• gender poverty gap
• Italy
• poverty

This study describes the predominance of women living in poverty in Italy across its 20 regions and investigates some key explanations of gender differences in 20 regions on the risk of becoming poor.

The matter is approached with two perspectives: individual characteristics (composition effects) and sub-national context. The former can inspect closely and thoroughly the causes leading to the prevalence of poor women but it ignores information on the characteristics of the region (contextual effects) that can influence the percentage of Italian men and women with low income differently. Thus by estimating the parameters and comparing the fit of the models, we evaluate the explanatory power of both types of variables.