This paper aims to outline the major methodological and conceptual challenges to understanding poverty from a gender perspective. Divided into three sections, the paper addresses the engendered nature of poverty analysis, the principal challenges identified including gender exclusion in mainstream analytical and methodological approaches and continued inadequacies in data on gender and poverty, and finally, future directions in research and policy. Even if we take issue with the notion that the ‘feminisation of poverty’ is an over-determined construct which has evolved in the interests of gender advocacy, social relations of gender still seem to ‘predict greater vulnerability among women’.