Asymmetric power within couples: the gendered effect of children and employment on entitlement to household income

This paper investigates the gendered and non-gendered determinants of individual “entitlements” to household resources. We model households as sites of cooperative conflict (Sen 1990), wherein entitlements represent the results of cooperation to increase total household resources and of conflict over individual access to those resources. We use individual answers to satisfaction with household income from the British Household Panel Survey (1996-2005) for couples, stripping out the effects of unobserved heterogeneity. Results suggest the co-existence of gendered and symmetric effects of employment and children on both aspects of entitlement, over and above partners’ relative wage rates