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Abstract
This paper presents new evidence on the proportion of women in poverty in ten
developing countries. It compares poverty measures for males and females and male- and
female-headed households, and investigates the sensitivity 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 significant in only a fifth to a third of the datasets. Due to their low
population share, the contribution of female-headed households to aggregate poverty is
less than that of females. Stochastic dominance analysis reveals that differences between
male- and female-headed households, and between males and females, are often
insignificant, except for Ghana and Bangladesh, where females are consistently worse
off. These results suggest that cultural and institutional factors may be responsible for
higher poverty 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.