Incorporating Gender Inequality into Income Distribution Research

Abstract

Income distribution research assumes equal sharing of resources within the household. This assumption has been criticized for leading to an underestimation of the extent of gender inequality in modern societies. In this paper two alternative methods of deriving an income distribution are presented, both of which make other assumptions about the extent of sharing of resources within households. The first is a partial sharing distribution modelled from survey data; the second is a distribution of individual income, i.e. no sharing of resources. The methods are then applied to income distribution data from the 1991 Swedish Level of Living Survey and the respective distributions are compared with the baseline distribution, assuming equal pooling of resources. As expected, the results indicate that differences between men and women increase but the extent of this increase is somewhat less than expected. Nevertheless, the analysis highlights how gender inequality can be brought into the field of income distribution.