 This de-valuation and invisibility has contributed directly to the feminization of poverty, which is now a problem of global proportions. Global poverty is getting worse, and increasingly women bear the brunt of it. Two billion people (about one out of three) live in extreme poverty on less than two dollars a day. About 800 million go to bed hungry every night, and eight million die from poverty related causes each year. More than seventy per cent of them (nearly three fourths) are female. So serious are the effects of extreme poverty on women (and girls) that the World Health Organization has named it a disease (“extreme poverty,” coded Z59.5) and called it “the world’s most ruthless killer” (Jain 2005, p. 138).