From Households to Individuals: a Gendered Approach to Functional Income Inequality in the Eurozone

This paper analyses functional income inequality at the individual level using data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for 19 Eurozone countries over the period 2008-2022. It integrates the personal and functional distribution of income by developing a typology of income groups based on women's and men's relationships to production and distribution processes, including state intervention and inter- and intra-family transfers. To address the limitations of equivalised income measures from a gender perspective, the paper proposes individualising income through four stylised income-sharing scenarios, ranging from full pooling to complete individualisation. The results show that official income measures tend to underestimate poverty rates for both men and women and that both within- and between-income group inequalities represent important dimensions of economic disparity.