how other indicators of welfare can provide important insights into the way men and women experience poverty.

_How women and men experience poverty has multiple dimensions_ Understanding how different individuals experience poverty is crucial for the design of policies to reduce poverty. Gender differences are among the most important. Gender inequalities make women and girls more vulnerable than men and boys to poverty (World Bank, 2011) and they affect how men and women react to changes in poverty status. Differences in gender norms, intra‐household division of assets, work and responsibility and relations of power drive these disparities (Grown, 2014). In many countries, females have lower levels of education, lower ownership and control over assets, and lower social indicators than men. Bargaining power is affected by control of resources (e.g. assets and income), legal rights, skills and knowledge, the capacity to acquire information, education, etc. Social norms also set the context of intra‐household negotiation over time allocations, resources, and access to labor markets (Quisumbing, 2010). Social policies that facilitate universal access to services and mitigate shocks can serve to level the playing field and change both social norms and bargaining power. A few examples include policies providing adequate water and sanitation in schools, as in Almeida and Oosterbeek, 2016, conditional cash transfer programs where the benefits are given to women such as the _Progresa/Oportunidades_ program in Mexico, or unemployment insurance and social pensions.

Access to and control over income and assets is an important component of welfare especially when a household dissolves, whether due to separation, divorce or death. This frequently determines the livelihoods available to members of household, and influences the distribution of resources within the household (Deere et al. 2012). Furthermore, it underpins women’s greater vulnerability to poverty. Agbodji et al. (2013) show that inequalities in education and employment largely explain gender differences in poverty in Burkina Faso, while differences in access to assets and credit are the main sources of gender differences in Togo.

Gender inequalities in labor markets also contribute to women’s greater vulnerability to poverty. Evidence suggests that even after controlling for individual characteristics, women in Latin America have a lower probability of participating in the labor market, a lower probability of being formal workers, and lower hourly wage remuneration (Costa et al., 2009). Moreover, because women are more likely to be informally employed, they are also more prone to be excluded from non‐wage benefits such as health insurance, pensions, paid sick leave and maternity leave (ILO 2016). Women are more likely to be providers of unpaid care within the household (for children, those with disabilities and the elderly) (as shown in World Bank 2012). Tax policies also affect women and men differently over the lifecycle, and may not take into account transitions in roles and household types. For instance, the presence of children in combination with the tax treatment of the household’s second earner in systems that tax the household’s joint income, may lead to further fall in women’s labor force participation (Grown and Valodia, eds. 2010).

Since specialization in any activity typically requires costly and considerable investments, gender differentials in early investments can result in larger gender differentials later in life. Lokshin and Mroz (2003) examine how a spectrum of gender differences vary across income groups over the lifecycle in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The results suggest that the main source of gender inequality comes from different investments in girls’ and boys’ education that increase with declines in income levels. At the same time, single women that come from poor households could be at a great risk of poverty because of limited labor market opportunities available to them compared than those available for males (Rosenzweig and Wolpin, 1994).

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