These results suggest that early marriage is correlated with higher poverty rates for girls and boys alike, and that marriage and childbearing is correlated with higher poverty rates for men and women of peak childbearing and reproductive age (18‐49 years old). Poverty rates for women in this age group ‐ irrespective of marital status‐ are 3.4 and 3.9 percentage points higher than those for women in the 50‐64 and 65+ age groups, respectively. Poverty rates for males of peak reproductive age are 2.5 and 2.0 percentage points lower than men in older age groups. On the other hand, married men and women in the 50‐64 age group—an age group when the likelihood of having young dependents in the household decreases—face poverty rates between 3 and 5 percentage points lower than their married counterparts at peak childbearing and reproductive years.

# Where are the gender differences? Economic characteristics

Gender differences in labor force participation and employment are well documented (World Bank 2011), and these differences impact women’s ability to access and manage resources. Education gaps, on the other hand, have been closing over time. Worldwide, there are no gender differences in education enrollment rates between girls and boys (World Bank Gender Statistics 2017). But a closer look at the gender profiles of the poor through economic characteristics shows additional differences that build on those observed in terms of demographic characteristics.<sup>25</sup> Educational achievements and income‐earning capacity (represented by employment status) are measured at the individual level in household surveys, allowing for inter‐personal comparison and a broader understanding of well‐being.

At a first glance, we see that formal education is inversely correlated with poverty, but the association between employment and poverty varies by sex and type of employment. In the GMD dataset, 41 percent of the poor population aged 15 and above have no education. The poor account for nearly a quarter of those with no education, and women are almost two thirds of the population, poor and non‐ poor, without any education. Globally, male poverty rates are slightly higher than female poverty rates at all levels of education. For example, in South Asia, the poverty rate for men with primary education or above are higher than for women with same education levels, the same can be seen for men with secondary and tertiary education. However, these differences are not statistically significant.

Female and male poverty rates decline sharply as education increases, especially for women. Overall, individuals with tertiary education are unlikely to be poor, as only 1 percent of women and 1.4 percent of men with tertiary education live under the poverty line. Interestingly, the share of women among the poor diminishes with education, but the opposite is true for men. Poor women represent 62.3 percent of the poor population ages 15 and above with no education, but only 36.9 percent of those with tertiary education. Across all age groups, women with no education are a larger share of the poor (see figure 7 for prime working age group). Men, on the other hand, comprise 38 percent of the poor with no education and 63 percent of the poor with tertiary. Notably, as more population reaches primary education (e.g. looking at the younger age groups), women’s share of the poor is higher than for older cohorts. These patterns are, as before, driven by the two regions where most of the poor are concentrated, namely South Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa (Annex Figure A2). In East Asia and Pacific, the share of women among the poor decreases sharply when moving from no education to primary education, but remains stable

> 25 The sex‐disaggregated statistics on employment status used here do not reflect the new definitions of work and employment adopted by the 19<sup>th</sup> International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ICLS) in 2013. These new definitions restrict employment to production of goods and services for pay new definition of employment and broadens the definition of work to encompasses volunteering, own production of goods and services, unpaid trainee work and other forms of work. In addition, statistics will no longer refer to ‘inactive’ population, instead they will report on population ‘out of the labor force that the household surveys included in the 2013 version of the GMD predated these new definitions.

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