Rense Nieuwenhuis » household

Household classification, family diversity and poverty risks in Europe: Addressing a North-Western bias

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 14:58:15 +0000

European statistics and policies commonly rely on household typologies that classify households based on the number of adults and children living together. However, these typologies overlook family relationships and classify any non-standard arrangement into a broad residual category of ‘other’. This approach fails to capture increasing family diversity across Europe and introduces a persistent North-Western bias into data and policymaking. As a result, families that do not fit conventional models may be misclassified or entirely overlooked in poverty assessments and policy targeting. This is problematic since family structures vary substantially across European countries and became more diverse over time. This article introduces the Families in Households Typology (FHT), a classification system that uses relationship identifiers in EU-SILC microdata to reconstruct family structures within households. The FHT reduces the share of individuals placed in the residual ‘other’ category from over 20% to around 5%, particularly improving identification in Southern, Central, and Eastern European countries where multigenerational living arrangements are common. The results also show that nearly half of all single parents in Europe live with another adult and are not captured as single parents under conventional typologies. This has important implications for policy design: many single-parent households may be excluded from targeted support due to misclassification. Reclassifying households using the FHT also reshapes our understanding of living standards. The poverty risk of single parents is often overestimated when the Eurostat household typology is adopted. When single parents co-residing with kin or unrelated adults are correctly identified, their average poverty risk tends to be much lower. These findings highlight the importance of moving away from basic household counts towards relational classifications that more accurately reflect the diversity of family life across Europe, rather than using typologies that reflect the dominant family reality in Northern and Western Europe.

Read the full publication in the Journal of European Social Policy (JESP).

Van Lancker, W., Bartova, A., Thaning, M., & Nieuwenhuis, R. (2026). Household classification, family diversity and poverty risks in Europe: Addressing a North-Western bias. Journal of European Social Policy, 09589287261430496. https://doi.org/10.1177/09589287261430496

Family policy as an institutional context of economic inequality

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 09:00:54 +0000

Women’s rising earnings have reduced economic inequality in recent decades. In a new publication in Acta Sociologica, I show together with Ariana Need and Henk van der Kolk how family policies played a role in supporting women’s earnings. The paper makes an argument that family policies – traditionally considered in analyses of gender inequality – should also be incorporated in ‘mainstream’ analyses of economic inequality among households.

Abstract

It is demonstrated that family policies are an important aspect of the institutional context of earnings inequality among coupled households. Although seldom integrated into prominent analyses of economic inequality, women’s earnings are consistently found to reduce relative inequality among households. This means that family policies, as well-known determinants of women’s employment and earnings, are important contextual determinants of economic inequality. Using Luxembourg Income Study data from 18 OECD countries in the period 1981–2008, this study demonstrates that women have higher earnings, and that their earnings reduce inequality among coupled households more in institutional contexts with generous paid leave and public childcare. We found no sizeable association between financial support policies, such as family allowances and tax benefits to families with children, and the degree to which women’s earnings contribute to inequality among coupled households. Family policy arrangements that facilitate women’s employment and earnings are associated with less economic inequality among coupled households.

Nieuwenhuis, R., Need, A. & Van der Kolk, H. (2018). Family policy as an institutional context of economic inequality. Acta Sociologica. Forthcoming, online first: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0001699318760125

Invited Lecture: Reforming Social Security Lunch Seminar Series (University of Leiden)

Rense Nieuwenhuis — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 09:24:19 +0000

I was invited to present my research at the “Reforming Social Security Lunch Seminar Series” of the university of Leiden. The lecture will be on Friday, February 22nd. Below an abstract of this lecture is given.

Institutional and Demographic Explanations of Women’s Employment
Family policies have stimulated women’s employment in OECD countries in recent decades. Women also gained a stronger position on the labour market with higher status positions and higher wages. As a result of this stronger position of women on the labour market, earnings inequality between men and women, and within households, decreased. Of course, the strong increase of women’s employment was not only explained by the implementation of family policies, but for instance also by women’s rising educational levels and decreasing fertility. In my dissertation (to be completed this year) I address the interplay between these institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment.

First, I will outline the background of my dissertation. I argue that studies solely using macro-level data to study the outcomes of family policies on women’s employment are limited in two ways. First, they run the risk of committing an ecological fallacy, which is best illustrated by the observation that after 1985, the cross-country correlation between fertility and women’s employment turned positive. Second, I argue that studies using only macro-level data – despite the advantages of such data – are limited in the type of questions they can answer and cannot properly account for demographic changes. In other words: using solely macro-level data, studies cannot account for the combination of institutional and demographic explanations of women’s employment. I will illustrate my argument based on two chapters in my dissertation.

Secondly, I will detail a third chapter, which addresses the question whether the increased availability of family policies have the unexpected result of increased the earnings inequalities between households. I present a (very) preliminary analysis of a decomposition of earnings inequalities between households, in 17 OECD countries from 1975 to 2005. The results suggest that in societies with extensive reconciliation policies, women’s earnings have a stronger attenuating effect on the inequality between households. In contrast, in societies with extensive financial support policies, the attenuating effects of women’s earnings on household inequalities is weaker. It is well known that earnings inequalities between households have been increasing in recent decades. This analysis suggests that there is no ground to the concern that family policies have contributed to this trend. On the contrary: societies that provide an institutional context facilitating small inequalities within households, also tend to attenuate the inequalities between households.