Women's Role in Maintaining Households: Family Welfare and Sexual Inequality in Ghana

Over the last 30 years in Ghana, the proportion of households headed by women has increased and the composition of these households has shifted, with a growing percentage of households headed by the divorced and widowed. The paper assesses the implications of these trends for family welfare, and evaluates more broadly the current role of women in the economic maintenance of households with children, using data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey. The consumption levels of household members are highest in households in which women play a primary role in the provision of cash earnings either in partnership with their husbands, or as the primary cash providers. In all types of household, women work, on average, longer hours than men, but the differences between the sexes are greatest when men and women co-reside, and least when they do not. Access to resources from an economically committed male is found to be important to the welfare of female-headed households, which made up roughly 30 per cent of all households in Ghana in 1987/88. Because the majority of households in Ghana are maintained by the economic contribution of more than one member, headship often presents a misleading picture of the overall division of economic responsibilities within households.