Are Married Women More Deprived Than Their Husbands?

Abstract

Conventional methods of analysis of poverty assume resources are shared so that each individual in a household/family has the same standard of living. This article measures differences between spouses in a large sample in indicators of deprivation of the type used in recent studies of poverty at household level. The quite limited overall imbalance in measured deprivation in favour of husbands suggests that applying such indicators to individuals will not reveal a substantial reservoir of hidden poverty among wives in non-poor households, nor much greater deprivation among women than men in poor households. This points to the need to develop more sensitive indicators of deprivation designed to measure individual living standards and poverty status, which can fit within the framework of traditional poverty research using large samples. It also highlights the need for clarification of the underlying poverty concept.