Invisible Deprivation and the Feminist Case for Joint Distributional Poverty Measures

Poverty measurement is often reduced to univariate thresholds or scalar indices linked to means. These one-dimensional types of thresholds may distort differences that are relevant to feminist economic inquiry, particularly for marginalized groups or where resource constraints reinforce one another. This article argues that the reduction of distortion is a central aim of feminist research methodology, and that joint distributional approaches offer a possible way forward. Unlike univariate poverty thresholds, joint distributional approaches ask which combinations of resources represent relative deprivation. We apply these techniques to the study of income and time poverty. Income and time are only partial substitutes, which conventional measures handle by imposing a fixed rate of substitution between time and money. Following Dorn et al. (2024), we instead define poverty as a contour of the joint empirical distribution of leisure and income, using the 2019 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Roughly one in ten people is deprived in the joint allocation of both leisure and income while exceeding the lower bound of both univariate thresholds, a group we call the Invisibly Deprived. Women make up a disproportionate share of this group, with classification highly sensitive to assumptions about intra-household income sharing.