<mark>income poverty. One result that has emerged from this literature is that female‐headed households are extremely heterogenous and so reliance on the correlation between the sex of the household head and poverty rates is often misleading. The route to becoming a female household head reflects a variety of circumstances, including for example, widowhood, divorce, desertion and separation, which entail different degrees or complete absence of choice about becoming a household head (Chant, 2003, 2008). Women’s access to labor markets and assets varies according to social class and income. Also, the means to meet household needs include the “moral economy” of community and kinship rules (Kabeer 1997) and these rules may accord different entitlements to female household heads for example, widows versus single mothers, depending on social norms. So, whether female headed households are disproportionately represented among the poor or not will depend on the circumstance leading to their headship as well as the broader social context, including the access to labor markets and assets, prevailing</mark> social norms, their kinship‐based claims and other entitlements.

<mark>The UNHCR data identify principal applicants for each household and our analysis examines differences in household poverty between households with a female rather than male principal applicant.</mark><sup>6</sup> <mark>The principal applicant is the person who receives assistance from UNHCR for the family and is self‐selected or selected by the family. This definition of female headship has advantages over the way that household headship is commonly identified in household surveys. An often‐noted drawback of the headship variable is that female headship may reflect the enumerators’ perception about who should be considered a family head rather than who has the most responsibility for the family’s welfare in practice.</mark><sup>7</sup> <mark>Social norms can also affect whether female respondents self‐identify as household heads. For example, some Eritrean returnees who would in other cultural settings be regarded as</mark> _<mark>de jure</mark>_ <mark>female headed (single mothers, widows, divorcees, separated women) reported being male ‐headed. Other Eritrean female returnees who would be considered</mark> _<mark>de facto</mark>_ <mark>heads reported headship by absent husbands or male relatives (Kibreab, 2003). Our approach is therefore to distinguish between different types of female and male principal applicant households, using a typology that reflects some of the indicators of vulnerability used</mark> by UNHCR.

<mark>We find that distinguishing between different types of female principal applicant households is important in the setting of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Most male principal applicants are one of a married couple with children whereas most female principal applicants are single care‐givers, single persons or living in non‐traditional family groups. While on average female principal applicant households are no more likely to be poor than male principal applicant ones, poverty rates for some types of households are higher when these households have a female principal applicant. Households that have formed because of the unpredictable dynamics of forced displacement, such as sibling households, unaccompanied children, and</mark>

> 6 Identification of the head of the case (as family groupings are referred to in the UNHCR ProGres database) is determined by who best represents the family for case management purposes. It is not assumed that the household will be best represented by a man; a woman or even a child can be a head of a case, depending on standard operating procedures.

> 7 Even when traditional household survey data are gathered at the individual level, the information is often collected from a single respondent. The respondent is usually the self‐identified ‘most knowledgeable’ household member, which overwhelmingly corresponds to the ‘head’ of the household. In the case of a household survey that solicits information on ‘headship’, this information is gathered often through the question: “Who is the head of this household?”

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