Introduction

As Cantillon et al (2004) argue, what happens within households is often neglected. The family is a key site of distribution – of money, time and labour (see, for example, Lister, 2005), as well as other resources – but is often a ‘black box’, which is not investigated and in which equality is assumed. The qualitative study drawn on in this chapter is one element of a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) as part of the Gender Equality Network that tries to help open up this ‘black box’. The research aims to find out more about what goes on within heterosexual couples in relation to financial resources, and to use this to analyse the effects of changes in social security, tax credits and associated labour market policies. The project is timely given current policy changes in this area in the UK, which are affecting the resources available to men and women and the conditions under which these are given – and hence also gender relationships.

This chapter is based on some findings from semi-structured interviews with a sample made up of 30 low- to moderate-income heterosexual couples living in different areas of Britain, who had had children at some point, and where one or (mostly) both partners were of working age. Most were on means-tested benefits or tax credits at the time of the interview and/or had been in the past. The sample was drawn from a ‘booster’ group of low- to moderate-income households added to the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) in the late 1990s for the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). (They had last been interviewed for this purpose in 2001.) Interviews were carried out individually rather than jointly, in order to explore the different perceptions of men and women about factual information as well as views and feelings. This decision could be criticised as resulting in unnecessary duplication. But we found that in a number of cases, the man and woman had different degrees of knowledge about the facts of their household finances, as well as different views.