percent in country B). A related consideration is whether to report absolute or relative gaps. Relative gaps are measured as the percent ( _not_ percentage _points_ ) difference in the incidence of property ownership between men and women. In the example above, relative gender gaps are larger in country A, where men are twice as likely to own property than women, compared with country B, where male ownership is just 14 percent higher than female ownership. While relative gender gaps have the advantage of normalizing for differences in the incidence of female (or alternatively, male) ownership (the denominator), they can be imprecisely estimated in cases where female ownership is low and are – as the percent difference of an indicator itself reported in percent – less intuitive. For these reasons, we focus on absolute gender gaps, but present complementary statistics on levels of male and female property ownership in Table A2 (appendix). Besides the DHS data, this paper draws on the following country-level databases:

- (1) The _Women Business and the Law_ (WBL) program provides data on laws and regulations constraining women’s property ownership and economic opportunities (World Bank 2015). This paper draws on the 2012 and 2016 versions of the WBL data.

- (2) The _2015 Revision of World Population Projections_ , with country-level data on male and female population by age group (for 2012), is used to derive population-weighted averages across African countries (UN DESA 2015).<sup>17</sup>

- (3) The _World Development Indicators_ (WDI) provide additional country-level variables, e.g. on GDP per capita, labor force participation rates, etc. (World Bank 2016).

# **3.2 Africa-wide estimates**

The analysis of DHS data reveals the extent of gender inequality in property ownership. Only 13 percent of women aged 20-49 years report sole ownership of land, compared with 36 percent of men (Figure 5). The gender gap declines if joint ownership is added to the equation, which is more commonly reported by women than men, but remains significant. 38 percent of African women report owning any land (sole or jointly), compared with 51 percent of African men. The gender gap is similar for housing, with 13 percent of women claiming sole ownership compared with 39 percent of men. This gap, too, shrinks if joint ownership is included (43 percent of women vs. 55 percent of men).

**Figure 5: Fewer African women than men own land or housing**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Land Housing<br>60% 60%<br>16%<br>40% 15% 40%<br>25% 30%<br>20% 36% 20% 39%<br>13% 13%<br>0% 0%<br>females males females males<br>sole joint sole joint<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Note:_ Data for 27 (land) / 28 (housing) countries from 2010-16. Population aged 20-49 years. _Source:_ DHS.

Extrapolating these estimates to the region at large (Table 1) shows that this gender gap translate into 38 (44) million fewer women than men claiming sole ownership of land (housing) property (in the age

> 17 DHS weights sum to the survey sample size (and not to the country’s population). Combining DHSs from multiple countries requires the use of external population projections (here, country-level estimates from UN DESA 2015).

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