Decision-Making

• • Edgell (1980) interviewed middle-class couples and found women controlled the “minor decisions” (e.g. choosing a colour scheme for decoration) and men took the “major decisions“ (e.g. buying a car or a house). Edgell found this correlated with the men earning most of the money and therefore choosing how to spend “his money”
• Weeks eat al (2001) found that men and women had a pooling system where they put their money in a joint account for household spending, while keeping some back for personal spending
• However Paul & Vogler (1989) found that men were still dominant in deciding how money in the joint account would be spent. They also observed an alternative model - the allowance system - where the money belonged to the man, but he gave his wife an allowance (like pocket money) to spend on the house and for herself
• The personal life perspective (put forward by Carol Smart) suggests that questions about who makes decisions and how resources are shared in a household today do not necessarily reflect structural inequalities in society, and are often personal to the individual families and their specific circumstances