Gender, poverty and sharing within households
Trish Hill
Social Policy Research Centre
Contact Email:   p.hillunsw.edu.au

It has been argued that the extent of women's poverty, and the categories of women who experience poverty, have been obscured by mainstream poverty analyses that measure poverty at the household or income unit level and assume the equal sharing of resources within households. Research suggests that the equal sharing assumption may not hold in many households. An alternative concept of poverty might measure resources at the level of the individual and assess the adequacy of resources that are independently controlled by each household member.

This approach would identify the resources that each adult individual brings to the household and model various sharing possibilities within the household. This paper outlines the findings from an analysis of the Household Expenditure Survey that employs a number of alternative income sharing
models to determine individual income poverty rates and the factors that are most strongly associated with income poverty for men and women. The analysis reveals that changing the assumption of equal sharing has a minimal impact on the individual income poverty rates of men, but significantly increases the individual income poverty rates of women.

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