# Introduction

Eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty, is among the main challenges the global community and governments face. Achieving this goal by 2030<sup>2</sup> will require for governments to implement a set of policies aimed at investing in human capital, improving labor markets, expanding social protection, and implementing targeted policies to help groups of the population experiencing specific disadvantages. Various population subgroups, be they based on gender, ethnicity, race, or income, have faced and continue to face barriers that have slowed the rate of poverty reduction. Understanding how poverty affects subgroups in different ways is critical to realizing welfare goals.

A key area of concern has been the extent to which women and men face different levels of poverty and distinct barriers to poverty reduction. Our understanding of these differences, however, has been constrained by the available data. In the standard approach to measuring poverty, the primary source of information is household surveys and the key indicator is a money‐metric measure of welfare based on consumption or income. Data are collected on the consumption or the income of each household, and not always of each individual living in those households<sup>3</sup> . This masks variation in individual‐specific welfare levels, as intra‐household disparities in access to income, consumption and other entitlements cannot be measured. The result is that gender differences in poverty rates are muted or not at all visible.<sup>4</sup> In this study we show that, even with the existing constraints (which we discuss in greater detail below), there is still much to be learned about poverty and gender. Taking advantage of a global database of harmonized country‐representative surveys constructed by the World Bank, we look at the ways in which men and women experience poverty differently. The focus of the study is on four key questions. First, in the absence of individual‐level poverty data, what can we learn in terms of gender differences by looking at individual‐level information? Here, we focus on the relationship between sex and poverty and explore available data to us such as age, location, education, marital status, and labor market participation. This is done at global level but is also explored at the regional level. Second, to the extent that there are differences by sex, are these related to specific moments of the lifecycle of women and men? Third, at the household level, are there specific types of households that are more likely to be poor than others and how does gender factor into this? And, finally, what are the channels that link individuals and households to poverty?

To answer these questions, we use two approaches. First, the study provides gender profiles of the poor at the global level, taking into account sex, age, marital status, education and employment. The global profiles are supplemented with regional profiles to begin to understand how geography, gender and poverty are related. Second, the study looks at household profiles of the poor. Given the limitations of work looking at households only by the sex of the household head, this study proposes two new typologies of households, a demographic one and an economic one.

This study makes three key contributions to the literature on poverty and gender. First, it provides a global picture of the connections between gender and poverty. By using the same global database and the same measure of poverty used by the World Bank to monitor the first Sustainable Development Goal and its own goal of eradicating extreme poverty, we are able to provide a global picture of poverty and

> 2 SDG Goal 1: By 2030, eradicate extreme poverty for all people everywhere, currently measured as people living on less than $1.25 a day. (Resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2015. 70/1).

> 3 In addition, the data is generally collected from one or two respondents “best informed”, which may lead to under‐estimates of consumption/income if not all consumption/income is shared and visible, which is the case when individuals work in different workplaces and keep separate accounts.

> 4 Grown, 2014; Lanjouw, 2012; Deere et al., 2012.

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