No standard measures of gender-related intrahousehold poverty and inequality based on consumption data are yet available. These measures would require data collection of consumption or expenditure level for each member of a household. However, when collecting data on individual consumption, only part of the goods – for example, adult clothing, alcohol or tobacco, or, in some cases, education and health expenditure – can be assigned to specific members of the household. It is less easy to measure how much of the food or household common goods (such as housing, water supply or sanitation) is consumed or used by each individual household member. In addition, if data are collected at individual level and different patterns of consumption are observed, it is not always clear if they are related to different individual levels of need (for example, women may require a lower caloric intake than men), to different preferences or to unequal distribution of resources.
Individual non-consumption measures of gender-related intrahousehold poverty and inequality need further development. Education, health, and time use are key elements in the broader concept of poverty and wellbeing. However, standard individual-level measures needed to capture the overall gender inequality in intrahousehold allocation of resources are not equally available for all these three areas. Only for education there are international standards guiding, for example, the measurement of school attendance, literacy or educational attainment for each individual. No international standards are yet available for summary measures of individual-level health status or time use, although some indicators are currently used by some national statistical offices or academia. For example, in the case of adult health, such individual-level measures would refer to self-reported health status, or limitations in daily activities or formal work. When it comes to children, measures of immunization or nutrition are fairly standardised and widely used. In the case of time use, the summary measures of time poverty would refer to the time for leisure, total time of work, or the household time overhead.