拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的性别与贫困：生命周期分析

11260 Gender and Poverty in Latin Americaand the Caribbean An Analysis through the Life Cycle Paola Buitrago-HernandezDaniela Maquera SardonHugo ÑopoEliana Rubiano-Matulevich Poverty and Equity Global DepartmentNovember 2025 A verified reproducibility package for this paper isavailable athttp://reproducibility.worldbank.org,clickherefor direct access. Policy Research Working Paper11260 Abstract This paper analyzes gender disparities in poverty across thelife cycle in Latin America and the Caribbean using harmo-nized household survey data. Although gender gaps in labormarket outcomes are well-documented, gendered povertydisparities have remained understudied. The results reveal agendered poverty penalty that emerges as women enter theirprime productive and reproductive years—a penalty thathas increased over the past 15 years. The presence of youngchildren significantly increases the likelihood of poverty ina household. Single-mother households and those with sole or no earners face particularly high vulnerability. To explorethe determinants of the gendered poverty penalty, the paperidentifies four relevant groups of individuals and appliesa Kitagawa-Binder-Oaxaca decomposition. The resultsindicate that, beyond the presence of children at homeand women’s age, unobserved factors (including potentialdiscrimination) are behind most of the gap. These findingsemphasize the critical role of household composition andlife cycle factors, particularly family arrangements. The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about developmentissues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry thenames of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely thoseof the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank andits affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent. Gender and Poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean: An Analysis through the Life Cycle Paola Buitrago-Hernandez, Daniela Maquera Sardon, Hugo Ñopo, Eliana Rubiano-Matulevich World Bank JEL Codes: I3, J1, O1 Keywords: Poverty, Gender, Lifecycle, Women, Household. Introduction and Literature An accurate measurement of poverty is important to identify the most in need, to formulate interventionsthat aim to alleviate poverty, and to monitor and assess their effectiveness. Conventional povertymeasurement relies on household-level income or consumption data as the key monetary measure ofwelfare. This approach attributes the same welfare estimate to all household members, maskingindividual gender disparities in poverty, as small differences are observed in aggregate poverty rates forwomen and men. This outcome is mainly explained by data limitations: poverty is measured at thehousehold level, with uniform classification for all members (Newhouse et al. 2017), and neither individualwelfare nor intrahousehold disparities are considered (Muñoz-Boudet et al. 2018; Beegle et al. 2021). There are important efforts underway to estimate the fraction of household expenditure consumedby/allocated to each family member, shedding light on intrahousehold resource allocation and thereforeintrahousehold monetary poverty (World Bank 2018; Muñoz-Boudet et al. 2018; Aminjonov et al. 2024;Aminjonov et al. 2025). In Latin America, Iglesias and Coelho (2020) estimate a model for householdbehavior using data from the Brazilian consumer expenditure survey, to show that the average share ofhousehold total expenditure is slightly larger for men than for women. For Mexico, Calvi et al. (2023)report that women receive a larger resource share and that households benefit from significanteconomies of scale. In Argentina, Bargain (2024) factors women's and men's net-of-tax earnings andtargeted benefits into a household resource sharing function, finding that women’s financial powermodifies the amount of resources accruing to women and children in the household. Overall, these effortsshow the importance of challenging the unified household assumption. Consumption data at theindividual level, nonetheless, is rarely observed; and establishing equivalence scales to determine how toallocate expenses among individuals within a household remains a challenge (Haddad and Kanbur 1990;Nelson 1993; Muñoz-Boudet et. al. 2018). All of this restricts the analysis to a household-based measureand reliance on the traditional homogeneous-sharing assumptions. Despite these difficulties, using existing household-level data is an imperfect but valuable way tounderstand the gender dimensions of poverty. One such approach is to adopt a life cycle approach topoverty measurement, which examines various age groups during th