10 significant, raising the question of whether the independent variable of interest, female/male dummy, may be correlated with it. To examine this question, another probit was tested with the urban/rural dummy as the dependent variable and the logarithms of per capita expenditure and household size and the female/male dummy as explanatory variables. With the exception of Angola, the female/male dummy was always statistically significant. Therefore, the sample was split into urban and rural in every country, and regressions were run separately, eliminating the urban/rural dummy as an explanatory variable.<sup>7</sup> In every case where the coefficient for female/male dummy was statistically significant, the probability of increasing the dependent variable by switching from male‐ to female‐headed households was computed. For that purpose, the values of the remaining two variables assumed the weighted averages in urban and rural areas, respectively. For ordinary least squares, which drops all households with zero expenditure on electricity and regresses the logarithm of spending on electricity on the three explanatory variables, the percent increase in spending on electricity (not logarithm) was computed, again setting the values of the two remaining variables at average values of the households in the sample.

For cross‐regional comparison of household access to electricity, presented first, access rates in 1990 and 2012 in different regions from the 2015 Global Tracking Framework report (World Bank and IEA 2015) were compared as a function of two measures of the poverty gap ($3.10 and $1.90 per day per person at purchasing power parity in 2011 international dollars) and of logarithms of per capita GDP (at the market exchange rate in 2005 U.S. dollars and at purchasing power parity in 2011 international dollars). 2012 was selected because it is the last year for which access rates are available in the Global Tracking Framework report, three other years being 1990, 2000, and 2010. 1990 was selected as an alternative because the poverty gap in South Asia, the region with the second lowest rate of access to electricity, was close to that in Africa in 2012. Unlike GDP, the availability of the poverty gap data is sporadic, reducing the sample size by more than half. For access in 2012, corresponding poverty gap data were taken from 2012 whenever they were available, and otherwise from 2011 or 2013, and if the data were not available from any of these years, they were taken from 2010 (the poverty gap in 2014 was not available for any country). For 1990, in order to capture India, which had the poverty gap data in 1987 and 1993 but no other year in between, the range of years was extended to 1987–1992. For regression equations, in addition to access, per capita GDP, and the poverty gap, 1/0 regional dummies for Africa, South Asia, East Asia and Pacific, Latin American and the Caribbean, and “other” for the countries in the remaining regions were also used.

The next section entitled “Cross‐Regional Perspective” is the only one that does not use data from recent household surveys in the 22 countries covered in the rest of the paper. It is also the only section that defines the poverty gap according to the poverty lines of $3.10 and $1.90 per person per day. Elsewhere, the poverty gap refers to the grid‐electricity poverty gap defined in the equation above. To distinguish different measures of the poverty gap, “poverty gap” is followed by threshold values: $3.10, $1.90, 30 kWh, 50 kWh, 100 kWh, and 250 kWh.

> 7 For the probit for the dependent variable that excludes generators and solar, ideally the sample should be restricted to those who could potentially have connected to the grid. Only Malawi and Nigeria asked that question of each household and the main reason for choosing not to connect. One approach is to assume that if there was at least one household citing electricity use in a sampling unit, the entire sampling unit was electrified. In the context of Africa, such an assumption may be too sweeping, and was not examined in this study.