<mark>broader social context, including the gender norms that determine women’s access to markets (including labor markets) and other institutions and, their kinship‐based claims and other entitlements (Kabeer 1997). One strand of the literature has therefore focused on more homogenous groups of female‐headed households, for example, widows or single mothers (Appleton 1996; Horrell and Krishnan 2007; de Walle 2013) or explored alternative classifications of households to female headship alone, encompassing demographics or household structure and ethnic group in specific country settings (Ruwanpura and</mark> Humphries 2004; Van de Walle and Milazzo 2015).

<mark>There has been little research on the link between household female headship and poverty in fragile and conflict‐affected settings. A study of Sri Lanka found that displacement caused precipitous income losses for both female‐ and male‐headed families but that losses for male‐headed households were higher. On average, female‐headed households lost 76 percent of their income while male‐headed households lost 80 percent. However, this resulted in a larger share of female‐headed than male‐headed households falling below the poverty line (Amirthalingam and Lakshman 2012). Widows are especially vulnerable in situations of conflict and forced displacement due to the loss of resources tied to husbands and the destruction of social networks (Brück and Schindler, 2009). Widow‐headed households in post‐genocide rural Rwanda were found to have a higher incidence of poverty than male‐headed households, even after controlling for the distribution of size and composition of these types of households (Schindler 2010).</mark>

# 2. Syrian Refugees in Jordan

<mark>Syrian refugees fleeing to Jordan came mainly from the governorates that are closest to Jordan: Daraa, which borders Jordan, and Homs, another southern Syrian governorate. Nearly all the refugees are concentrated in the four northern governorates (Irbid, Al Mafraq, Zarqa, and Amman) with over half settled in the governorates that border Syria (Al Mafraq and Irbid) (Verme et al. 2016). Between January 2012 and December 2013, the total number of Syrian refugees registered by UNHCR increased from around 3,000 to 574,354 and as of May 2018, there are 666,113 UNHCR‐registered Syrian refugees living in Jordan. Of these, 21 percent live in camps and the remainder live with host communities mostly in</mark> northern and central Jordan.<sup>9</sup> <mark>Figure 1 shows that many people fleeing Syria between 2011 and 2014 (56 percent of female principal applicants and half of male principal applicants) came to Jordan informally by crossing the border and thus arrived without formal residency rights or work permits. Officially, Syrian refugees arriving in Jordan at that time were required to go to one of Syria’s refugee camps and register with UNHCR as refugees. They could leave the camps if sponsored by a Jordanian relative who was over 35 years old. The remaining percentages correspond mainly to legal entries, as the percentages associated with people born in the city of arrival, through smuggling, or with missing data are very small. Interestingly, gender differences in the percentages of legal and informal entry status are statistically significant.</mark>

> 9 <u>https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria/location/36, accessed June 21, 2018.</u>

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