specific residential unit), they do not allow ‘reconciling’ intra-household discrepancies in perceptions about ownership (see Doss et al 2020 for a discussion).

This paper reports on two different concepts of reported ownership, depending on whether a respondent owns property alone or jointly with someone else, typically (but not always) his/her – spouse. The DHS questions on individual property ownership provide four response categories (1) “alone only”, (2) “jointly only”, (3) “both alone and jointly”, and (4) “does not own”. In the analysis, the category ‘sole ownership’ combines options (1) and (3), while the category ‘sole and joint’ combines options (1), (2) and (3). Joint ownership of property is a common occurrence in many of the countries included in this study, and gender gaps are generally smaller than in sole ownership. There are reasons to expect that joint ownership rights may be weaker than individual ownership rights. Joint property ownership does not necessarily mean that men and women have equal rights; women may be disadvantaged in decision-making when their interests do not align with those of their husbands (Agarwal 2003; Doss et al 2014; Jacobs and Kes 2015). On the other hand, joint ownership may be preferable in contexts where women face high social cost in obtaining sole ownership rights (Jackson 2003). There is also no clear policy path for advancing sole property ownership for married men and women, given that housing property is typically nonpartible, while land property is partible only to a certain degree due to concerns around land fragmentation. Given these considerations, the main indicator used in this paper is the sole and joint ownership combined. However, sole ownership is often reported separately, where this is thought to provide further insights. In the interest of parsimony, land and housing ownership is in some analyses combined into a single indicator of property ownership, which equals unity if a woman or man owns land and/or housing, and zero otherwise.

Our analysis is based on the DHS’s ‘couple sample’, that is men and women who were both interviewed, lived in the same household and named each other as a spouse. This excludes households where a married couple was not interviewed because there was no married couple in the household or for other reasons. It also excludes unmarried individuals living in households with a principal couple included in the analysis. Comparing husbands and wives allows us to focus on the intra-household property allocation, whilst abstracting from gender differences in marital status and other demographic factors.

The descriptive analysis focuses on the absolute gender gap, that is the percentage point difference between the share of men and women who report owning property. The drawback here is that absolute gaps do not provide information on the incidence of male and female property ownership, that is how high or low ownership rates may be. However, more detailed statistics on land and housing ownership at the country-level are reported in Table A3 (Appendix).<sup>8</sup>

> 8 For example, two countries with the same absolute gender gap in property ownership (say 10 percentage points) may have different shares of men and women owning property (say 20 and 10 percent in country A vs. 70 and 80 percent in country B). The alternative would be to report relative gender gaps, which are measured as the percent difference in the incidence of property ownership between men and women. Thus, 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. However, relative gender gaps can be imprecisely estimated in cases where female ownership is low and are – as the percent difference of an indicator itself reported in percent – somewhat less intuitive.

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