been instrumental in pointing out and quantifying the impact of excluding women from formal economic activity.<sup>7</sup> Much of this work has been supported by extensive gender-specific data collection efforts that have pointed out strong correlations, for example, between lack of home ownership and gender inequality as well as major divergence in land ownership patterns, often due to titling issues, that impede access to credit and greater agricultural productivity.<sup>8</sup> Evidence from Vietnam and Honduras has shown major gains from empowering women financially through the issuance of land titles (Namubiru-Mwaura 2014). More recently, World Bank (2018) estimates individual poverty rates in households of different types and shows that in some Sub-Saharan African countries (e.g. Malawi), the estimated consumption allocation within the household is unequal and the gender poverty gap surpasses more than 20 percentage points in some cases. Klasen and Lahoti (2016) estimate the gender gap in education and conclude that this gap is much larger using individual rather than household measures in a diverse set of countries, including Iraq, Tanzania, Mexico, Indonesia, and Ecuador. Finally, Munoz Boudet et al. (2018) show that the gender gap in poverty varies along the life cycle and they find that women are more likely to experience poverty than men during their youth and reproductive years. This micro-level research has been complemented by a major effort on data collection that enables capturing the size and persistence of national gender gaps in labor markets, education attainments, and entrepreneurship, and highlights measurement issues more generally (World Economic Forum 2017). We will return to the usefulness of gender gaps analysis for our purposes later; however, there is no doubt that collection and dissemination of comparable data serves a hugely important need.

Another strand of thinking that is highly relevant for our approach seeks to prioritize among many development challenges those that matter most to growth as proposed by Hausman, Rodrik and Velasco (HRV) (2005). In the same way that the HRV diagnostics attempts to identify those constraints that matter most as explanations for impeded economic growth, we extend the method to consider the interplay between the constraints to growth and the distortions associated with the gender gaps. This approach allows us to discern the gender disparities constraining women’s economic position that are most likely to limit the gains from policies aimed at relaxing the most binding constraints to economic growth. In a way, our approach is related to the agency deprivations approach, pioneered by the World Bank, which recognizes both the multiplicity of deprivations and their inter-connections, but also the need to find entry points to deal with the inequality of endowments and the inequality of opportunity.<sup>9</sup> Our paper is also related to the large literature on inequality and fairness (Stiglitz, 2012; Piketty and Saez 2003; and Piketty 2017). Issues

> 7 See the World Bank’s Gender Equality and Development Report (2012), Milazzo and Goldstein (2011) as well as Campos and Gassier (2017), O’Sullivan (2017), and Chakravarty, Das, and Vaillant (2017), among many.

> 8 World Bank studies show ownership differences of 10-30%, for example, in countries as diverse as Nepal, Burkina-Faso, Honduras, Senegal, Côte D’Ivoire and Indonesia, World Bank (2014), p. 136.

> 9 World Bank (2014) suggests entry points of education, laws and institutions, social norms, and jobs and social protection as being fundamental drivers of change.

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