Marriage and cohabitation

It is a general and also striking characteristic of the partners’ control over financial resources that the pooling system seems to be the most widespread management system (Table 6). Al-most 60 percent of the couples said that they pooled their incomes. The separate system is used by one third of the partners who live together in one household. His or her exclusive control over the income is quite rare. Cooperation is even more common when it comes to decision-making power. Almost 90 percent of the female partners state that they make finan-cial decisions together with their male partners.

This first results supports Burgoyne (1990), who carried out a qualitative study on married couples. She found that in many couples the discourse of equality dominates “[...] [C]ouples almost invariably articulate discourses of equality, arguing that marriage should be based on equal sharing and that all money should be shared equally, regardless of who contributes what to the household.” (Vogler, 1998, 16) This ideology of equality can also be detected in this survey. Most couples perceive that they make financial decisions together and that they pool their income.

There are no gender differences between his and her control over the income. The male part-ners decide only slightly more often than the female partpart-ners. Since we know that the power bases are distributed inequally in the population, e.g. women have a lower income and

em-ployment status, this finding suggests that this unequal allocation of power bases does not translate into a general power disadvantage for women – at least not in their perceptions.

However, according to previous studies (Lott, 2009; Vogler, 1998), there are differences in couples’ control over the income between marriages and cohabitations. Indeed, if one con-siders the type of relationship, the picture is a little different (Table 6). Whether a couple is married or cohabiting matters for control over the income. According to the chi-squared test, the relation between marriage and cohabitation and control over the income is significant (p <0.001).

Marriages and cohabitations differ predominantly with regard to the separate system, defined as noncooperation, and the joint pool, defined as cooperation. According to the female re-spondents, the separate system is much less likely to be used in the married couples. Only 21 percent manage their money separately or partly separately. However, more than half of the female partners (66 percent) say that they pool their earnings with their partners. In the cohab-itations, the reverse can be observed: nearly 70 percent of the cohabiting couples separate their incomes, while less than a third (27 percent) uses the joint pool. Regarding decision-making, the male partners are slightly more often perceived to have exclusive decision-making power in the marriages. In the cohabitations, the frequencies of his or her exclusive decision-making are more or less equal.

Interestingly, there is no difference between married and cohabiting couples for decision-making. The majority of the women say that they make their decisions together with their partners – regardless of whether they are married or not. Chapter 3.9 discussed the subjec-tivity of the financial power outcomes. It argued that control over the income is closer than financial decision-making to an objective arrangement in the relationship. The large contrast between the cohabiting and the married couples with regard to controlling the finances sup-ports this assumption. This difference indicates that the interviewees indeed seem to have in mind a specific practice, e.g. the organization of bank accounts, when answering the survey question. The answers for control over the income are more responsive to the type of relation-ship. But how can the different patterns of controlling the income in the marriages and the cohabitiations be explained?

Financial power outcomes

In % general married cohabiting

Control over income

Separated 31.50 21.54 67.75

She 5.31 6.03 2.72

He 5.05 5.85 2.14

Pool 58.14 66.58 27.39

N 2,988 2,293 695

Decision-making

She 4.51 4.37 5.11

He 6.49 6.87 4.92

Both 89.00 88.76 89.97

N 1,992 1,582 410

Note: Column percentages weighted with cross-sectional weight;

N not weighted; Female respondents; Data source: SOEP 2004, 2005, and 2008 (control over income), SOEP 2005 and 2008 (decision-making)

Table 6: Financial power outcomes in marriages and cohabitations

Three main reasons for an explanation of the differences between marriages and cohabita-tions come to mind. First, gender role attitudes or partners’ gender ideologies might underlie the way of controlling the finances. As Elizabeth (2001, 389) puts it, cohabitation “can be strategically deployed to indicate resistance to some, but not necessarily all, of the conven-tions of marriage”. Regarding the control of finances, cohabiting couples seem to refuse the convention of pooling incomes. Vogler (1998) points out that the 50:50 ideology is frequently implemented by cohabiting couples. 50:50 not only means that partners share equally, but also that they contribute equally. In order to implement the rule of equity, partners have to differentiate between her and his money. The separate system is therefore much more useful than the joint pool. Furthermore, studies have shown that cohabiting couples, who are living in a “trial marriage”, make fewer investments in the relationship than married couples. The sharing of earnings can be perceived as an investment cohabiting couples hesitate or fear to make. Hence, cooperation is much less frequent than in marriages. However, this attitude might change with the duration of the relationship. Do couples who cohabit for a longer pe-riod of time still separate their earnings? Or do they increasingly resemble married couples?

020406080100Percent

Married Cohabiting

up to 7 7−14 15 or more up to 7 7−14 15 or more Her response

Control over income

Separated She

He Pool

Data source: SOEP 2004, 2005, and 2008

020406080100Percent

Married Cohabiting

up to 7 7−14 15 or more up to 7 7−14 15 or more Her response

Decision−making

She He

Both

Data source: SOEP 2005 and 2008

Figure 4: Financial power outcomes and the duration of the relationship

Thus, second, the difference between cohabitations and marriages might be due to the duration of the relationship. Cohabitations still last for a much shorter period of time than marriages do. They often function as “trial marriages” and end through one of two events:

marriage or dissolution. The number of cohabiting couples who never get married is still rel-atively small. Figure 4 gives a general idea about duration of the relationship and control over the resources in the marriages and the cohabitations. The separate system is used less often and the joint pool more often if the partners have been together for a longer period of time. The relation even seems to be linear. The increase of the joint pool and the decrease of the separate system can be observed especially in the marriages. In the cohabitations, this tendency is also present, but the separate system continues to dominate in couples which have been together for 14 years or more. Thus, power allocation within couples becomes more traditional over time – but primarily in marriages. Furthermore, one partner’s exclusive control is most common in marriages but less common in cohabitations of a long duration. Can this result also be found for decision-making power? Here, we observe stronger gender differences: she has less and he has more power in marriages of a longer duration. Interestingly, this relation is reversed in the cohabitations: she has more and he has less power if the partners have been cohabiting for a longer period of time. This also shows that arrangements in marriages are more often traditional and in cohabitations more often reverse traditional. However, the chi-squared test indicates that the relation between duration of relationship and type of relationship is signif-icant for control over resources (p < 0.001), but not for decision-making. The interpretation that cohabiting couples implement non-traditional or reverse-traditional arrangements more often than marriages do should be taken with a pinch of salt.³⁵

35Note that one has to be cautious to interpret the findings as developments over time. The self-selection of couples in different groups of duration might step in.

A third and final reason for the difference between married and cohabiting couples could be the fact that the gender wage gap in marriages is usually greater than that in cohabitations.

The mean value of the relative earnings of the female partners is around 28 percent in the marriages and around 42 percent in the cohabitations. The gap is even larger if the median is taken into account. The married women earn approximately 23 percent and the unmarried women 43 percent of the total income of both partners. Heckert et al. (1998) have developed a typology to characterize partners’ distribution of earnings. They differentiate between “tra-ditional arrangements”, where she earns up to 25 percent of the total income, “new-tra“tra-ditional arrangements”, where she has a share of 25 to 50 percent of the total earnings, “non-tradtional arrangements”, where she earns 50 to 75 percent, and “reverse-traditional arrangements”, where she earns 75 to 100 percent of the total income. This typology can be applied to vari-ous other arrangements within couples, e.g. the division of hvari-ousework. In this sense, married couples predominantly have new-traditional patterns of earnings, while cohabitations almost always have a non-traditional allocation of incomes. Note that Heckert’s typology is related only to relative earnings of partners. Here, the use of these labels does not refer to specific gender role attitudes or to gender ideology.