These effects can be broken down into four components: women’s employment rates, women’s work intensity, the share of females in skilled jobs, and the overall returns to female employment (wage effect). The figure shows that if the proportion of households with a working female had remained the same as in the mid-1980s, household income inequality would have increased, on average across the OECD countries, by an additional 0.8 point, i.e. an increase in the Gini from 28.2 to 31.6 instead of 30.8. The equalising impact of rising female employment was larger in countries such as Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom, where the share of working-age households with female workers increased greatly: this contributed to lowering inequality by 2.5 or more Gini points in these countries.