Volume 1, Number 3
October 1995
New Findings on Gender and Poverty
A new paper on gender and poverty by Agnes Quisumbing, Lawrence Haddad, and Christine Pe¤a (IFPRI) presents new evidence on the association between gender and poverty, based on an empirical analysis of 14 data sets from 13 developing countries (eight from Sub-Saharan Africa, five from Asia, and one from Latin America). The paper computes income- and expenditure-based poverty measures and investigates their sensitivity to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units. Similar to previous studies on gender and poverty, this study shows weak evidence that women are overrepresented in poor households. While individuals in female-headed households are worse off in terms of a number of poverty measures, these differences are statistically significant in about one-third to one-half of the data sets, depending on the poverty measure used.
Stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between male- and female-headed households among the very poor are not sufficiently large that one can conclude that one is unambiguously worse or better off, except for a few exceptions. These exceptions occur in countries with social and cultural institutions that are heavily biased against women.
These results, however, should not be taken to argue that policy interventions should not be targeted by gender. Even if there are no strong poverty differences between men and women, in many countries, women have lower levels of education, assets, and social indicators than do men. It is therefore quite remarkable that poverty differences are not large, despite the massive discrimination against women in terms of access to and control of resources. Women may not be that much poorer, but may have to work that much harder to achieve the same level of income as men.
