# Introduction

<mark>Conflict, persecution, natural disasters, and violence force millions to flee from their homes. At the end of 2017, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that there were approximately 68.5 million people who were forced to flee, 25.4 million of whom were refugees.</mark><sup>2</sup> <mark>The civil war in Syria has created one of the worst humanitarian crises of our times and more than half of Syria’s pre‐war population of 11 million has been displaced, either across borders or within the country. The crisis is now in its eighth year and many people have been displaced multiple times. Over 6 million Syrians are</mark> currently registered as refugees with UNHCR, many of whom fled to Jordan.<sup>3</sup> <mark>Jordan is ranked as the country with the seventh largest refugee population in the world and with an estimated one in fourteen people being a refugee in 2017 (89 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants). It is currently host to over 668,123 registered Syrian refugees, the vast majority of whom (83 percent) live outside refugee camps.</mark><sup>4</sup> <mark>UNHCR reports that as of June 2018 the majority of Syrian refugees in Jordan live in urban areas and in poverty: over 85 percent live below the poverty line, 48 percent of refugees are</mark> children, and 4 percent are elderly.<sup>5</sup> <mark>The purpose of this paper is to understand how gender inequality affects poverty among Syrian refugees in Jordan. Many reports document the hardships and human rights violations experienced by refugees, highlighting that women and children are a highly vulnerable group among refugees and it is clear that women and men, boys and girls experience and respond to forced displacement differently (World Bank, 2017a). However, to date, there is a dearth of research and empirical analysis in this field, in part because there are few datasets available for this task. Hence, there is little evidence pertaining to refugee settings on how gender‐based differences affect poverty rates. Further, as Jordan and the international community develop new approaches that respond holistically to the specific needs of refugee and host communities, more evidence is needed about how gender‐based constraints and vulnerability affect refugee women’s ability to take up economic opportunities and to access the services and resources they need to enable their families to move out of poverty.</mark> <mark>Our analysis applies a gender lens to a rich set of microdata on Syrian refugees in Jordan collected by UNHCR between 2011 and 2014. As these data do not capture how the changes in policies affect refugees and the constant evolution of their situation since 2014, the analysis is not intended to directly inform current policy choices and decisions. Instead, our aim is to devise an approach that can provide greater insights into gender‐specific barriers, based on the premise that the experiences and potential</mark> vulnerabilities of women, men, and children are significantly different in refugee settings.

<mark>We use household‐level data to examine the relationship between poverty and gender for Syrian refugees. Our approach is informed by a body of work in the academic literature that has used household survey data to examine the relationship between the gender of the household head and household</mark>

> 2 <u>http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2017/, accessed August 2, 2018.</u>

> 3 <u>http://www.unhcr.org/globaltrends2017/, accessed August 2, 2018.</u>

> 4 <u>https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/64568, accessed August 2, 2018.</u>

> 5 <u>https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/64114.pdf, accessed August 2, 2018.</u>

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