Cheryl Doss is a development economist whose research focusses on issues related to assets, agriculture and gender with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa.
Among her research projects, she co-leads the Gender Asset Gap Project, a large-scale effort to collect data and measure individual asset and wealth holdings for men and women in Ecuador, Ghana, and Karnataka, India. This research examines best practices for collecting individual data on assets and also quantifies women’s ownership of and control over productive assets. Currently, much of her work focusses on how to understand both joint and individual ownership and decision-making within rural households.
Cheryl Doss works with a range of international organizations on issues including best approaches for collecting sex-disaggregated data, gender and agriculture, intrahousehold resource allocation, and women’s asset ownership. Currently, she is the gender advisor for the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In recent years, she has also worked with UN Women, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, DFID , the Africa Development Bank, and the UN Foundation on issues of women’s asset ownership.
She has published widely in academic journals in economics, agricultural economics, and development studies.