Abstract
Income comparisons are often performed through the construction of reference groups based on sociodemographic characteristics. Gender is usually included in these characteristics only when the number of cases is large. However, it has not been demonstrated empirically that people compare their income within or between genders. This study analyses these comparisons using questions collected in three waves of the pretest of the German Socio-Economic Panel. Results suggest that income comparisons are mainly within groups of the same gender. On average, women compare more than men, and this is the case regardless of the gender composition in their sector of employment. Despite the predominance of within-gender comparisons, between-gender comparisons also exist. Indeed regressions that test the impact of income comparisons and reference groups on subjective well-being explain the data better when gender is not included as a dimension of reference.
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Notes
- 1.
92% of active men worked full-time and 62% of active women worked part-time in the reference period.
- 2.
In 2008, the gender pay gap was 23% in Germany.
- 3.
In a footnote, the author mentions that she added gender only because “The two referees of this paper asked to include gender in the reference group definition”. Therefore, the inclusion of gender was not originally planned in the article.
- 4.
The question wording comes from https://paneldata.org/questions/12781 (accessed 18 May 2017). The term (other) refers to people of the same sex. This term is excluded when the question is asked to people of the opposite sex. For more information about SOEP pretests see https://paneldata.org/studies/5 (accessed 18 May 2017).
- 5.
- 6.
To calculate the equivalised disposable income, we follow the so-called modified OECD equivalence scale, which gives a weight to all members of the household: 1.0 to the first adult; 0.5 to the second and each subsequent person aged 14 and over; 0.3 to each child aged under 14. Due to the dataset construction, we define adults as individuals aged 16 and over.
- 7.
Similar results have been found using ordered probit models (omitted for brevity and available upon request).
- 8.
We always regress the two IC measures in separate equations because they are highly collinear (Spearman’s rho = 0.83).
- 9.
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Ravazzini, L., Piekałkiewicz, M. (2019). With Whom Do We Compare Our Income? The Effect of Gendered Income Comparisons on Subjective Well-Being. In: Bianco, A., Conigliaro, P., Gnaldi, M. (eds) Italian Studies on Quality of Life. Social Indicators Research Series, vol 77. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06022-0_10
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