Deprivation of Women and Men Living in a Couple: Sharing or Unequal Division?

• Author: Karel Van den Bosch,Anne-Cathérine Guio
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12449
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Date: 01 December 2020

© 2019 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

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DEPRIVATION OF WOMEN AND MEN LIVING IN A COUPLE:

SHARING OR UNEQUAL DIVISION?

by Anne-CAthérine Guio

Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research

AND

KArel VAn den bosCh*

Belgian Federal Planning Bureau

University of Antwerp

In standard poverty analyses, all household members are assumed to share equal living conditions.

Though a few national studies exist, this paper is the first to present empirical evidence on this issue

for the EU, using the 2015 wave of the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. We map the

extent of intra-couple inequality in deprivation, and analyze its determinants. We find that for most

items, the gender difference in lack between partners, though generally small, is significant and at the

disadvantage of women. When aggregating the individual items into a deprivation scale, couples where

the number of enforced lacks is higher for the woman (9.2 percent) are (significantly) more numerous

than couples where the man is disadvantaged (6.5 percent), at the EU level. Econometric analysis shows

that the work status of the partners and their relative contribution to the joint income are important

determinants of the intra-couple gender deprivation gap.

JEL Codes: I32, J16

Keywords: EU-SILC, gender inequality, intra-couple inequality, material deprivation

1. introduCtion

In standard poverty and deprivation analyses, all household members are sup-

posed to share equal living conditions. This assumption is for example implicit in

the at-risk-of-poverty rate used at the EU level, which is derived from household

income. Household income is the aggregation of individual income received by

all household members as well as the income components received at the house-

hold level (such as rent, some social or inter-household transfers etc.). The same

assumption has also been made to date for the EU standard deprivation indicator,

which is based on nine items collected in the household questionnaire (see Guio,

2009 for a description of the EU agreed indicator). Researchers have been aware

for some time that this assumption is rather restrictive (Jenkins, 1991), and could

result in a downward bias of estimates of the extent of poverty and deprivation,

especially among some subgroups, such as women and children. Intra-household

*Correspondence to: Karel Van den Bosch, University of Antwerp, St. Jacobsstraat 2, 2000,

Antwerp, Belgium. (karel.vandenbosch@uantwerpen.be)

Review of Income and Wealth

Series 66, Number 4, December 2020

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12449

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Review of Income and Wealth, Series 66, Number 4, December 2020

959

© 2019 International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

inequality could mean that some persons in a household are living in poverty or

deprivation, even though the household as a whole is above the threshold, and also

that a family below the poverty threshold could contain someone who is above it.

A number of studies, using various methods and data, have looked into the

“black box” of the intra-household distribution of incomes and consumption.

Though a few have studied the distribution between parents and children (see e.g.

Main and Bradshaw, 2016; Bárcena Martín et al., 2017), most studies focus on the

intra-couple distribution (as we will do below), covering different aspects. Some

investigate the ways in which a couple’s finances are managed and controlled,

while others have studied individual consumption or living standards of wives and

husbands within couples (see Bennett, 2013, for a review). Only a few studies for

Ireland (Cantillon and Nolan, 1998, 2001; Cantillon et al., 2015) have looked at

differences in deprivation within couples. These indicate that such differences are

not very common, but that when they do occur they are more often to the disad-

vantage of wives than of husbands.

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence on this issue for a range

of EU countries. It uses the data on material deprivation of the 2015 wave of

the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which contain

a number of items on deprivation at the individual level, in addition to the usual

deprivation items collected at the household level. We map the extent of intra-cou-

ple inequality in deprivation, and analyze its determinants. The paper is structured

as follows. The next section reviews the literature on intra-couple inequality, dis-

cussing studies on differences in outcomes (consumption, deprivation), as well as

those on management and control of a couple’s finances. Section 3 presents the

data and methods used. Descriptive results are shown in Section 4, while Section 5

investigates the determinants of the gender deprivation gap. Section 6 concludes,

discussing the substantive findings, as well as making recommendations for future

data collection.

2. literAture reView

Until fairly recently, survey or other data that directly measured the living

standards of partners within couples were lacking. The call by Jenkins (1991) to

stop ignoring the within-household aspects of poverty was therefore first followed

by studies which used alternative assumptions for the distribution of incomes

within households (Bennett, 2013). Davies and Joshi (1994) examined the impact

of making the assumption that there would be only minimum sharing between

adults within households, and show that this leads to a much higher estimate of

poverty among married women. (Also see Borooah and McKee, 1994; Phipps and

Burton, 1995; Lise and Seitz, 2011; Corsi et al., 2016.) Such studies suggested that

there might be a substantial reservoir of hidden poverty among wives in seemingly

non-poor households.

When looking into the “black box” of intra-household distribution, it is

important to distinguish between outcomes and processes. The first term covers

consumption, living standards, deprivation and, ultimately, well-being, while the

second concept refers to financial control, resource management, income pooling