This paper claims that the determinants of women’s household headship and those of homeownership are correlated, and therefore the empirical models of the probability of attaining homeownership used in most studies has a statistical problem (endogeneity) that leads to inconsistent and often counter-intuitive results. If female household headship is not exogenous to the tenure choice, then, even in the presence of lower probabilities of homeownership, a naive view of the data may reflect that women headed households have higher probabilities of owning their own home.

It is thought that this is the first paper which focuses on the factors affecting homeownership and household headship jointly by explicitly providing an econometric solution to the endogeneity issues that arise by the joint determination of both variables. The results for 17 Latin American countries show that the biases are important, and that female headed families have a substantially lower probability of attaining homeownership.

Regarding other variables, as expected, it was found that the higher the income of the family the higher the probability of owning their home. The higher the income of the woman of the house the higher the probability of having a female headed family. Therefore, for a woman higher personal income has opposing effects on the probability of attaining homeownership. On the one hand, the direct effect higher household income increases the probability of homeownership. On the other hand, it also increases the probability of female headship and thus reduces the probability of homeownership.

Homeownership is one of the most powerful intergenerational wealth transmission mechanisms. Therefore, the results of this paper are important for poverty reduction policies. Although it does not provide immediate policy recommendations to eliminate or reduce homeownership gender biases, it changes the diagnostic and opens the window to explore at the country level the institutional determinants of this situation and the eventual remedies.