Are women overrepresented among the poor? An analysis of poverty in 10 developing countries

This paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in 1 0 developing countries. It compares poverty measures for males and females, and for male and female-headed households, and investigates the sensitivit y of these measures to the use of per capita and per adult equivalent units and different definitions of the poverty line. While poverty measures are higher for female-headed households and for females, the differences are si gnificant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets. The contribution of f emale-headed households to aggregate poverty is less than that of females, due to the low population share of the former. Stochastic dominance analysi s reveals that differences between male- and female-headed households, and between males and females, are often insignificant, except for Ghana and Ba ngladesh, where females are consistently worse-off. These results suggest t hat cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for higher povert y among women in these countries. Our results point to the need to analyze determinants of household income and consumption using multivariate methods , and to give greater attention to the processes underlying female headship . (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.