In the Netherlands, the difference in how much money people make has been kinda steady. But if you look closer, there’s been some big changes. Over the past 40 years, the money gap has gone up by 12%, mostly in the last 10 years.
What’s interesting is that women with lower incomes are working more now, kind of slowing down the rise in inequality. On the flip side, guys’ incomes haven’t gone up much in those 40 years, according to research from Leiden University.
“This increase is lower than in Anglo-Saxon countries, for example,” the researchers explain. “But if you break down the figures into higher and lower income groups, you see that behind this average there are substantial differences.”
Equalizing effect
Men’s incomes are spreading apart more, meaning some make a lot more while others make less. On the flip side, women’s incomes are getting closer, mainly because women in lower-income brackets are working more. One interesting thing is that the richest 1% now have more spending money, and this is partly because of tax breaks they got in the last 10 years.
“If women in the lower-income groups had not started working so much more, there would have been a much greater increase in inequality in the Netherlands,” the researchers say.
The researchers found that at the lower end of the income scale, more people weren’t working due to reasons like unemployment and illness. Additionally, the number of folks with permanent job contracts has dropped the most in this group.
“These results are an important message for the parties in the coalition talks: low-income earners have faced increasingly precarious contracts, stagnant or even declining wages and more illness, forcing them to make very different choices,” they explain. “If there is one thing this study shows, it is that there is no more for further pressure on people’s livelihoods; there is no more give.”
Disposable income
The study found that from 1981 to 2021, the average household money people have after expenses went up by 1.1% each year. The big driver behind this was the increase in women’s income, rising by 3.4% every year compared to just 0.3% for men. More women working played a big part: in the last 40 years, the number of women with jobs went up by 2% each year, and on top of that, women worked about 0.8% more hours per week over the past two decades.
“So people’s disposable income has increased mainly because women have started working more,” the authors continue. “The consequence, however, is that there is less time available for informal care, for example.”
The researchers also noticed big differences in how families are set up based on how much money they make. In the lower-income groups, there’s a higher increase in the percentage of people living on their own or being single parents. Plus, there are fewer families with kids in these lower-income groups. On the flip side, the family setup has stayed pretty similar in the higher-income groups.
