This year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Claudia Goldin, is an optimist at heart. Some might say that she needs to be. After all, her research on long-term trends in economic inequality between men and women has demonstrated, time and again, that progress for women is anything but linear.
Goldin’s now-famous “U-shaped curve” shows that women in the US were pushed out of many occupations during the 19th century, such that later generations then had to spend the 20th century regaining lost ground.
If it happened before, could it not happen again?
Illustration: Mountain People
As a quote often attributed to French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir advises: “Never forget that it only takes a single political, economic or religious crisis for women’s rights to be called into question.”
Nonetheless, Goldin believes that wealthy countries are on the cusp of what she calls the “last chapter” of the “grand gender convergence.”
This could be achieved through a combination of changes at work (eliminating “greedy” jobs that demand availability during evenings and weekends) and at home (through equal sharing of housework and caregiving), she said.
Now that women are free to make the same career choices as men, these advances could reduce the earnings gap to zero.
Yet as overdue as such changes are, our own work suggests that they will not be enough to reduce economic inequality between men and women. Even if women do someday get equal pay for equal work, they will continue to lag men, because economic inequality today around the world is increasingly about wealth, not wages.
Wealth is the term social scientists use to qualify what others refer to as capital, assets, property, estates or patrimony. It is, simply put, a store of value.
As French economist Thomas Piketty and his team have shown, wealth inequality is a central and defining characteristic of contemporary capitalism.
According to their 2022 World Inequality Report, the wealthiest 10 percent of households own more than three-quarters (76 percent) of global wealth, whereas the bottom 50 percent own a mere 2 percent.
While privileged social classes monopolize wealth and strive to preserve it from one generation to the next, most others are persistently deprived of it.
Although Piketty’s work has become part of mainstream thinking, pioneering statistical studies have demonstrated the extent to which wealth inequality is also gendered.
For example, a German study based on data from 2002 to 2012 identified a significant gender wealth gap not only between single men and single women, but also within unmarried and married couples.
Similarly, economists Nicolas Fremeaux and Marion Leturcq have shown that France’s gender wealth gap has widened steadily in favor of men, rising from 9 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2015.
They have also found that men systematically own more capital than women, whether it be housing, land, or financial and professional assets. Notably, the gap was modest between working-class men and women (as neither partner accumulates much wealth), and much wider in the upper income cohorts.
This gap has remained hidden and underappreciated, largely because it is difficult to document. In most countries, wealth data are collected by household (either through surveys or tax filings) rather than at the level of individuals. With equal ownership in households usually presumed, the standard approach tends to mask the reality of power dynamics concerning the control of assets. These obstacles help to explain the absence of gender as a variable even in Piketty’s 700-page magnum opus Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
So, how does one estimate the individual wealth of a man or a woman when they jointly own property as a couple, and when most surveys group together everyone living under the same roof?
As sociologists working on the topic for the past 20 years, we found a way around this difficulty by focusing on the extraordinary moments when couples break up and family estates are transferred to next of kin. That is when power dynamics come to light, revealing who really controls and benefits from family wealth.
Obviously, part of the gender wealth gap is linked to what happens in the labor market. The diverging careers and unequal earnings that Goldin studies imply that it is easier for men to put money aside.
However, nowadays, an individual’s wealth comes less from what they have personally accumulated and more from what they have received, usually through inheritance.
We find that the gender wealth gap takes root in the family, where it is tacitly reproduced by men and women as they carry out the roles of spouses and partners, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers and sisters.
However, it is also reinforced by legal professionals — lawyers, judges, notary publics and others — who tend to condone an unequal sharing of wealth between siblings or former spouses. And, of course, women are socialized to accept these unequal outcomes, often in the name of preserving familial peace or ensuring the maintenance and transmission of the family’s social status.
The perpetuation of gender hierarchies thus goes hand in hand with the reproduction of social class. Consider the 2019 divorce between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and novelist MacKenzie Scott. The couple’s net worth was more than US$130 billion, including 16 percent of Amazon’s stock. As the divorce laws in Washington State, where the couple resided, stipulate that all assets acquired during marriage must be divided into two equal parts, some Amazon shareholders feared what would happen to the company if Scott claimed the half to which she was legally entitled.
However, a few months after the decision to divorce, Scott announced that she was “happy to be giving him all my interests in the Washington Post and Blue Origin, and 75 percent of our Amazon stock plus voting control of my shares to support his continued contributions with the teams of these incredible companies.”
After two decades of researching the topic, we have found such outcomes to be fairly common. When couples break up, men tend to keep ownership of “structuring assets” such as land, real estate or companies, while women receive cash payments (if anything).
Even when women do keep productive assets, they are usually the least profitable ones.
Gendered wealth inequality is also revealed — and reproduced — at the moment of inheritance. Consider the case of a middle-class family in the southwest of France. When bakery owner Marcelle Pilon retired in 1992, she had to choose a successor to the family business. A widow of 15 years, she decided to give the business, and the large house attached to it, to her 43-year-old son Pierre, who had been working with her making pastry.
However, Pierre had three sisters, and French law technically requires that inheritances be equally shared. To circumvent this condition, Marcelle arranged for each of her daughters to receive some real estate, too; but as these assets were much less valuable than the bakery and the house, it was agreed that Pierre would provide his sisters with free bread and pastries, daily, for the following 10 years. In the event, the deal was scrupulously upheld under the watchful eye of the heirs’ mother, who made sure that each baguette and croissant was duly delivered.
Not only did this arrangement imply that the daughters must live near the family bakery to collect their daily bread; it also left other undeclared transfers in the shadows. In fact, Pierre had already previously received from his parents a pastry business — worth almost 100,000 euros (US$107,000) — which was later merged with the family bread bakery, but no one had bothered to mention that to the authorities.
The justification for this apparent favoritism was that the parents had paid for their daughters’ higher education, while Pierre had gone to work for the family business. Yet when one of us asked the sisters directly about the fairness of the arrangement, they challenged the official version.
In reality, they said, they had financed their education mainly through scholarships and had worked for free at one time or another in their parents’ shop, whereas Pierre had immediately been given a wage and a percentage of pastry sales. The sisters had legitimate grievances, but they dared not file a legal claim.
Maintaining the family business and preserving the peace had priority over considerations of fairness between the siblings.
All of this matters because we have left the era when livelihoods depended primarily on wages and welfare provisions. We have entered what sociologists Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings call the “asset economy.” More than at any time in the past century, owning wealth has become the key not only to accessing increasingly expensive higher education, housing and healthcare, but also to securing credit, self-employment or income. In uncertain times characterized by precarious work and disappearing safety nets, the ability to build wealth has gained existential importance.
The goal of feminist empowerment is to teach women to act as autonomous economic agents. Yet now that income is increasingly valued less than wealth, women stand to lose the most once again. Far from being merely a topic for academic study and debate, this broad shift has profound implications for women’s everyday lives. It tells us that working-class single mothers will continue to face daunting choices and hardships for themselves and their children; and it means that business ventures will remain the preserve of men.
Even romantic prospects might once again be matched with economic considerations. As British economist Peter Kenway said, we could soon see a “Jane Austen-style marriage market, as millennials without an inheritance try to partner up with millennials who stand to inherit a house.”
Indeed, the gender wealth gap affects all conjugal life, because men’s wealth advantages reinforce their power to make lifestyle choices (such as where to live) that might affect their spouses’ or partners’ professional careers.
Worse, in cases of domestic violence, it is well known that financial dependence can prevent women from leaving.
All these inequalities are revealed and reinforced through break-ups — which are increasingly common — and widowhood, which more often affects women, given their longer average lifespans and tendency to be somewhat younger than their male partners. As more couples choose to separate their assets (either by living in marriage-like relationships or by signing prenuptial agreements), widows are less protected than before. Gendered wealth inequality thus threatens to usher in a future of women who are burdened in old age, dependent on pensions that generally pay less than men’s and with little, if any, wealth.
Goldin’s work captured the essence of an era in which the gender employment and wage gap was gradually narrowed — especially in the more prestigious professions — owing to policies and technologies that improved the labor market and strengthened women’s reproductive rights.
Yet as Goldin herself points out, there is still much to be achieved and past progress can be easily undone, as demonstrated by the recent restrictions (many of which are tantamount to outright bans) on abortion in the US.
Looking ahead, policymakers and researchers will need to start addressing the gender wealth gap before our societies revert to the kind of inequalities that characterized the 19th century. That means focusing on dynamics not only in the labor market or on Wall Street, but also within households and families.
We urgently need new studies in history, sociology and economics to understand the full scale and implications of the gender wealth gap. Just as Goldin recoded an impressive mass of 18th and 19th-century archival data to show that women listed merely as “wives” could in fact be considered “workers,” we need researchers to lift the veil on household wealth. What share do women actually control?
If we are ever going to fix the problem, we first need an army of Goldins to document and describe it.
Ironically, precisely when women in many countries have become more educated than men and have secured the right to access any occupation at the same pay as their male counterparts, the locus of economic inequality has shifted. Wealth is what matters most now and the deck is stacked against women once again.
French philosopher Albert Camus (also a Nobel laureate) famously wrote that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
In fact, one must imagine Sisyphus a woman.
Celine Bessiere is a professor of sociology at Paris Dauphine University. Sibylle Gollac is a research fellow in sociology at the Paris-based National Center for Scientific Research.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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