Comparing welfare regimes by their effects on intra-household inequalities

Abstract

Gender analyses of policies tend to evaluate their effects on gender equality in access to the labour market and on gender roles within households; these have been examined both within and across different welfare state regimes (see for example Lewis 2009). However relatively little attention has been paid to effects on gender inequalities in access to and control over households’ financial resources. This chapter analyses the effect of employment status, to capture individuals’ paid and unpaid contributions to their household, on changes in satisfaction with household income, taken as an indicator of relative access to household resources. Intra-household gender inequalities can arise through policies’ effects both on the intra-household division of contributions and on the salience of that division to men’s and women’s access to household resources. Results are compared for three countries, Australia, Germany and the UK, chosen, not only because of the characteristics of their welfare regimes, but also because they all collect good household panel data that can be used for empirical investigation of such intra-household effects, and some comparative results are presented in this chapter