Against the backdrop of sex-disaggregated indicators on individual land ownership and rights that have been endorsed as part of the monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs),<sup>3</sup> it is common for the required microdata to be provided by the most knowledgeable household member(s) interviewed by household and farm surveys - often a single respondent in each household (Doss et al., 2019; Doss et al., 2008; Deere et al., 2012; Ruel and Hauser, 2013). Under these circumstances, the surveys may not ask the most knowledgeable household member(s) to identify the individual owners and rights holders of each asset. As a result, (confounded) conclusions regarding the gender asset gap would be (and have been) anchored in the comparison of male- versus female-headed households.<sup>4</sup> And in the event that surveys do ask the most knowledgeable household member(s) to uniquely identify the reported, documented and/or economic owners for each asset of interest,<sup>5</sup> this information is seldom paired with the identification of individuals holding various rights to these assets. This in turn limits our understanding of the inter-relationships among ownership and rights indicators, and whether these relationships vary across individuals.

Recently, the international momentum behind improving the availability and quality of individualdisaggregated survey data on asset ownership and control has accelerated, in part thanks to the United Nations Evidence and Data for Gender Equality (EDGE) initiative. Over the period of 2014-16, the UN EDGE initiative supported the implementation and analysis of the Methodological Experiment on Measuring Asset Ownership from a Gender Perspective (MEXA) in Uganda (see Box 1; Kilic and Moylan, 2016), which in turn informed the design of the EDGEsupported country pilots that were implemented by the national statistical offices across Georgia, Maldives, Mexico, Mongolia, the Philippines and South Africa. These activities ultimately

> 3 <mark>These include the SDG 1.4.2 indicator, namely the proportion of total adult population with secure tenure rights to land, with legally recognized documentation and who perceive their rights to land as secure, by sex and by type of tenure, and the SDG 5.a.1 indicators, namely (a) the proportion of total agricultural population with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land, by sex; and (b) the share of women among owners or rights-bearers of agricultural land, by type of tenure.</mark>

> 4 These households have very different socioeconomic and demographic compositions, with women also being more likely to be living in male-headed households than men living in female-headed counterparts (Deere and Doss, 2006; Beegle and van de Walle, 2019). In the context of a household survey that solicits information on “headship”, this information is gathered when a sampled household is first approached for an interview, and often through the question: “Who is the head of this household?” The simplicity of the question is, however, deceiving. First, headship definitions vary across countries. The head of household could be equated to the eldest member of the household, the primary breadwinner and/or the primary decision maker. Second, headship definitions typically refer to the head of household as the individual whose “authority” is recognized by the household members, but this definition overlooks the potential intra-household variation in authority in different realms of decision making. Relatedly, headship has rarely been extended to capture “dual-headed” households. Finally, there may be a disconnect between the headship definition and the interpretation of the survey question, with the latter exhibiting idiosyncrasy potentially at the household-level. 5 Following the 2008 System of National Accounts, the reported owner of assets is the legal owner, and the economic owner is entitled to claim the benefits associated with the use of the asset in economic activity, by virtue of accepting the associated risks with that activity (UN, 2017). For agricultural land, an individual is identified as a documented owner if they are reported to be listed on an offer of lease, title deed, or certificate of lease for at least one agricultural parcel.  As discussed further in the paper, these types of ownership typically overlap.

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