Gender and Poverty: How We Can Be Misled by the Unitary Model of Household Resources – the Case of Tajikistan

Using the 2003 Tajikistan Living Standard Survey this paper looks at the relationship between gender and poverty and show how, by modifying the equal sharing assumption of the household resources, we can easily be misled by the poverty and gender relationship. This paper also shows how those gender analyses which use the female headed household and male headed household dichotomy in Tajikistan obscure the gender analysis of poverty due to the heterogeneity of female headed household types. Southampton Statistical Sciences Research Institute Applications & Policy Working Paper A04/21 Gender and Poverty: How we can be misled by the unitary model of household resources – the case of Tajikistan Jane Falkingham Angela Baschieri Southampton Statistical Sciences Institute (S3RI) University of Southampton Abstract Using the 2003 Tajikistan Living Standard Survey this paper looks at the relationship between gender and poverty and show how, by modifying the equal sharing assumption of the household resources, we can easily be misled by the poverty and gender relationship. This paper also shows how those gender analyses which use the female headed household and male headed household dichotomy in Tajikistan obscure the gender analysis of poverty due to the heterogeneity of female headed household types.Using the 2003 Tajikistan Living Standard Survey this paper looks at the relationship between gender and poverty and show how, by modifying the equal sharing assumption of the household resources, we can easily be misled by the poverty and gender relationship. This paper also shows how those gender analyses which use the female headed household and male headed household dichotomy in Tajikistan obscure the gender analysis of poverty due to the heterogeneity of female headed household types.