designated as the direct beneficiary of land reforms. However, given the gender division of labor, women rarely undertook this task. In addition, perceptions of men as breadwinners and more capable farmers and women as essentially dependents, as well as concerns regarding male resistance, resulted in reforms designed to maintain the gender status quo (Agarwal 1994, 2003).

In Sub-Saharan Africa, while men and women traditionally possessed differing (at times overlapping) rights to land, formal titling and registration programs typically conferred complete and exclusive rights to a single individual: the male household head. Given a confluence of social and economic forces which contributed to the increasing scarcity and commodification of land, these programs had a negative effect on women’s land rights (Lastarria-Cornheil 1997).

While Latin American agrarian reforms and land titling programs historically were biased against women (as the sole beneficiary was designated as the household head), this began to change in the 1990s. A number of Latin American countries rewrote their legislation to recognize dual-headed households and mandated joint adjudication and titling. Many of these countries also explicitly targeted female-headed households. These legal changes have had a dramatic positive effect on the female share of beneficiaries compared to previous episodes of land reforms (Deere and Leon 2001).

# _Gender differences in land ownership: The empirical evidence_

Relatively little research has been carried out on the distribution of ownership of land or other productive assets by gender, primarily because most analyses have studied asset holdings at the level of the household (typically attributing the assets to the household head) rather than at the level of the individual. The scant existing evidence appears to show that the distribution of land ownership is heavily skewed towards men. For example, using household survey data from the last decade for a sample of Latin American countries, Deere and Leon (2003) find that, depending on the country, roughly between 70 and 90 percent of formal owners of farmland were exclusively men. Furthermore, conditional on land ownership, men owned more farmland on average than women.<sup>18</sup> Similarly, in Ghana, Doss (2005) finds that 60-70 percent of landowners were men. Further, conditional on ownership, the mean value of land for men was almost 3 times higher than the corresponding statistic for women. In Burkina Faso, Udry (1996) finds that the mean size of male-controlled plots is almost 8 times higher than the corresponding statistic for female-controlled plots. Synthesizing findings from other studies, Quisumbing et al. (2004) report that the area cultivated by women range from one-third to two-thirds of the area cultivated by men in sample of four Sub-Saharan African countries.

# _Economic effects of weaker land tenure security for women_

Direct empirical evidence on the gender-disaggregated effects of land tenure insecurity on investment and other economic behavior is largely lacking. The fact that careful studies show that tenure insecurity impairs investment incentives in general, coupled with higher levels of tenure insecurity for women in many settings, suggests that women’s agricultural productivity

> 18 In several countries, however, this difference was not statistically significant.

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