Consumption Expenditure and Female Poverty: A Review of the Evidence

This paper sets out to answer two questions. First, are poor females at a significant disadvantage compared to males and non-poor females in terms of welfare indicators of such as health, education, nutrition, labor force participation, and time use? Second, are female-headed households over-represented among the poor? To answer these questions and maintain consistency in the definition of poverty, this review limits itself to the literature that includes consumption expenditure (or income) welfare measures. This includes more than 60 Poverty Assessments carried out by the World Bank since 1994 as well as other recent published and unpublished studies. There is considerable variation in the nature and extent of gender inequality across countries, making it difficult to generalize that disparities between women and men are systematically larger below the poverty line. The evidence surrounding the incidence of poverty in female-headed households is also found to be country and case specific. For example, in a given context, de jure female-headed households may be disproportionately poor while de facto households are not. The evidence indicates that a more nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between headship and poverty is needed. This includes accounting for differences in household structure and as well as analyzing the process of household formation. a The World Bank b University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Background Paper for the World Bank Policy Research Report on Gender and Development. The authors would like to thank Deon Filmer, Agnes Quisumbing and the participants in the June 1999 PRR workshop in Oslo for their helpful comments and suggestions. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.