The “feminization of poverty” has been a longstanding, if deeply contested, trope in gender and development (GAD) discourse since the mid-1990s. This entry traces the origins of the term and provides a critical review of some of the key debates which have occurred around its theoretical assumptions and empirical bases. Particular attention is paid to methodological and data difficulties in substantiating trends in the “feminization of poverty,” to the problems of its purported links with a virtually ubiquitous increase in the number and share of households headed by women in global south regions, and to the quandaries presented by the “feminization” of poverty reduction programs nominally designed to change poverty's predominantly “female face.” Support for more gender-sensitive, multidimensional approaches to poverty which go beyond income to embrace other factors relevant to women's disadvantage, such as time and power, is indicated to enhance empirical and conceptual robustness and policy responses alike.