The Interplay between Women’s Earnings and the Income Distribution: Cross-National Analysis of Latin-American and Anglophone Countries

• In Event: 4363 - Stratification, Families, and Gender

Abstract

Since the 1980s, an inter-disciplinary literature drawing heavily from economics and sociology has addressed the interplay between women’s earnings and household income. We tackle three such questions: (1) What share of household income is contributed by women household members? (2) Do women’s earnings increase or mitigate inter-household income inequality? (3) To what extent do women’s earnings enable their households to escape income poverty and/or to attain middle-class income levels? In recent years, as men’s earnings have stagnated or fallen in many countries, and as poverty reduction has become the leading goal of international organizations such as the United Nations, these questions have attracted increasing attention.

We extend current scholarship by examining this set of questions in five middle-income countries in Latin America for which we have access to detailed, high-quality microdata: Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. To help identify what uniquely characterizes this group of middle-income countries, and to benchmark their outcomes against those in other countries, we compare them to five high-income Anglophone countries that have been the subject of past research: Australia, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Database, we focus on couple-headed households in which both the head and the partner of the head are aged 25-59. We find some expected differences between the two groups of countries across three measures of the income distribution (the dispersion of household income, the share of partnered adults that lives in poverty, and the share whose household income places them in the middle class). However, our main finding is that the contribution of women's earnings and transfers to the shape of the income distribution, and thus their potentially equalizing impact, is minimal in the Latin American cluster of countries in absolute terms and relative to the Anglophone cluster of countries. We discuss underlying reasons for differences in the impact of women’s earnings between country clusters.

Authors

• Janet Gornick, The Graduate Center / City University of New York

• Berglind Ragnarsdottir, Graduate Center, City University of New York

• Leslie McCall, City University of New York-Graduate Center