Increased similarity in employment behavior and earnings of men and women has been argued to increase economic inequality between households.

The article provides internationally comparative evidence for the last two decades for five countries.

We propose a novel method to study employment and earnings similarity separately, and independently from the overall earnings distribution.

We show that increased similarities among partners does not augment economic inequality to a relevant degree in none of the countries.

In most cases, the increase in dual-earner households, taken alone, would have led to lower levels of inequality than were observed.