Money in Intimate Relationships: Wealth Inequalities and Changing Gender Relations

How couples manage their money is not merely a matter of individual preferences, but also reflects structural inequalities, gendered negotiations, societal norms, and institutional embeddednes. The project “Money in Intimate Relationships: Wealth Inequalities and Changing Gender Relations” investigates how financial decisions are made within couple households and how the associated patterns of inequality shift in the context of broader societal transformations.

The project builds on a relational perspective on social inequality. Rather than conceptualizing economic resources, particularly wealth, as individual endowments or stocks, they are understood as claims to economic agency: As socially secured access to property, financial security, and investment opportunities. The focus lies not only on distributions of economic resources, but also on entitlements, rights of disposition and power relations within couples.

The project poses the question of how unequal claims to economic resources—such as to wealth, income, institutionalized forms of security, as well as normative expectations—shape financial decision-making within couple relationships. Its focus lies in the individual and joint practices of money management and investment decisions, which are situated in ambiguous values of autonomy, solidarity, and dependence. Using quantitative analyses, the project investigates how the determinants of financial practices within couples change across time and social contexts.

Several ongoing collaborations contribute to this project, addressing current challenges of transforming societies such as partnership and marriage beliefs, the division of housework and financial responsibilities, and online dating. Empirical data are drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the pairfam panel study, and original data.

The objective of this project is to make financial practices within couples visible as a key dimension in the reproduction of social inequality.