Hugh Davies

Sex, Sharing and the Distribution of Income

It is customary to assume that income is redistributed between the sexes within the family. This article investigates alternative assumptions about sharing within the family and their effects on the distribution of income. Using data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey for 1968 and 1986, we contrast two assumptions about sharing within the family; the conventional assumption of equal sharing or ‘pooling’, and an alternative of ‘minimum sharing’. Under each assumption, we examine the composition of extreme quintiles of the income distribution, and compute the numbers of men and women falling below an arbitrary ‘poverty line’. The contribution to inequality of the net transfers between the sexes and other sources of income is also examined. We estimate that resource transfers (other than for housing) between spouses could, if all income is pooled, account for about one third of married couples’ pooled incomes in 1986 and about 56 per cent of the inequality of married womens incomes (in 1968, 56 per cent and 50 per cent respectively). Taking the bottom quintile of pooled income as an arbitrary ‘poverty line’, we calculate that 15 per cent of married people would have been below this line in 1986 if all incomes were pooled. On the minimum sharing assumption, 52 per cent of married women, but only 11 per cent of married men would have been under the line.

Forgone income and motherhood: What do recent British data tell us?

Children affect women s opportunities in the labour markets of most advanced countries in three ways: an immediate effect on employment, and effects on longer term earning power and pension coverage. This paper quantifies these impacts on women s lifetime income for hypothetical illustrative British cases. New results, based on data collected during the 1990s, are compared with estimates from 1980. Although childrearing and employment have increasingly been combined over the period, the estimated loss of gross earnings associated with motherhood remains substantial. It still amounts to around half potential earnings post childbirth for less qualified sections of the British female labour force, but has become smaller for highly qualified women. The paper examines the effect of the tax/benefit system on the costs, and makes some assumptions about the distribution of net costs between mothers and fathers. It also shows how far motherhood jeopardizes financial security in old age, particularly for the least qualified.

Financial dependency on men: Have women born in 1958 broken free?

Abstract This paper examines some evidence from the 1958 NCDS birth cohort about what is actually happening to financial imbalance within British couples. The increased proportion of women in the labour force is not uniformly matched by an equivalent increase in the share of womens earnings in the household budget. While women approach half of the labour force, few women in couples of this, or other, generations bring home as much as half the total cash. A minority have successfully combined a continuous full‐time career with purchased childcare and an equal contribution to the couples cash, but many more still leave the labour market on motherhood and return to part‐time jobs. They remain, at least partially, financially dependent on pooling income with their partners, and, eventually, on derived benefits such as widows’ pensions. Dual career couples are matched by another minority, where neither has a job, the woman is doubly dependent on the mans state benefits, and arguably trapped by them into fur...