The hidden gender gap in well-being: A study by Celine Bessier and Sybil Gollack - Project Syndicate

The importance of equal pay and other labor market gains for women is undeniable, but progress toward economic equality with men remains fragile and incomplete. As inequality becomes less about wages and more about wealth, women once again face deep structural disadvantages.

Clodia Goldin, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in Economics

is an optimist by nature. You might say she needs to be. After all, her research on long-term trends in economic inequality between men and women has shown time and again that progress for women is not linear. Goldin's famous "U-curve" shows that in the nineteenth century, women in the''responsibilities and childcare). Because women are now free to choose the same careers as men, these gains could close the wage gap.

Whatever these changes delay, however, our work suggests that it will not be enough to reduce economic inequality between men and women. Even if women in the future receive equal pay for equal work, they will continue to lag behind men because economic inequality today - both in the U.S. and globally - is increasingly tied to wealth, not wages.

Wealth is a term

which sociologists use to define what others call capital, assets, property, or''legacy. Simply put, it is a means of preserving value. And as French economist Thomas Piketty and his team have shown, inequality of wealth ownership is a central and defining feature of modern capitalism. According to their 2022 World Inequality Report, the richest 10% of households own more than three-quarters (76%) of global wealth, while the bottom 50% have just 2%. Elite social classes monopolize wealth and tend to retain it from one generation to the next, while most others are permanently deprived of it.

Although Piketty's work

h3>has become part of everyday thinking, initial statistical studies have demonstrated the extent to which the possession of wealth also depends on gender.''groups.

This gap has long remained hidden and underestimated, mainly because of the difficulty of documenting it. In most countries, wealth data are collected for households (through surveys or tax returns) rather than at the individual level. Because household co-ownership is generally assumed to be equal, the standard approach tends to cover up the reality of demonstrating power dynamics with respect to control over assets. These obstacles explain the absence of gender as a variable even in Piketty's 700-page major work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

How does one measure the individual wealth of a man or woman?

When they together own real estate in''as a married couple and when most surveys group everyone living under the same roof? As sociologists working on this topic for the past 20 years, we have found a way around this difficulty by focusing on moments of couple breakup and the transfer of inheritance to relatives. That's when the power dynamics become apparent, allowing us to figure out who actually controls and benefits from family wealth.

Obviously, part of the gender gap in wealth ownership is related to what happens in the labor market. The diverging careers and unequal earnings that Goldin addresses imply that men have an easier time saving. But today, an individual's wealth no longer depends so much on what he or she has personally accumulated as on''companies'." After two decades of research, we have found that such results are very common. When couples divorce, men tend to keep 'structuring assets' such as land, real estate or companies, while women get cash (if anything). Even when women do retain productive assets, they are usually the least profitable.

Gender inequality in the possession of wealth is also evident and amplified at the point of inheritance. Consider the case of a middle-class family in the south of France.

But Pierre had three sisters, and French law technically dictates an equal division of inheritances. To get around this condition, Marcelle decided to give each of her daughters a piece of real estate, too; but since these assets were far less valuable than the bakery and the house, it was agreed that Pierre would provide his sisters with free bread and pastries every day for the next ten years. In the end, the deal was strictly enforced under the careful supervision of the heirs' mother, who made sure that every baguette and croissant was delivered on time.

But it wasn't just this deal that meant the daughters had to live near the family bakery to get their''daily bread; it also left other unofficial transfers in the shadows. In fact, Pierre had previously received a bakery from his parents - worth close to 100,000 euros ($107,000) - which was later merged with the family bread bakery. But it never occurred to anyone to mention it to authorities.

The justification for this apparent privilege was that the parents paid for their daughters' education while Pierre went to work in the family business. However, when one of us asked the sisters directly about the fairness of the deal, they disputed the official version. In fact, they said that they predominantly funded their education through scholarships and worked for free in the parents' store at one time or another, while''Pierre got his salary and a percentage of the bake sale at once. The sisters had legitimate grievances, but they dared not sue in court. Maintaining the family business and keeping the peace took precedence over validity between the siblings.

This all matters because we have left an era where livelihoods were largely dependent on wages and social security. We have entered an era that sociologists Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings call the "asset economy." More than ever before in the last century, the possession of wealth has become key not only to accessing ever more expensive higher education, housing, and health care, but also to obtaining credit, self-employment, or income. In uncertain times,''characterized by precarious jobs and disappearing social guarantees, the ability to accumulate wealth has become essential.

The goal of feminist emancipation was to teach women to act as autonomous economic agents. But now that income is increasingly less valued than wealth, women once again have the most to lose. Far from being just a topic for academic research and debate, this broad change has profound implications for women's everyday lives. It tells us that working single mothers will continue to face daunting choices and challenges for themselves and their children, and means that business ventures will remain privileged''are reinforced through breakups, which are becoming more common, and through widowhood, which most often affects women, due to their longer average life spans and tendency to be somewhat younger than their male partners. As more and more couples choose to share their assets (either by living in a marriage-like relationship or by entering into prenuptial agreements), widows are now less protected than before. Gender inequality in the possession of wealth thus threatens to enact a future for women who are burdened by old age, dependent on pensions that tend to be smaller than men's, and with little or no wealth.

Goldin's work captures the essence of an era when the gap in employment and earnings between the sexes is gradually''has been declining-especially in the more prestigious professions-thanks to policies and technologies that improve the labor market and strengthen women's reproductive rights. However, as Goldin herself rightly points out, much more needs to be done, and past progress can easily be eroded, as recent restrictions (many of which amount to outright bans) on abortion in the US attest.

In the future, policymakers and researchers must begin to address the gender gap in the possession of wealth before our societies return to the type of inequality that characterized the nineteenth century. This means focusing not only on dynamics in the labor market or on Wall Street, but also within families and households.

We urgently need new research on''history, sociology, and economics to understand the full extent and implications of the gender gap in the possession of wealth. As Goldin proved by collecting a huge amount of archival data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to show that women who were labeled simply 'wives' could actually be considered 'workers', we need researchers to lift the veil on family wealth. How much of the wealth do women actually control? If we ever want to solve this problem, we first need an army of Goldins to describe and characterize it.

It is ironic that at precisely the time when women in many countries have received more higher education than men and secured the right to access any profession with the same pay as men, wealth is central.