Existing approaches to measuring poverty and gender disparity suffer from a variety of flaws. To develop a new, gender-sensitive measure of multidimensional povety, we undertook participatory research in Fiji, Indonesia and elsewhere. Local teams worked with men and women in poor communities to undertand how they viewed poverty and hardships, to what extent they saw these as gednered and how they thought deprivation could best be measured. We developed the Indiviual Deprivation Measure, which improves upon existing measure of poverty and gender equity, measuring it at individual rather than household level. The IDM measures deprivation in 15 dimensions and in each dimension, individuals are scored on an interval scale of one to five. The IDM is ready for use by governments, international development agencies, NGOs and local communities.