Source: Reuters Foundation
So it's not just women who think they should get a bigger piece of the pie, that's also the opinion of many of the speakers and participants at the World Bank's Land and Poverty Conference in Washington.

It's easy to say from a natural justice point of view that women should gain more power over their own lives. But implementation of gender equality is also a smart thing to do from a financial point of view, since it will lead to the blossoming of the economy, experts at the conference say.

It doesn't have to be big steps. It can be as simple as persuading men to take over a few household chores, so that women are freed from domestic roles to work as businesswomen, or engage in politics.

But there are also big steps that need to be taken.

Historically and culturally, land ownership tends to lie in the hands of men. African women, in particular, are struggling to gain land ownership, where customary law clashes with formal law, and there are different models of what land rights even mean.

It can be difficult to tilt the scales in favor of women.

Agnes Quisumbing, senior researcher at the International Food and Policy Research Institute, said she doubted the oft-repeated statistic that as few as 2 percent of women farmers own land globally.

She says new country-specific research shows that these single-digit statistics cannot be relied on, and this complicates how policymakers can address these issues if they are relying on outdated data is the sole source of knowledge.

Despite what she sees as a growth in ownership of land, Quisumbing says there are much broader definitions of landownership, and understanding this could help in coming up with strategies on how to provide resources to women.

The Department for International Development (DfID) chief economist Stephen Dercon and the World Bank's Hoseana Ghebru said researchers aren't even asking the right questions.

Assumptions have been made concerning issues around land and inheritance in Africa and what this means for women. But, as Ghebru noted, women's land rights are littered with confounding factors such polygamous households, and how land is "redistributed" among multiple wives to give them land title.

What has also complicated issues is that the profile of land is being changed from customary systems, meaning that land is owned communally, to land that is becoming "individualised" in circumstances where foreign investors are acquiring land in Africa.

"So who gets the money from the land sold?" Ghebru asked.

It is never easy to change things that will have a big impact on how human beings view the world. And there are many people who say they KNOW that land belongs to men, and it will take a lot to dislodge that cultural norm.

But as Ghebru noted, times they are a-changing, and this interpretation of land ownership no longer applies in all African societies.

So while the legal terrain is changing across developing countries with new approaches to investigating and understanding women and land rights, in some cases this has still not helped women much.

Things are getting worse in some countries, says Evelyn Namubiru-Mwaura from Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa.

The problem is that the correlation between land ownership and economic benefit has been ignored, which has meant rural women in particular remain trapped in a cycle of economic deprivation and marginalised from resources. That's the message which isn't getting across. How much money is missing from the economy because women aren't active in it?

And it's not just about giving women access to land title and tenure. Inheritance has its own problems.

When researchers asked women about land ownership, and whom they would bequeath it to, guess what the majority said?

"I'd leave it to my sons."

We have a long way to go.