Women and household cash management: evidence from financial diaries in India

Abstract

Using an innovative data set that involved 90 poor women logging in daily household financial diaries for a period of 11 months in 2008–2009 in the town of Ramanagaram, Karnataka, India, we address the following question: Do women use money differently from men? Comparing weekly cash expenses of 19 female-headed households with similar male-headed households, we arrived at several nuanced conclusions. For example, among the poorest households, women showed a greater tendency towards spending household cash on food items and they spent less on fuel and entertainment as compared with the male-headed households. Among the microfinance borrowers in our sample, the poorest among the female-headed households showed spending on jewellery, in contrast to the borrowers in the male-headed households spending on household assets. The fact that financial diaries data are more fine-grained and detailed than one-off surveys allows us to generalize these results for the urban-poor working in the informal sector.