gender as well as regional comparisons. Second, by expanding on household typologies beyond headship, we show that using information on the full composition of the household, not just the sex of the head of household, contributes to a better understanding of gender differences in poverty. Finally, the study introduces a lifecycle approach that sheds new light on how poverty affects people over time.

The present study provides a compelling story of how a lifecycle approach, including age, family formation and living arrangements play a crucial role in the way women and men experience poverty. The analysis is presented in the following manner. Section 2 contains a brief literature review related to the key issues of the poverty and gender intersection as well as a description of the data set used for the analysis. The third section looks at gender profiles of the poor in both demographic and economic terms and some of the drivers of the observed differences. The work presented in Section 4 addresses the limitations of standard head of household analysis by introducing two new typologies of households and exploring how gender, poverty and household type are connected. The section ends with a discussion of the channels that link household type and poverty.

What do we know about gender and poverty?

# _Measuring poverty is a complex task_

Measuring global poverty is a complex, data‐intensive exercise. Data used comes from nationally‐ representative household surveys that capture a money‐metric measure of welfare – either consumption or income. Each data set is harmonized and then a welfare aggregate is constructed. The World Bank’s database includes almost 150 surveys from developing countries, of which 104 fall in the time period of analysis used in this report. This collection of survey data is then combined with complementary data on population size (growth), inflation, real economic growth, and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) exchange rates to produce country‐level, regional and, global estimates of poverty.<sup>5</sup> From there, population‐level poverty figures are estimated by taking the household level welfare measure and dividing it by the number of people in the household. This assigns all consumption evenly to household members. Those individuals whose per capita consumption is below the value of the international poverty line (US1.90 in 2011 PPP terms) are classified as living in extreme poverty.<sup>6</sup> The fundamental concern with this measure of poverty is that it assumes consumption or income is distributed and shared evenly within a household. True individual welfare is not observed and the household measure often ignores intra‐household disparities in access, consumption, and other entitlements (Grown, 2014; Lanjouw, 2012; Deere et al., 2012), making the uniform distribution of consumption (income) to all household members inadequate. A substantial body of literature suggests that not all members of the household share equally the resources of the household (see, for instance: Haddad and Kanbur, 1990; and Chant, 2010). In fact, household income (consumption) may bear no relation to women’s poverty because women may not necessarily be able to access it (Bradshaw 2002; Chant 2006, 2010; Bessell 2010, 2014). Predictions derived from a unitary model of household behavior, based on the notion of a single benevolent decision‐maker or consensus amongst members, often do not find empirical support (Lundberg et al., 1997). In summary, the small differences in observed poverty between men and

> 5 See Castañeda et al., 2016 for more detail. Note that national poverty measures differ as both the welfare aggregate and the value of the national poverty line will vary from the harmonized variables and international poverty line used here (World Bank, 2015).

> 6 The international poverty line corresponds to the mean of the poverty lines found in the poorest 15 countries ranked by per capita consumption (World Bank, 2015).

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