Gender asset-ownership gap, women's agency, and its implications for household inequality: Evidence from Nigeria

he gender asset-ownership gap remains a persistent barrier to inclusive economic growth. While women contribute significantly to agricultural production and household welfare, they continue to face constraints in accessing and controlling productive assets such as land and non-land resources. Using nationally representative panel data from the Nigeria Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) waves 4 and 5, this study examines the role of women’s productive asset ownership and empowerment in shaping household income inequality in rural Nigeria. Descriptive evidence shows persistently high intrahousehold inequality, with intrahousehold Gini coefficients averaging approximately 0.70 across survey rounds, despite a modest decline between 2018/19 and 2023/24. Regional patterns reveal particularly pronounced inequality in the North East, where income distributions are heavily skewed and most households exhibit extreme intrahousehold disparities. Employing fixed effects regressions and Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions, the analysis yields three key findings. First, women’s land share is associated with reduced intrahousehold income inequality, but this effect is modest and conditional. It becomes meaningful primarily in households where women control more than half of total household farmland, suggesting that small and fragmented landholdings offer limited inequality-reducing potential on their own. Women’s control over income and participation in agricultural decision-making emerge as additional and consistently significant drivers of reduced intrahousehold inequality. Second, women’s land share has a significant and positive effect on women’s income share, with a 10 percentage point increase in female-managed farmland associated with approximately a 0.76 percentage point increase in women’s share of household income; women’s income control and agricultural decision-making further amplify this effect. Third, Blinder-Oaxaca decompositions reveal that households where women own productive assets have significantly lower intrahousehold inequality and higher women’s income shares than those where no woman owns an asset, with differences driven primarily by disparities in women’s income control and decision-making authority rather than asset ownership alone. This shifts the policy debate from simply closing gender asset gaps to ensuring women’s assets are productive and consolidated with genuine economic agency.