The zombie statistic about women’s share of income and property

Article here. Excerpt:

'“Women provide 66% of the work, produce 50% of the food, but earn only 10% of the income and own 1% of the property. We can change this.”
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The Fact Checker encourages readers to submit fact checks via Twitter using #FactCheckThis, and this widely circulated Oxfam tweet ended up in our mailbox. It certainly offers a striking set of statistics.

But as is often the case, the statistics are too good to be true. Oddly, these statistics have circulated for decades, persistently, despite the efforts of researchers to debunk them as ridiculously inaccurate. One reason is because the statistics have been promoted by supposedly reputable organizations, such as Oxfam and UNDP. But people also often want to believe facts that appear to confirm their own biases.

With International Women’s Day on the horizon, let’s try to unravel this once and for all.
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Yet, Doss noted, “when I presented the paper on how much of the world’s food do women produce at FAO [Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations] — they were quite upset with me.  They kept saying that they needed this statistic!”
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It’s good that for the first time Oxfam and UNDP have acknowledged that they have peddled false information. But they need to take a proactive role in setting the record straight. Any papers or Web sites that had previously used these figures need to be prominently corrected. It’s not enough to simply kill a link. The message should be clear: This is a bogus, Four-Pinocchio statistic unworthy of citation.'