About 40 per cent of ethnic minority women are living in poverty, twice the proportion of white women.

According to a new report by the Fawcett Society and Oxfam titled 'Poverty pathways - ethnic minority women's livelihoods', poverty extends to more than a third of black women and almost two thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women.

Ethnic minority women are amongst the poorest and most socially excluded people in the UK. Yet very little is known about their lives, or how to lift them out of poverty.

Mainstream approaches simply do not see these women or their needs says the report.

This report, published as part of Seeing Double, Fawcett's flagship campaign on ethnic minority women, shows how the recession is on course to present two major risks if current policy approaches do not adapt:

The report outlines seven key policy traps and the steps needed to get things right. It looks at household dynamics, moving beyond paid employment as a panacea for poverty, and how women's lives change over their lifetimes.

It shows how ethnic minority women need to be brought back into the policy picture if their poverty is to ever be addressed.

In the foreword of the report, chief executive of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Julia Unwin said: "It is remarkable how badly policy deals with complexity. The poverty experienced by women and by people from ethnic minorities is usually considered in isolation, with crucial interactions ignored."

"This report is important because it examines the unique experiences of women from ethnic minorities, who are one of the most marginalised groups in British society. The context for this report is the establishment of a single equalities commission and the new Equalities Bill.

"Whilst social policy and research about race and gender are relatively well-established, these recent developments highlight the next human rights challenge of tackling multiple discrimination and investigating intersections of diversity and their implications.

"It is vital that we move beyond simple generalisations using parallel lines of gender and ethnicity when differences in experiences of poverty among women and between ethnic groups can be vast, as our own research has shown."

In February 2005, Fawcett published the seminal report Black & Minority Ethnic Women in the UK.

The report showed that the corridors of power are still closed to ethnic minority women - and their exclusion shows at every level of society.

Some of the facts found were: