The Gender Gap in Subjective Poverty: A Comparative Study

In this article we use data covering 20 countries from the first round of the European Social Survey (ESS) collected in 2002-2003 to investigate how individual and contextual factors influence the subjective experience of economic strain among married and cohabitating men and women. Our main hypothesis is that countries with low labour force participation among women will tend to feature a gender gap in subjective economic wellbeing in the disfavour of female spouses/partners due to a negative association between labour force participation and economic strain at the individual level. However, we also present a secondary hypothesis about countervailing forces operating at the macro- level: in countries with a low aggregate labour force participation the economic wellbeing of women could be less dependent on own labour force participation because non-participation is supported by norms of income sharing within the household. We do find a strong negative association between own labour force participation and the subjective experience of economic strain, particularly among female partners, while we do not find consistent support for our secondary hypothesis about a negative interaction effect with high labour participation at the aggregate level.