vehicles (cars, bicycles, trucks), real estate, and culturally specific valued items such as jewelry or cloth.

Land, housing, business enterprises, and financial assets can be used to generate income and wealth. Some consumer durables can also be used to generate income, especially for women, which is why it is important to collect information on them as well. A refrigerator, for instance, may be used to chill water for sale and cooking pots may be used to make food items for sale. Financial assets, investments in real estate and, in certain circumstances, jewelry or cloth are important stores of value and can be converted into cash in times of emergency or crisis. The type of productive assets that men and women own varies both across time and across countries, depending on gendered social norms and the legal framework (discussed below).

Very few studies collect information on the full set of physical and financial assets. The few that collect data on assets at the individual level usually focus on a limited number of assets, rather than the full range of material and financial assets listed above. Few studies examine whether assets are owned individually or jointly, how assets were acquired, what is their current value, and the rights that individuals have over each type of asset. Yet, all of this information is important for policies to reduce poverty, provide social safety nets, and improve individual wellbeing. The available information on the magnitude of the gender asset gap for each type of asset is summarized below.

_Housing_ . Although a house may be the most important asset in urban and peri-urban areas, little work has been done on the gendered patterns of home ownership within and across countries<sup>3</sup> . Rarely do surveys ask which household member(s) own the dwelling and/or who has title to the house.<sup>4</sup> Analysis of LSMS surveys for Nicaragua, Panama and Paraguay that do ask these questions indicate that rates of homeownership are quite high nationally, with slightly over threequarter’s of households owning their own homes. In Nicaragua in 2001, 47.1 percent of the homeowners were women and 52.9 percent were men (Authors’ calculations, ENMV Nicaragua 2001). The questionnaires for Panama and Paraguay asked the ownership question only of those households that had a formal document (57.6 percent and 51.5 percent of the total homeowners, respectively). Of those who were titled homeowners, in Panama 50.2 percent were women and 49.8 percent were men. In contrast, in Paraguay, only 35.2 of the titled homeowners were women while 64.8 percent were men (Authors’ calculations, ENV, Panama 2003; MECOVI, Paraguay 2000-01). In all three countries women constituted a larger share of homeowners in urban as opposed to rural areas. These Latin American data suggest the wide regional disparity that may exist in the gender asset gap. Unfortunately, none of these data sets allow the gender asset gap to be measured in terms of differences in the value of the homes owned by men and women (e.g., the gender wealth gap).

A 2004 survey by ICRW in two Indian states found that of 402 women surveyed in Kerala, about 36 percent owned immovable property; of these, 16 percent owned a house only, 5 percent owned land only, and 15 percent owned both house and land; in West Bengal, of 450 women surveyed, 35 percent owned property and, of these, nearly 47 percent owned a house only, 36 percent owned land only, and 9 percent owned both. Among the 450 women surveyed from three sites in Sri Lanka, 30 percent reporting owning some form of property; of these, nearly 54 percent owned a house only, 32 percent owned land only, and 13 percent owned both. In all of 6