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The feminisation of poverty indicates that female-headed households (FHH) constitute a vulnerable socio-economic group generally considered as impoverished compared to male-headed households (MHH). The interest in this paper is to examine whether the nutritional status of children in FHH differ significantly from that of children in MHH. Anthropometric data on 1466 toddlers aged 12-59 months and several societal, household and individual variables from the Malawi Demographic Health Survey (MDHS) 1992 were used to find out the net impact of the sex of household head on stunting, under nutrition and wasting in the toddlers. The bivariate results show that children in FHH (stunted – 56.7%; underweight- 33.3%; wasted – 6.7%) may not have poorer nutritional outcomes than their counterparts from MHH (stunted – 53.6%; underweight – 31.3%; wasted – 5.7%) since the differences are not significant. However, a number of the background characteristics were significantly associated with the three indicators suggesting that the results on headship could be masked by the differentials shown in background characteristics. Furthermore, results from the logistic regression analysi