community and lineage, are generally perceived as the owners or care-takers of land and are accorded a wider of span of authority over the asset. Women’s customary land rights, meanwhile, are generally limited to use rights – with restrictions on transfer, long-term investments, etc. – and are determined by their relationship with a male spouse or relation in the kin group or community.<sup>25</sup> In addition, the patrilocal residence patterns of most rural households, whereby women typically migrate to their husband’s community for marriage, further undermines their recognition as a member of the community or their husband’s lineage (Joireman 2008).

Gender differences in property rights under customary settings also arise _within_ households. In Ghana, women have less political power within local hierarchies and thus face a greater risk of land expropriation, leading them to fallow their land for shorter periods than men (Goldstein and Udry 2008). These women’s lower levels of tenure security and investment have costly consequences, leading wives to achieve substantially lower farm yields than their husbands.

Customary norms also shape and constrain women’s access to and use of non-land assets. For example, norms around wives sharing income and other resources with their husbands may inhibit women’s savings activity (Anderson and Baland 2002; Schaner 2015c). And social norms to share resources with other family members may also dampen women’s asset accumulation. Jakiela and Ozier (2015) conducted a field lab experiment which offers insights on the social pressures that lead women to sacrifice economic returns. Women who received larger endowments through the experiment were more likely to forego investment earnings and hide their income when their relatives were in attendance. Meanwhile, men did not hide their income in the presence of their kin network.

Norms over livestock ownership may limit women’s access to and control of this productive resource as well. In Ethiopia, rural smallholders rely heavily on draught animals for agricultural production. Yet cultural norms discourage women from using oxen (Holden, Deininger, and Ghebru 2011). Nationally-representative data from Ethiopia show that female plot managers use significantly fewer oxen per hectare on their plots than male managers (Aguilar et al. 2014). These livestock differences can translate into differences in productivity for women and men (Pender and Gebremedhin 2008).<sup>26</sup> Furthermore, women’s tenuous customary rights over land and other assets can evaporate in the event of the death of a spouse. In an analysis of 15 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa, Peterman (2012) finds that widows on average inherit no assets – including land – in more than half of these countries. Women in customary contexts also face threats to dispossession through divorce. In Ethiopia, for example, Fafchamps and Quisumbing (2002) find that more than half of men anticipate claiming all of the household land assets in the event of a no-fault divorce. Even after maintaining control over land, these women still face threats to expropriation. Households headed by widowed and separated women in Uganda, for example, were more likely than male-headed households to experience land conflict on their plots (Deininger and Castagnini 2006).

> 25 Men hold a wide set of rights over customary lands via their membership in corporate groups, but these rights do not generally include the right to transfer the land without authorization from the group itself (Lastarria-Cornhiel et al. 2014). Platteau (2000) argues that norms opposing women's ownership rights over land stem from fears of land being sold to families outside of a man's lineage.

> 26 The productive potential of livestock holdings is non-trivial. Across the six countries included in the World Bank's LSMS Integrated Surveys on Agriculture program, approximately 32% of households had animals suitable for traction, as compared to 1% of households who own a tractor (Sheahan and Barrett 2014).

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