women may be less a reflection of reality and more a result of the fact that poverty is measured at the household level and by assumption all household members are classified as either in or out of poverty, and, the ratio, when considering all ages, of males to females is roughly 50/50 in both poor and non‐poor households.<sup>7</sup> In an attempt to get around this fundamental limitation, various researchers have developed alternative methods. The most common is to classify households according to headship and compare poverty across female‐ and male‐headed households. However, several studies have contested the use of headship as a relevant analytical category for a number or reasons. First, countries use different and often non‐comparable definitions of the terms “household” and “head of household”. Second, there is ambiguity in the term “head of household” when the assignment of headship is left to the judgement of household members (or the survey enumerator). Third, the term “head of household” is not neutral; it is loaded with additional meanings that do not reflect internal conflicts in the allocation of resources (Buvinic and Gupta, 1997; Quisumbing et al., 2001; Budlender, 2008). In addition, the link between female headship and poverty may not be straightforward partly because female‐headed households are a highly heterogeneous group and may well reflect self‐selection, demographic processes, or others<sup>8</sup> . Aside from socio‐economic status, female (and male)‐headed households show significant variation in terms of age, relative dependence, household composition, lifecycle, and access to resources beyond the household unit, among others, making such classification not very useful.

The fact that differences in poverty rates between female‐ and male‐headed households cannot necessarily be ascribed to gendered differences in earnings, access to employment or control over resources, has led authors to explore alternative classifications of headship. Rogan (2013) explores four alternative classifications of households based on the absence of male householders or the dependence on female income in post‐apartheid South Africa. The findings of this study suggest that there is an association between self‐reported female headship and a female household member being identified as the main breadwinner. However, under a different classification of household head (e.g. who is the main responsible individual for the household that can be identified in the data), then the finding that female‐ headed households are increasingly more vulnerable to poverty (relative to male‐headed households), is even stronger. A recent report also reveals that working‐age women are more likely than men to be poor when they have dependent children and no partner to contribute to the household income. At older ages, women in developed countries are more likely than men to be poor, particularly when living in one‐person households (United Nations, 2015).

In addition to looking at headship, there are several other approaches to circumventing the limitations of the household poverty measure. There are some innovative attempts to extract individual‐ level welfare information from household surveys. Such studies attempt to draw inferences about intra‐ household resource allocation by, for example, estimating the fraction of household expenditure that is consumed by each family member.<sup>9</sup> Dunbar et al (2013) estimate individual resource shares for adults and children in Malawi by observing how expenditures on a single private good that can be ascribed to individual household members vary with income and household size. Their results indicate that the incidence of poverty is significantly higher for women (85 percent) than men (60 percent) and even higher for children (95 percent). Using a unique survey for Senegal that collected consumption data for sub‐groups of household members (“cells”) in non‐nuclear households, Lambert et al. (2014) and De Very and Lambert

> 7 Castañeda et al. (2016)

> 8 There are multiple explanations for why women head households and these differences can lead to different outcomes that are not necessarily negative for women’s well‐being (Chant, 2003, 2008). 9 Dunbar et al. 2013; Bargain et al. 2014.

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