Income Inequality by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2013-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

Women’s Work, Family Earnings, and Public Policy

Margarita Estévez-Abe and Tanja Hethey-Maier

WOMEN’S ECONOMIC POSITION WITHIN THE FAMILY

Male breadwinner households are more prevalent in some countries than in others. Even when both spouses—or partners—work, the degree to which women contribute to the family income varies from country to country. This chapter poses two questions: How does a woman’s economic status in a married or cohabiting couple vary from country to country? What labor market institutions and social policies affect women’s economic status in the family? The analysis is conducted for 16 OECD countries using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, around 2004.

Scholars have noted the role of the welfare state in reducing women’s economic dependency on their husbands (Sorensen and McLanahan 1987; Hobson 1990; Bianchi, Casper, and Peltola 1996, 1999; Stier and Mandel 2003). Typically, they conceptualize the wife’s dependency in terms of the gap between the husband’s and wife’s earnings, as a percentage of family earnings. When the gap is small, women are independent; when the gap is large, women are dependent. Bianchi and colleagues (1996, 1999) applied Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s three welfare state regimes—social democratic, liberal, and conservative—to explain the mean economic dependency levels of wives in different high-income countries (see Esping-Andersen 1990). In applying Esping-Andersen’s taxonomy to explain wives’ dependency on their husbands, Bianchi and colleagues expected wives in social democratic welfare states to be the most independent. Publicly provided child care and generous paid maternity and parental leaves actively enhance mothers’ labor market attachment and thus women’s relative economic position in the family. The tax systems in social democratic countries promote wives’ employment because taxes are individual-based and thus do not penalize working wives in the way household-based income tax does. They expect conservative welfare states to do just the opposite. In such states, policies are geared toward discouraging wives from working. In contrast, liberal welfare states—relatively small welfare states in predominantly English-speaking countries—are gender-neutral. Their policies neither promote nor discourage female employment. Thus, Bianchi and colleagues expected wives in conservative welfare states in continental European countries to be the least independent.1

Figure 9.1 illustrates cross-national variation in the shares of three different types of heterosexual married and cohabiting couples.2 The bars on the left show the shares of heterosexual “male-breadwinner households,” in which wives’ contribution to family earnings is less than 30 percent. (For the sake of simplicity, we refer to female and male partners who are not married but cohabit as “wives” and “husbands.”) The bars on the right indicate the shares of what we call “female-breadwinner households,” in which husbands’ earnings fall below 30 percent of the family earnings. The bars in the middle represent the shares of “egalitarian households,” where wives’ earnings constitute equal to or more than 30 percent but less than 70 percent of the family earnings. Figure 9.1 sorts countries into three groups that correspond to Esping-Andersen’s three welfare regimes. The social democratic regime, which consists of the Nordic countries—Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden—appears to be the most gender egalitarian.

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