and book chapters whose themes were related to the family economy and poverty were studied.
4. Results and Discussion
4.1. Evolution of Scientific Production
Table 3 shows the evolution of the main characteristics of the volume of articles published on the family economy and poverty from 1968 to 2019. The time horizon of the study, 51 years, was divided into four-year periods, in order to facilitate the analysis. In this time horizon, interest in research on this subject has been constantly increasing, especially since the beginning of the 20th century.
Thus, while in the first period (1968–1971) only two articles were published on this topic, in the last four-year period analyzed (2016–2019), the number rose to 539, that is, practically 270 times more. The increase in the number of publications is especially accentuated in the last four years, where 24.7% of the total articles published in the analyzed period were published with 539 articles. In this same sense, during the last eight years (2012–2019), 45% of the articles (978) were published, with 2019 being the year in which the most publications were obtained, with 164. It is clear that the renewed interest in this issue may be due to the promotion of the Sustainable Development Goals of 2015, which places poverty as a priority objective.
During the period under review, the total number of authors who contributed to this research topic was 4339. As with the volume of articles, the total number of authors also increased in geometric progression during the period analyzed. In the last four years (2016–2019), 32.2% of the total authors of the 51-year period are concentrated. Regarding the average number of authors per article, if in the four-year period 1968–1971, the average number of authors per article was 1.5, in the last period (2016–2019) it increased to 2.6, that is, this was the four-year period with the highest average in the time horizon studied. In this regard, it should be noted that the increase in the number of co-authors per article is a growing trend in all disciplines.
On the other hand, in the period analyzed (1968–2019), the total number of countries that have contributed to the publication of articles related to this topic was 133. Thus, the number of countries has increased from two (1968–1971) to 94 (2016–2019).
Unlike other studies, the first articles on the subject tended to receive a significant number of citations, and the two articles published in the first period (1968–1971) only received one appointment. From there, over the years, the following articles have focused on the subject and the main lines of research. Thus, in the last four-year period analyzed (2016–2019), the number of citations amounted to 1781, that is, an average of 3.3 citations per article, despite the fact that this four-year period contained the most recent articles and, therefore, they did not receive all possible appointments.
Finally, the total number of journals where articles on this subject were published was 1166 throughout the time horizon. Thus, it increased from 2 o’clock in the first period examined to 381 o’clock in the last four years (2016–2019), which also represents 32.7% of the total number of journals for the entire period analyzed.
Figure 1 shows the evolution in the number of articles as well as the polynomial adjustment that can be made to the evolution in this series. In addition to the notable increase in the number of articles published in the last eight years, the perfect parabolic adjustment obtained stands out, which denotes a more than proportional growth in the number of articles in the entire series analyzed. It is an ever-increasing curve, in geometric progression, in which none of the sections analyzed showed a decline in the number of articles published, with respect to the immediately previous period.
4.2. Analysis of Scientific Production by Areas: Journals, Authors, and Countries
4.2.1. Distribution of Publications by Subject Area and Journal
During the time horizon analyzed of 1968–2019, there were various categories where works related to the relationship between poverty and the family economy have been found. According to the Scopus classification, there were a total of 27 subject areas in which the 2182 articles in this sample were classified. In this regard, we have to inform that an article may be classified in more than one subject area, depending on the author and publisher’s own interest.
Thus,
Figure 2 presents the evolution of the seven main thematic areas where Scopus links the articles on the research topic during the time horizon examined (1968–2019).
The Social Science category is the outstanding one during the entire period studied, with 39% of the articles published (1400) in this category. They are followed, in order of importance, by the categories Economics, Econometrics, and Finance (19%, 686), Environmental Science (8.5%, 304), Medicine (6%, 214), Agricultural and Biological Sciences (5.8%, 210), Business, Management, and Accounting (5.1%, 185), and Arts and Humanities (5.1%, 182). Thus, the seven most prominent categories represent 88.5% of the documents published from 1968 to 2019. Furthermore, the other subject areas did not exceed 2.5% of the total articles published.
The first three categories, Social Science, Economics, Econometrics and Finance and Environmental Science, were the only subject areas that had articles published in all four-year periods analyzed.
The association of the publications with the theme of this article led us to believe that the social and economic aspects were the most relevant in the analysis of poverty and the family economy, although the environmental, medical and field aspects cannot be lost sight of in rural areas.
Table 4 shows the characteristics of the articles from the main journals on the global research on poverty within the framework of the family economy. In the ranking of the 20 journals with the most published articles, the high percentage of journals (75%) that belonged to the first quartile (Q1) of the 2019 SJR index stands out. Furthermore, the greatest impact factor, SJR, was presented by the Journal of Development Economics with 3.585 (Q1), followed by Economic Development and Cultural Change with 3.483 (Q1).
World Development was the journal that had published the most articles in the time horizon considered (75, 3.4%), followed by the Journal of African Economies (44, 2.0%). The top 20 journals on this research topic published 18.50% (403) of the total articles. On the other hand, World Development is one of the most constant journals in the publication of articles related to the subject, since 1983. At the same time, together with the Journal of African Economies, it is the journal that has occupied the first position the most times in the ranking of magazines with the highest number of articles. In the last four-year period, 2016–2019, the three journals that had published the most on the subject were: World Development, International Journal of Social Economics, and Social Indicators Research.
On the other hand, if the interest of the scientific community in the works is the object of the subject analyzed, it is necessary to highlight the high number of citations per article of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change (66.86 citations per article), in accordance with the high impact index it presents (3.483 Q1). Next in importance, according to the average number of citations to their articles, are the Journal of Development Studies (61.78 citations per article) and World Development (47.87 citations per article).
It has been observed that, over the years, the research topic has been attracting more journals and authors, as shown by the growth in the number of articles and the variety of interested journals. Thus, by country, those of European origin stand out: the United Kingdom (13) and Netherlands (3), followed at a certain distance by American magazines (3).
Finally, it is important to note that none of the pioneering journals in the study of poverty and the family economy is in the top 20 that is presented in
Table 4. This is the case of the Annals of The American Academy of Political And Social Science and Canadian Journal of Agricultural Economics, which were the first to publish articles on this subject in the first four-year period (1968–1972).
4.2.2. Productivity of Authors
Table 5 presents the main variables of the articles written by the most prolific authors during the period 1968–2019. It is noteworthy that four authors in this ranking are of American origin and only three are of European origin (Netherlands, Germany, and the United Kingdom). This situation is in contrast with the relevance of the most important journals on this subject in which European authors do not present the largest number of published articles.
The most productive author on the research topic is Martin Ravallion, from the University of Malaysia, with nine published articles, followed by the American, Sadoulet (9) and the Dutch Lanjouw (8), from the University of California and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, respectively. In any case, Martin Ravallion, despite the fact that he was not the first to start writing about this subject, since his first article was from 1995, was the author with the highest number of articles, with the highest number of citations (311), and consequently, with a higher average number of citations per article (34.56). In addition, Ravallion also stands out with the highest h-index (9), followed by Sadoulet and Lanjouw, with a record of 8 each. In this ranking, none of these authors had published in 2019, the last year of the sample, so we could expect some changes in the top ten in the next years.
Figure 3 shows the map of collaboration between the main authors who have published on poverty in the family economy, based on the co-authorship analysis. In this figure, the colors represent the different clusters formed by the work communities in the production of articles, while the size of the circle varies according to the number of articles published by each author in the sample. The network showed a great dispersion in the association of authors by co-authorship during the period analyzed (1968–2019). Thus, it was observed that the limited scientific collaboration between authors also promoted the scope of the subject, since several of the most prolific authors did not collaborate assiduously with a stable network of authors. In
Figure 3, the red cluster was formed by Huanj, J. and Rozelle, S, which had the largest collaboration network. However, none of the first three authors in
Table 5 appeared to participate in an international collaboration network on poverty and family economy.
4.2.3. Main Institutions and Countries
Table 6 presents the ten most prolific research institutions in the publication of articles during the period of 1968–2019. In this ranking, it was observed that the institutions had a varied origin. Those of European origin represented 30% (University of Oxford, University of Sussex, Wageningen University & Research, and the University of Manchester), the United States also represented 30% (The World Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute, Cornell University, and University of California), and 20% South African (University of Cape Town and University of KwaZulu-Natal).
The World Bank is the most prolific institution with 83 articles as well as the one with the highest number of citations: 3580 and also has the highest h-index: 31. However, the highest average number of citations was obtained by works attached to the University of California, with 59.7 citations per article, followed by the World Bank, with 43.1 citations per article.
On the other hand, Wageningen University & Research was the institution with the highest percentage of international collaboration (77.78%). However, this international exposure does not translate into more citations than in the case of articles written without international co-authorship. Only at the World Bank and Wageningen University & Research has international co-authorship been profitable, since the articles published by these institutions have a much higher number of international citations of 53.11 and 57.67 citations per article, respectively.
Table 7 lists the main variables of the countries with the highest scientific production on poverty and the family economy. In view of the results, it was observed that United States was the country with the most publications (593) and with the highest h-index (65). In addition, it was the country with the highest number of citations: 12,659, that is, ten times more than the average of the top ten countries listed in
Table 7. This result is closely linked to the importance that the World Bank has in international scientific production and influences the number of publications that are assigned to the United States. The second country with the highest number of articles is the United Kingdom (304), although it holds the first position in terms of the average number of citations (25.70 citations per article).
The sample of countries that appeared in the top ten suggests the importance of Anglo-Saxon publications, since the most relevant countries in this subject of study are linked to the United States and countries that are part of the Commonwealth.
The United States has also led the ranking of the most productive countries since 1980. Only in the four-year period of 1976–1979 did the United Kingdom surpass the United States in the number of articles related to poverty and the family economy. In the last four years (2016–2019), China has come to occupy the fourth position, after India, with 34 articles, which represents 40% of its total production (85 articles). In the future, this inertia is sure to consolidate China and India at the top of this table. In contrast, the Netherlands, which was in fourth position in the four-year period of 2004–2007, was in 26th position in the last period.
In short, the United States, United Kingdom, India, China, and South Africa are the main driving countries for research topics related to poverty and the family economy. Specifically, these five countries grouped 51.6% of the total articles in the sample.
Table 8 shows the variables related to international collaboration between the different countries, ordered by scientific productivity in the period examined (1968–2019). The countries with the highest percentage of work carried out through international collaboration were the Netherlands with 60.94% (36 countries), followed by France (55.56%, 27 countries), Germany (54.02%, 36 countries), and China (52.94%, 16 countries). In this ranking, India was the country with the lowest percentage of international collaboration (32.52%, 14 countries).
On the other hand, it is noteworthy that, except for the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, in the other countries in
Table 8, the average number of citations of articles with international co-authorship was higher than those made without these collaborations.
Figure 4 shows a map of collaboration between the main countries based on the co-authorship analysis. The different colors represent the different clusters formed by the groups of countries, while the diameter of the circle varies depending on the number of articles published by each country. The VOSviewer software grouped them into seven components.
Cluster 1, in red, was the most numerous and included nine countries and was headed by the United Kingdom. South Africa and the Netherlands also belonged to this cluster, which also belonged to the top ten countries with the highest scientific production. The nine countries that made up this cluster group had 608 articles, that is, 27.9% of the total sample. Cluster 2, in green, was made up of eight countries led by Germany (87). The other countries with which it relates were: Canada (81), Sweden (31), Brazil (30), Norway (29), the Russian Federation (28), Denmark (22), and Finland (11). Together, these countries grouped 319 publications, that is, 14.6% of the total. Cluster 3, in blue, was led by Australia (91) and included countries such as Indonesia (27), Malaysia (27), Bangladesh (25), Philippines (25), and Thailand (16). Thus, cluster 3 managed to group nine (6%), of the total articles in the sample, that is, 211 articles. The following four clusters grouped 47% of the sample, so were less relevant.
4.3. Keyword Analysis
The sample of 2182 articles contained a total of 6866 keywords.
Table 9 shows the 25 most used keywords in this research. These terms express the object of study of the articles, so their analysis allowed us to obtain information on the interests that have been generated throughout this research line.
We found it predictable that among the most prominent keywords in the sample was poverty (860 documents, 39.4%), since it was one of the main search terms. However, it is striking that among the five most prominent keywords, we also found rural-economy (354 documents, 16.2%). This keyword appeared for the first time in the four-year period of 1992–1995, when it occupied position 183, with only two articles that related it to poverty and family economy. However, from 2000 on, it was placed in the second position, which justifies the scientific interest in focusing on the analysis of poverty in rural areas. In this sense, in the tenth position of the ranking in
Table 8, the terms rural-area (116 documents, 5.3%) and rural-development (71 documents, 3%) also appeared strongly (3%), and climbed to the sixth and twenty-fourth positions in the last four years of 2016–2019. The rise in the ranking of keywords related to rural areas is in contrast with the loss of relevance of the term agriculture (78 documents, 3.6%), which in the four-year period 1976–1979 occupied the fourth position and in the last four-year period, it moved to 20th place.
From a gender perspective, it is interesting the relevance that the concept of women acquires in scientific documents that deal with poverty in the context of household. Thus, the term woman/women (142 documents, 6.5%) was in seventh position. In the time horizon considered, this term has not ceased to acquire relevance, which justifies a vision from the gender perspective of family poverty.
The relationship among the different keywords in the sample can be seen in
Figure 5, which allowed us to glimpse the main research trends of the sample considered. This grouping was based on the co-occurrence method used by the VOSviewer application when analyzing the simultaneity of keywords in the articles in the sample. Thus, the color of the nodes was used to distinguish the different clusters according to the number of co-occurrences, while their size varied according to the number of repetitions. In this sense, the VOSviewer software tool has made it possible to detect three main lines of research developed by the different scientific communities. According to the term associated with a greater number of articles within each component, the cluster and research lined a linked batch around “
Poverty”, “
Economics and Developing countries”, and “
Woman and family”.
The first grouping of keywords was made around the red cluster, with 201 relevant terms that were dedicated to the study of poverty and its impact in various areas. This cluster grouped the largest number of keywords and articles. Among the most important keywords in this cluster were: poverty (860 documents), rural-economy (354), household-income (217), rural-area (116), and income-distribution (112). This topic remains dominant in 53.03% of the articles in the sample and it is logical since it includes all the search terms that gave rise to the sample of 2182 articles (
Table 2).
The second cluster (green) batched 90 keywords that made up a research line around the socioeconomic aspects of poverty and its impact on development. In this sense, the most used terms in this cluster were: economics (177 documents), developing-country (113), socioeconomic-factors (106), socioeconomics (103), and demography (78). The theme of the cluster was present in 23.74% of the articles in the sample.
Finally, the third cluster (blue) with 88 keywords (23.2% of the sample) was dedicated to the study of women and the family. The most recurrent term in the articles corresponding to this cluster was woman/women (142 documents), male (96), adult (86), household (58), and child (53). It should be noted that this third cluster was not the object of the search (
Table 2) and revealed an important fact: the role of women in the family environment in the scientific literature that studies poverty at home.
We present
Figure 6 in order to analyze the gender perspective in more detail in the scientific literature on poverty. It is an expansion of the blue cluster, dedicated to women and family, in which the co-occurrence of the term woman was observed. Women with other keywords from this same cluster as well as the relationship with other clusters. In this regard, although it was known that woman/women were the dominant keywords in this cluster, it was also the one with the highest number of relationships with other keywords. These co-occurrence relationships are very strong in the case of poverty, rural-area, and income (red cluster) as well as with economics, developing-countries, and employment (green cluster).
Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the relevance of women in the analysis of the scientific literature on poverty in the family sphere and, more specifically, in its effects on employment, the development of countries, and the socioeconomic aspects of poverty. These results are consistent with those references in our bibliographic review. Specifically, it is interesting to point out those investigations from a feminist perspective that refer to the role of women in rural contexts—peasant economies—as an element of not only biological reproduction. We refer to that complementary relationship between informal economies—unpaid, supply, maintenance, food—where the role of women would appear, and the context of the “formal” wage labor.
Finally, the analysis of keywords has not shown a trend in research dedicated solely to the family context, but is rather part of a higher theme, described in the blue cluster. In this sense, it is of interest to investigate these contexts, and expand current lines of research that review the role of women in rural and poverty settings. From this line of research, it would be interesting to look at the economic and reproductive strategies that could be activated, so that the role of women in these areas is understood more broadly.
5. Conclusions
The objective of this study was to analyze the scientific production of the relationship between family economy and poverty through a bibliometric analysis of 2182 articles obtained from the Scopus database. The findings made it possible to identify the main drivers, potential tendencies, and certain gaps in critical knowledge.
The number of articles related to this topic published annually during the period 1968–2019 has been increasing. Since 1980, the rate of publication has increased. While in the first period (1968–1971), only two articles were published on this topic; in the last four-year period analyzed (2016–2019) the number rose to 539, that is, practically 270 times more. The increase in the number of publications is especially accentuated in the last four years, where 24.7% of the total articles published in the analyzed period were published, with 539 articles. In this same sense, during the last eight years (2012–2019), 45% of the articles (978) were published
The Social Science category is the outstanding one during the entire period studied, with 39% of the articles published (1400) in this category. This was followed, in order of importance, by the categories Economics, Econometrics and Finance (19%, 686), Environmental Science (8.5%, 304), Medicine (6%, 214), Agricultural and Biological Sciences (5.8%, 210), Business, Management and Accounting (5.1%, 185), and Arts and Humanities (5.1%, 182). Thus, the seven most prominent categories represented 88.5% of the documents published from 1968 to 2019. Furthermore, the rest of the subject areas did not exceed 2.5% of the total articles published.
In the ranking of the 20 journals with the most published articles, the high percentage of journals (75%) that belonged to the first quartile (Q1) of the 2019 SJR index stands out. Furthermore, the greatest impact factor, SJR, is presented by the Journal of Development Economics with 3585 (Q1), followed by Economic Development and Cultural Change with 3483 (Q1).
World Development was the journal that had published the most articles in the time horizon considered (75, 3.4%), followed by the Journal of African Economies (44, 2.0%). The top 20 journals on this research topic published 18.50% (403) of the total articles.
The most productive author on the research topic was Martin Ravallion from the University of Malaysia with nine published articles, followed by the American Sadoulet (9) and the Dutch Lanjouw (8) from the University of California and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, respectively. In any case, Martin Ravallion, despite the fact that he was not the first to start writing about this subject as his first article was from 1995, was the author with the highest number of articles, with the highest number of citations (311), and consequently, with a higher average number of citations per article (34.56). In addition, Ravallion also stood out with the highest h-index (9), followed by Sadoulet and Lanjouw, with a record of eight each.
The World Bank was the most prolific institution, with 83 articles as well as the one with the highest number of citations: 3580 and also had the highest h-index: 31. However, the highest average number of citations was obtained by works attached to the University of California with 59.7 citations per article. This was followed by the World Bank, with 43.1 citations per article. On the other hand, Wageningen University & Research was the institution with the highest percentage of international collaboration (77.78%).
For its part, the United States was the country with the most publications (593) and with the highest h-index (65). In addition, it was the country with the highest number of citations (12,659). The second country with the highest number of articles was the United Kingdom (304), although it held the first position in terms of the average number of citations (25.70 citations per article). The United States also led the ranking of the most productive countries since 1980. Only in the quadrennium of 1976–1979 did the United Kingdom surpass the United States in the number of articles related to poverty and the family economy. In the last four years (2016–2019), China has come to occupy the fourth position, after India, with 34 articles, which represents 40% of its total production (85 articles). In the future, this inertia is sure to consolidate China and India at the top of this table. In contrast, the Netherlands, which was in fourth position in the four-year period of 2004–2007, was in 26th position in the last period.
In short, the United States, United Kingdom, India, China, and South Africa are the main driving countries for research topics related to poverty and the family economy. Specifically, these five countries grouped 51.6% of the total articles in the sample.
We found it predictable that among the most prominent keywords in the sample was poverty (860 documents, 39.4%), since it has been one of the main search terms. However, it is striking that among the five most prominent keywords, we also found rural-economy (354 documents, 16.2%). The rise in the ranking of keywords related to rural areas is in contrast to the loss of relevance of the term agriculture (78 documents, 3.6%), which in the four-year period of 1976–1979 occupied the fourth position and in the last four-year period, it moved to 20th place.
From a gender perspective, it is interesting the relevance that the concept of women acquires in scientific documents that deal with poverty in the context of household. Thus, the term woman/women (142 documents, 6.5%) was in seventh position. In the time horizon considered, this term has not ceased to acquire relevance, which justifies a vision from the gender perspective of family poverty.
From the analysis of our bibliometric review, we understand that future research lines should focus on (i) family economies in contemporary societies; (ii) the specific role of women in the family economy; (iii) comparative studies on the role of women in contexts of poverty and in developed countries; (iv) the participation of women in informal economies in contexts of poverty; and (v) female participation in contexts that break with the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
Among the lines of research to be developed, it would mainly be interesting to study (i) the participation of women in informal economies in contexts of poverty; (ii) female participation in contexts that break with the intergenerational transmission of poverty; and (iii) gender roles, intergenerational patterns and informal economy in the context of poverty.