The Gender of Capital

The

GENDER

CAPITAL

The

GENDER

CAPITAL

How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality

Céline Bessière

Sibylle Gollac

Translated by

Juliette Rogers

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England / 2023

SibylleGollac

First published in French as Le genre du capital:

Comment la famille reproduit les inégalités,

©Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2020

Printed in the United States of America

First printing

Cover design by Tim Jones

Cover photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts

courtesy of Getty Images

978-0-674-29280-2 (EPUB)

978-0-674-29279-6 (PDF)

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from

the Library of Congress

ISBN: 978-0-674-27179-1 (alk. paper)

To Amélina, Faial, Joan, and Toni

Contents

Preface to the English Edition ix

Introduction 1

1. e Family as an Economic Institution 15

2. Family Reproduction versus Women’s Wealth 39

3. Acquit the Strong and Condemn the Weak 71

4. Sexist Accounting under Cover of Egalitarian Law 105

5. Tax Avoidance and Family Peace at the Expense of Women 133

6. Can the Courts Make Up for Wealth Inequality? 157

7. e Particular Hardships of Proletarian Ex-Wives 186

Conclusion 212

Statistical Appendixes 223

Ethnographic and Archival Sources 263

Notes 269

Acknowledgments 311

Index 315

Preface to the English Edition

is book rst came out in France in February2020, a month before the

government ordered the population to shelter in place to slow the emerging

COVID-19 pandemic. In France, as in many other countries, the pandemic

and its management by public authorities accentuated and exposed inequal-

ities between families and within families. Lockdowns exacerbated the

eects of housing inequality: living conditions varied according to the size

of the primary residence and the possibility to move to a secondary home.

School closures made parents’ ability to help their children with their

schoolwork crucial, deepening the divide between white-collar parents who

could work from home and essential workers, more often women, who were

left to solve an impossible equation: caring for their children at home while

going to work. Women performed the bulk of the additional domestic labor

that resulted from the lockdowns and the pandemic. In particular, they

cared for children, the elderly, and sick persons, leading to a signicant deg-

radation of their own (remote) working and living conditions. Women

were more likely to take measures to stop working, which increased the

career and income inequalities between men and women. Being shut into

the domestic sphere increased the incidence of domestic violence, of which

women and children are the primary victims. e pandemic thus laid bare

the material dimensions of gender and class inequalities in the family.

is was also the goal of our book: to document the relations of eco-

nomic domination that are produced by the heteronormative family and

x PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

to focus the analysis of the gender order and the class society on these rela-

tions. Getting married (or not), opening a joint bank account (or not), re-

ducing employment hours to part-time, keeping the house after a separation,

paying or receiving child support, receiving a nancial gift from a family

member, inheriting a home, planning the transfer of a family business—

these are generally seen as either personal choices or legally necessary tech-

nical decisions. But as feminist studies have shown for decades, the personal

is political. Our book shows that these practices are caught up in relations

of domination and contribute to the reproduction of inequality. In France,

our book attracted an academic public in sociology, social anthropology,

economics, philosophy, history, and law, but it also drew a broader profes-

sional and activist public interested in the continuities between economic

inequality and gendered violence.

Our demonstration relies on the analysis of ethnographic materials col-

lected in family settings, courts, and the oces of legal professionals in

France, as well as on our own analysis of French statistical data on household

assets. Certain that the mechanisms revealed here were not specic to

France, from the outset we included in the book international statistical

comparisons and examples.

Our descriptions of how a bakery or a Cognac wine-grape farm is passed

down from father to son might seem to be specically French stories. Yet

with the publication of omas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

and the empirical demonstration of the rising weight of inheritance in all

contemporary societies, the relevance of our study of the mechanisms of

wealth accumulation and transfer within the family in diverse social mi-

lieus became evident.

Mike Savage has shown a shift in the connection between cultural

and economic capitals in the structure and reproduction of social spaces

today, relative to Pierre Bourdieu’s description of the 1970s in Distinc-

tion.

Once again it has become necessary to have inherited wealth in

order to occupy dominant positions in human societies—educational

degrees are no longer enough. It’s no accident that the mechanisms we

describe resemble the southwestern French or northern Algerian farming

societies that Bourdieu, as an anthropologist, described in e Logic of

Practice, based on research from the 1950s. ey are similar because the

past is overtaking the present as economic inheritance returns to such

prominence, well documented by Piketty, an economist, and Savage, a

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xi

sociologist. Some families have an enduring monopoly over economic cap-

ital and pass it down from one generation to the next. We demonstrate

that these mechanisms for the reproduction of the class society are still

gendered. ey are based on the exploitation of the labor of women and

their exclusion from property ownership, rst exposed by materialist

and Marxist feminists in the 1970s.

Our work is nevertheless grounded in twenty-rst-century France. Our

research was conducted in major cities and in small towns, with CEOs of

publicly traded companies, real estate agents, teachers, and gig-economy

workers. We did eldwork with men and women of all ages: long-married,

in a marriage-like relationship, freshly divorced, with or without children;

some the head of a single-parent household, others a parent in a stepfamily,

and so on.

Contemporary French society is characterized by formally egalitarian

civil law that stopped discriminating against women in matters of wealth

half a century ago. As elsewhere in Europe, France has a strong welfare state

that oers a safety net to the poorest, especially to women raising children

alone. French society is typied by a normative frame that highly values

equality between men and women, especially in education and the profes-

sional sphere. Our book demonstrates that despite this normative frame,

which is one of

the most egalitarian in the world, economic inequalities

between women and men quietly continue.

Worse yet, while income inequalities stagnate in France, inequalities in

wealth between men and women have expanded in recent decades. Used

interchangeably by economists, “wealth,” “assets,” and “capital” mean the

total value of a person’s property at a given time, composed of real estate,

nancial assets, or businesses. We use Piketty’s denition in Capital in the

Twenty-First Century. Contrary to the Marxist denition, Piketty does not

limit the notion of capital to assets used directly in the production process

or for which the owner expects a return. His denition includes land and

natural resources over which owners could exercise their rights, wealth as

a value reserve (gold, for instance), and rights to the use of assets (like a vaca-

tion home). In this book, “capital,” as “wealth,” consists of economic assets

whose value can be conserved or accumulated and whose nal fruition

(through sale) can guarantee future cash ow. It is virtually impossible to

document the gender wealth gap in most countries because survey-based

public statistics and tax records gather wealth data at the household scale,

xii PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

making it impossible to measure inequalities between members of a

household or track how they change over time.

Our work shows the extent to which the egalitarian norm, which has

now become a myth of established equality, produces economic inequality

in practice. We give several examples of this in the book. Because women

have access to the labor market and are supposed to have their own careers,

it can seem less legitimate that they request nancial compensation at the

time of separation. Before and after breakup, however, they are still the ones

who do the bulk of domestic labor (particularly the work of looking after

children), to the detriment of their careers and to the advantage of the

career of their former husband or partner. Prior to arriving at separation,

many dierent-sex couples come up with arrangements based on a presup-

position of equality: they split expenses fty-fty, choose the separation of

property when they get married (each managing their own assets), or decide

not to get married at all.

Feminists have rightly described marriage as a patriarchal institution.

In France, married women used to have no power over the management of

the couple’s assets, or even their own, and they could not open a bank ac-

count without their husband’s authorization. Although on paper they

owned half of marital assets, they had no eective control over them. It

was only in 1965 that married women acquired the right to manage mar-

ital assets equally with married men. is was the same period when mar-

riage hit an all-time low in France. By marrying less, women stopped ben-

eting from the powerful equalizer of marriage, as well as the economic

protections it oered in case of divorce or widowhood. ese changes in

family law and its uses occurred at dierent paces and time frames in other

countries. Our work emphasizes the importance of this legal context for

understanding contemporary developments in the economic inequalities

between men and women.

Documenting the transformation of “law on the books” must not dis-

tract from studying law in action. In this book we focus on two key mo-

ments in the circulation and distribution of family wealth: inheritance pro-

ceedings and separations of cohabiting couples. We study them rst from

the families’ perspective, in family case studies that allow us to identify

how family strategies of accumulation, distribution, and transfer of wealth

rely on gendered and economically inegalitarian roles. ese family strate-

gies of social reproduction unfavorable to women seem poorly compatible

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION xiii

with today’s formally egalitarian French law, an observation that prompted

us to do further research on the everyday practices of judges, lawyers, and

notaires (legal professionals whose duties notably include drafting wills and

marriage contracts) to understand the tenor of their interventions at the

time of separation or estate partitioning. Our book makes the connection

between French specicities in how these professions are organized and

the ways in which they participate in the reproduction of class and gender

inequalities. We show that although these inequalities emerge in the family,

they are legitimized and formalized by the professionals charged with sup-

porting heirs, separating people, and implementing the law.

Our research shows the utility of bringing together private and public

materials collected from families, family-law professionals, and the courts.

It also combines ethnographic materials with original statistical analyses

of household asset surveys and legal archives. Only the combination of all

these forms of data made it possible for us to understand how the repro-

duction of the social order is rooted in the family.

Doing research on private life raises ethical questions. With their full

consent, we observed the family lives of some informants over the course

of several years—we saw them enter into relationships, separate, discuss

inheritance with their brothers and sisters. We interviewed their loved

ones and collected personal documents and private les, making it pos-

sible to confront sometimes contradictory perspectives on a single family

matter. We were also able to observe lawyers’ meetings with their clients

and read notaires’ les, provided that their content be made anonymous.

We had to gure out how to render our ndings public while respecting

our engagement to condentiality and ensuring that our writings would

not harm the people who helped us in our research, which we did by

withholding certain details or analyzing certain data at the properly ag-

gregate level.

e growing specialization of

the social sciences generally leads to the

collection and analysis of a disjointed body of research materials. Histo-

rians and demographers describe the historical transformations of the

family as an institution. Sociologists of the family who specialize in mar-

riage and marriage-like relations are rarely interested in intergenerational

transmission, and vice versa. Sociolegal scholars research dierential access

to the law according to social class and the role of legal professionals in the

reproduction of social inequalities, while those specialized in gender and

xiv PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

judging pay less heed to the work of lawyers and notaires. Some legal

scholars study the complexities of national scal law that dictates the frame-

work for economic transfers in the family, while others specialize in the

comparison of civil laws that determine the legal framework for kinship,

separations, and estate distribution of transnational families. Socioecono-

mists focus on quantifying the economic inequalities between women and

men. In contrast, we hope that the translation of this book into English

will renew the dialogue within the social sciences, between distinct sub-

elds and methodological orientations, and between dierent national

settings.

We also hope to encourage others to build upon our work. We demon-

strate the signicant role of heteronormativity in the functioning of capi-

talist societies. e transfer of family wealth is based on children being as-

signed to binary sex categories. e mechanisms of wealth accumulation

and circulation are based on heterosexual coupling, characterized by the

overlap of a dierence in assigned sex, feelings of love, sexual activity, and

procreation. Studying the family trajectories, asset histories, and legal ex-

periences of LGBTQI+ people would certainly provide a fuller under-

standing of the heteronormative underpinnings of the social order. We

have also shown, albeit briey, that the processes of wealth accumulation

and their legal constraints are caught up in racial relations. For example,

international migration disrupts family economic arrangements and strat-

egies of reproduction. Legal professionals may racially categorize people

who are trying to implement such arrangements and strategies, with sig-

nicant consequences on how they treat their cases. Both of these leads

deserve deeper study.

We are desperately lacking the statistical data necessary to elaborate on

wealth inequalities caught up in issues of racial categorizations and sexual

orientation in France. Such data does exist in other countries to a certain

extent. We hope that reading this book will prompt numerous fruitful dis-

cussions, spurring the development of methodological tools and the pro-

duction of knowledge that will allow further exploration of how intimate

relationships structure the wealth inequalities that are at the core of con-

temporary society.

Introduction

   . Her family name, Levavasseur, is

fairly common in Normandy and means “the vassal of a

lord who is a vassal himself.” Ingrid was born in in a rural area near

the meanders of

the Seine River on its way to the sea. She and her three

siblings were raised by their mother, a former cleaning woman who became

a special needs caregiver. Her violent and alcoholic father was mostly out

of the picture.

At , Ingrid quit high school and left home. She went through a string

of service jobs—waitress, cashier, telephone operator—got married, had

two children. When she was only , a year after the birth of her second

child, Ingrid and her husband divorced. She worked nights as a reghter

while studying to become a nurse’s aide, although she really wanted to be

a nurse but couldn’t aord the three-year program. In  she earned ,

euros a month plus  euros in housing assistance and  euros in child

support. She had sole custody of her children, aged  and years. ey

lived in a small rented house in the town of Pont-de-l’Arche, and she had

to pay someone to look after them in the evenings while she worked in

Rouen, twenty kilometers away. e family vacationed three days a year at

a campground near Mont-St-Michel. Ingrid had a hard time making ends

meet. She barely managed to buy her kids new sneakers and keep the fridge

stocked, and she had long since stopped spending money on herself: no

haircuts, no sports, no dining out. She had no time for herself, anyway,

2 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

since she was on her own only every other weekend when the kids visited

their father.

In the autumn of , Ingrid Levavasseur became a national gure in

France as an activist in the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vest) movement.



Her

long red hair and Botticellian features made her readily recognizable in

news reports, where she gave a face to decades of statistics that described

the poverty of women running single-parent households. In  she an-

nounced that she was creating a support center to provide lodging, child

care, and activities for women raising children alone.

e Gilets Jaunes movement brought the media spotlight to working-

class people it had previously ignored. Headlines focused on women who

camped out at trac circles and highway toll plazas and led demonstra-

tions under the sharp eyes of the aggressive police.



A number of them were

raising their children alone and had a hard time balancing the family

budget. ey told reporters their stories—stories of unpaid child support

and never-ending paperwork to apply for limited public assistance. ey

spoke of their constant struggle to pay the bills, of putting their children’s

needs before their own. ey spoke of unemployment, part-time jobs,

having to take on as many work hours as possible. Some of these women

had given up on wage employment altogether and had become self-

employed, but it didn’t pay any better. And then there were retired women,

many of them widows, with meager pensions.

In poor families, money problems are women’s problems.



Her name is MacKenzie. She was born to a well-o family in San Fran-

cisco in , her father a wealth manager and her mother a homemaker.

She got a degree in English from Princeton University, which she chose so

she could study with Toni Morrison and become a novelist.

In the early s, MacKenzie Scott was working at the investment rm

of D.E. Shaw & Co. in New York, a job that paid the bills and left her

time to write ction. ere she met her future husband, Je Bezos, a fellow

Princeton alumnus with a computer science degree who had climbed to

the position of senior vice-president of the rm. He was the one who hired

MacKenzie, and his oce was next to hers. ey married in , when

she was  and he . e following year they moved to the West Coast,

where they rented a house in the suburbs of Seattle. During their cross-

country drive, with MacKenzie at the wheel and Je in the passenger seat,

INTRODUCTION 3

the couple came up with a business plan for a new company that would

sell books over the internet. e following year, Amazon was born.

MacKenzie was fully involved in the business’s beginnings. She did the

accounting, attended hiring and strategy sessions, and even chipped in

sending early packages out via UPS: “I was there when he wrote the busi-

ness plan, and I worked with him and many others in the converted ga-

rage, the basement warehouse closet, the barbecue-scented oces, the

Christmas-rush distribution centers, and the door-desk lled conference

rooms in the early years of Amazon’s history,” she recalled.

e couple’s rst child was born in , to be followed by three others.

MacKenzie and Je moved into a $ million house. MacKenzie started

working less for the company and delayed her ambition of becoming a nov-

elist to take care of the four children (she later said that she could have

hired nannies but she preferred to look after them herself, even going so

far as to homeschool them at times). Her rst novel, the fruit of ten years’

work, was nally published in  and won an American Book Award.

She published a second novel in  that was well received by critics but

had modest sales, a couple thousand copies, in part because bookstores

refused to carry the novel to protest the damage of Amazon’s expanding

empire on brick-and-mortar shops.



On January, , MacKenzie and Je Bezos announced the end of

their marriage of twenty-ve years in a jointly signed Tweet: “We want to

make people aware of a development in our lives. . . . [We] have decided

to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends. . . . We’ve had such a

great life together as a married couple, and we also see wonderful futures

ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as indi-

viduals pursuing ventures and adventures.”



e message portraying an

amicable divorce was addressed to nancial markets, investors, and share-

holders, rather than to their friends. e future of the world’s largest pri-

vate fortune was at stake: the couple’s net worth of over $ billion in-

cluded percent of Amazon’s capital. In Washington State, where the

couple lived and worked, divorce laws stipulate that all assets acquired

during the marriage must be divided into two equal parts. Hundreds of

newspaper articles worldwide expressed concern over the future of the Bezos

fortune, a large portion of which consisted of their companies: Amazon,

the aerospace company Blue Origin, and the Washington Post. ere was a

4 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

chance that 8percent of Amazon could fall into the hands of a woman,

which might make Je Bezos lose control of the company, and the mere

possibility made the markets anxious.

ree months later, some details of the divorce were made public by

MacKenzie, once again on Twitter: “Grateful to have nished the process

of dissolving my marriage with Je, with support from each other and

everyone who reached out to us in kindness and looking forward to next

phase as co-parents and friends. Happy to be giving him all my interest in

the Washington Post and Blue Origin and 75% of our Amazon stock plus

voting control of my shares to support his continued contributions with

the teams of these incredible companies.”

Je Bezos would remain the

primary shareholder of Amazon and the richest man on earth.

In wealthy families, looking after capital is a man’s prerogative.

Wealth Inequality, Class, and Gender

An ocean and billions of dollars separate the lives of Ingrid Levavasseur

and MacKenzie Scott. Ingrid Levavasseur’s wealth is likely limited to her

car and modest savings, probably no more than a couple thousand euros,

whereas MacKenzie Scott left her marriage with $35 billion. As omas

Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century revealed for all to see, wealth

inequality is a central characteristic of contemporary capitalism.

Much

stronger than income inequality, wealth inequality describes the ever-

widening chasm separating the worlds of MacKenzie Scott and Ingrid

Levavasseur. According to the 2021 World Inequality Report, published by

the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics, the richest

10percent of the global population receives about half (52percent) of total

global income, while the bottom 50percent receives only 8.5percent. e

wealthiest 10percent owns more than three-quarters (76percent) of global

wealth, whereas the bottom 50percent owns a mere 2percent.

In the early twenty-rst century, dierences in living conditions and so-

cial status are increasingly linked to the transfer of economic capital in the

family. is capital is crucial to obtaining housing in a context where home-

ownership is widespread and a mark of social distinction (if one can aord

the “right” address). As the gig economy rises and stable wage-earning oc-

cupations tend to disappear with the crumbling of the wage-earning so-

ciety, family economic support is ever more indispensable to going into

INTRODUCTION 5

business, keeping a business aoat, securing loans, and receiving supple-

mentary revenue from family assets.

Inequalities between schools and the

staggering price of a college education mean that family savings have also

become essential for the accumulation of educational capital.

More gen-

erally, it is known that a family’s standard of living inuences its children’s

success at school from a very young age.

In other words, Ingrid Levavasseur’s insecure economic situation will

probably aect her children’s educational futures and reduce their eco-

nomic opportunities. Even if her daughter and son excel in school and

nd stable jobs with good incomes, it will take them quite some time to

start accumulating their own capital. Meanwhile, MacKenzie Scott’s

three sons and daughter will likely have ready access to the best schools

and colleges and will probably never have to borrow money to buy a

home, start a business, or make promising investments, even if they are

mediocre students.

e Gilets Jaunes movement and the resurgence of an ultra-rich class

both illustrate that the accumulation of economic capital has once again

become a dening force of the social class structure. Karl Marx showed

that poverty and wealth result from relations of production, but the work-

place and the markets do not have a monopoly on production—the family

is another site where domestic relations of production lead to the accumu-

lation and transfer of economic wealth. Because of his focus on industrial

wage labor, Marx tended to overlook the reproduction of the labor force

necessary for capitalistic accumulation, thus limiting perception of the

extent to which capitalism exploits women.

In the 1970s, Marxist and

materialist feminists began to demonstrate that family wealth was accumu-

lated and passed along through the exploitation of married women’s unpaid

labor.

Women had very limited rights to this capital at the time and were

unwitting participants in the reproduction of the social hierarchy. How do

things stand today, when many societies profess legal equality for spouses

and for men and women in general?

Ingrid Levavasseur and MacKenzie Scott are obviously worlds apart, but

their lives do have some key points in common. During their relationships,

they were on the front line for child-rearing and running the home. Both

women sacriced some of their professional dreams, putting o or giving

up on cherished plans. eir professional lives were chopped into a succes-

sion of small jobs, rather than aligned in a career. Both women also went

6 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

through dicult divorces with the help of legal professionals who show-

ered them with legal advice, although Ingrid probably had one lawyer and

MacKenzie a whole legal team. For these women, divorce was synonymous

with impoverishment relative to their former situations. e  euros per

child, per month, that Ingrid receives in child support does not come even

close to covering the costs entailed. Who could possibly house, feed, clothe,

and care for a child in France today for such a sum? As for MacKenzie

Scott, who legitimately owned half of a colossal fortune at the time of her

divorce, she eventually settled for a much smaller share, and left the ma-

jority in the hands of her ex-husband.

e situation of these women at each end of the social spectrum raises

fundamental questions. Why is it that women are usually the ones to deal

with money problems in the working classes, while economic power is

monopolized by men higher up on the social ladder? Historically, almost

everywhere in the world, legal discrimination has hindered women from

accumulating wealth. Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Euro-

pean and North American societies seemed to have achieved formal

gender equality in worker’s rights, family rights, and property rights, yet

despite this legal progress, men still accumulate far more wealth than

women do.

Women’s Work, Men’s Incomes

ere are some who claim that women earn less than men because they

work less, so it merits to be said that women have always worked as much

as men, if not more.



One obvious characteristic of women’s work in a number of economic

sectors (agriculture, the trades, commerce, industry) is its invisibility and

lack of legal or nancial recognition. Reproductive labor, primarily per-

formed by women in a family setting, is the archetype of unpaid work that

never gets recognized as such.



Household production is not counted in

the large statistical aggregates measuring national production, because na-

tional wealth only includes activities that produce goods and services for

commercial exchange and services provided by the public administration.



A child-care provider paid to care for a child contributes to the national

income, but a mother who does the same work at home does not. If

household production were taken into account, the gross domestic product

INTRODUCTION 7

would have been 33percent higher in France, 63percent higher in the

United Kingdom, and 43percent higher in Germany in 2010; in the United

States, it would have been 23percent higher in 2014.

is unpaid and invisible household production is done largely by

women. Over the long term, time-use studies in Europe and North Amer-

ica have shown that despite converging labor-force participation rates and

time spent performing paid work, women still perform much more unpaid

work than men.

Women in Sweden and the United States spent an av-

erage of three hours per day on housework (cooking, cleaning, laundry and

ironing, home repairs and gardening, sewing and mending, shopping, adult

caregiving, household administration, and transportation) at the beginning

of the studied period (around the late 1980s). For the same tasks and period,

women in France and the United Kingdom performed four hours of

housework daily, and women in Italy and the Netherlands ve hours daily.

During the same period, men contributed between one hour (Italy) and

two and a half hours (Sweden) to such tasks. Roughly a quarter century later,

in the 2010s, women have reduced their housework hours by 20–25percent

in all studied countries except Italy, but this reduction has not been balanced

by an increase in men’s housework time, which holds steady when it hasn’t

slightly decreased.

Women likewise consistently devote more time to child care than men,

including routine and interactive child care, help with homework, and

transportation. Although men in all concerned countries have spent an in-

creasing amount of time on child care since 1980s, there is a concurrent

trend toward more-intensive parenting by mothers. In the 2010s, women

in Sweden spent 30percent more time on child care than men, and women

in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States twice as much.

Sweden, the country that comes the closest to the equal sharing of unpaid

work, women spent an average of one hour a day more than men on un-

paid work in 2010; this gure rose to two hours in the United States and

the United Kingdom, and four hours in Italy.

e same year, women in

France who were in a couple and had children worked a total of 54 hours

per week: 34 hours of unpaid domestic labor and 20 hours of paid employ-

ment. Men in the same households worked only 51 hours—3 hours less

per week. Men devoted, on average, 18 hours per week to unpaid domestic

labor, and 33 hours to paid work.

ough women worked slightly longer

hours, they were paid much less overall.

8 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

ese gures are based on the reported daily schedules of surveyed men

and women. e totals do not account for the fragmentation of women’s

domestic labor and professional work, which is constantly interrupted

because women must always be available to others.



Women always bear

the domestic mental load, even while they are at their paying jobs.



Mothers

are the rst to be contacted by schools and daycare providers when children

are sick. Women often multitask (housecleaning while taking care of the

children, for example) and must be ready to interrupt what they are doing

at any moment.



In contrast, men’s work, whether professional or at home

(house repairs, gardening, sometimes cooking), is more clearly delineated

in time and space.

Income inequality is the most visible of a wide range of gendered dispari-

ties that exist in families and in the labor market, across the social spectrum.

Women are concentrated in sectors that pay less, particularly education,

medical support, and home care services. Because of their family respon-

sibilities, women are often employed in part-time jobs and their careers

take a slower track.



In many sectors, the glass ceiling prevents them from

reaching the best-paying positions.



ese factors explain why women’s

earnings in France and elsewhere in the world are, on average, one-quarter

lower than men’s.



Even with all other things being equal (the same age,

seniority, job sector, position, years of employment, and so on), the labor

market still discriminates against women by paying them wages estimated

to be .percent lower than those of their male counterparts.



Countries worldwide are currently tackling unequal incomes with pro-

fessional equality legislation. But even if women do one day get equal pay

for equal work, it wouldn’t solve their economic plight. ere is still a form

of economic inequality between women and men that does not appear on

most political agendas and statistical radars, though it shapes individuals’

socioeconomic fates and is passed down from one generation to the next.

From Unequal Pay to Unequal Wealth

e distribution of wealth by gender has recently received some attention.



Given that women, on average, live a few years longer than men, that they

receive lower public pensions (the gender pension gap for mandatory pen-

sions is about percent in OECD countries), and that a growing number

of single-head female households live below the poverty line, the conserva-

INTRODUCTION 9

tive assumption that women could and should rely on their husbands’

wealth appears outdated.



Documenting the gendered distribution of as-

sets is dicult because joint ownership is often presumed, masking the

reality of individual ownership and control of assets. Most of the data on

wealth is collected at the level of the household (either through surveys or

tax data) rather than at the individual level. Because of this, research on

the gender wealth gap is often focused on comparisons of female- and male-

headed households with only one adult, or obviously individualized com-

ponents of wealth such as pensions.



ese studies have made valuable

contributions—showing, for example, that single women with children

have the lowest overall asset levels—but data collection at the household

level makes it harder to assess and explain the size of the gender wealth

gap. Assets accumulated by men or women in the same household tend to

be conated by data-collection methods.

High-quality wealth surveys describing each member of a household’s

individual ownership of, access to, and control of assets are hard to

come by, but there are two notable exceptions. e rst is a German socio-

economic panel study that measures a signicant gender wealth gap in

Germany, not only between single men and single women but also within

unmarried and married couples.



Using the net worth for the working-

age population of Germany in –, the study found that the gender

wealth gap was still high and in favor of men, although it had closed

somewhat over the decade, from about , euros to , euros.



is signicant gap was attributed to the large gender pay gap and women’s

low labor market participation, and its reduction was credited to the greater

participation of women in the labor market in the s.



e second

survey was conducted more recently in France, and its ndings are even

more surprising. Statistical data from the French Wealth Survey (Enquête

Patrimoine) conducted by the French National Institute for Statistics and

Economic Studies (INSEE) shows that the gender wealth gap is wid-

ening steadily in favor of men in France, rising from percent in  to

 percent in .



is increase concerns both single women and

single men (shooting up from percent to percent) and couples (from

percent to percent).



e same study also shows that men own more

capital than women, regardless of the form (housing, land, or nancial or

professional assets). In , the average wealth gap between women and

men was estimated at , euros, spanning a wide variety of situations,

10 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

from modest dierences between working-class men and women (where

neither partner accumulates much wealth) to vast gender gaps in the upper

classes. But the gender wealth gap is still poorly documented because un-

suitable units of analysis make it very dicult to measure.

How does one estimate the individual wealth of a man or a woman when

they jointly own property as a couple, and when surveys are conducted at

a household level, grouping together all people who live under the same

roof? is diculty probably explains the absence of gender as a variable

in the 696 pages of omas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

To document the gender wealth gap, it is necessary to have precise indi-

vidual statistical data, but that is not enough to fully understand how the

gender wealth gap is created and perpetuated; one must delve into the in-

tricacies of family relations.

Investigating the Production of Wealth Inequality

in the Family

e primary cause of the gender wealth gap is to be found in the everyday

struggles of family life, rather than in Wall Street dealings. is inequality

is produced by the unspoken practices of men and women when they act

as spouses and partners, fathers and mothers, daughters and sons, brothers

and sisters. It takes dierent forms according to social class, depending on

whether the wealth consists of debts, furniture, a few thousand euros in a

savings account, or a suburban house, a Parisian apartment, the family’s

country home, a timeshare, stocks in a company, works of art. We need a

new perspective on the family in order to see this inequality; the family

must be treated as an economic institution like any other—an institution

that not only produces wealth but also controls it and manages its circula-

tion and valuation through what we call family wealth arrangements.

As sociologists, we have been studying the ordinary economic arrange-

ments of French families of all social classes for more than twenty years.

ese nearly imperceptible arrangements can take many forms, from a little

help with an unforeseen expense to security deposits, interest-free loans,

gifts, inheritance, references, paying for college, caring for an aging parent,

moving in to help out during an emergency, providing child care or free

lodging, paying child or spousal support, and so on. Because family rela-

tions are considered private, the open discussion of their economic aspects

often makes people uncomfortable.

INTRODUCTION 11

We had to use a combination of methods and approaches to study the

topic. First, we conducted in-depth family case studies with repeated ob-

servations of and interviews with groups of kin. ese relatives invited us

into their daily lives as well as to more exceptional family events such as

weddings, funerals, and holidays. ey sometimes invited us to stay in their

homes. Some entrusted us with private family records, including notarized

and civil certicates, correspondence, and photographs. From  to ,

Céline Bessière used this method to study how family businesses were trans-

ferred in the cognac-producing area in southwestern France. During

roughly the same period, Sibylle Gollac investigated the real-estate strate-

gies of families from a variety of social backgrounds, following several of

them for over fteen years.

We described family economic transfers in detail when we wrote these

family case studies. We noted, for instance, that brothers and sisters some-

times had very dierent recollections of the settlement of their parents’ es-

tate: they did not count the same assets, assign them the same values, or

have the same conceptions of what a fair inheritance might mean. In fact,

family economic arrangements are always about more than money and

property. Viviana Zelizer has shown them to be “intimate transactions”

mixing economic transfer with emotions, moral obligations, values, princi-

ples of fairness, and reputational stakes, all embedded in a long history

of interpersonal relations.



Men and women aren’t in the same position

in this process, as they are not socialized to act in the same way or to

have the same aspirations; family expectations are not the same for women

and men.

ese family histories provide the substance of this book. ey allow a

close reading of family members’ interpretations of family economic ar-

rangements in their everyday lives.



In order to be able to tell their stories

in the necessary detail, we changed informants’ names to protect their pri-

vacy, and we changed certain place names as well.



As rich as they are, family case studies alone are not enough to examine

the gender wealth gap from all sides. In order to generalize our ndings

and compare families across social classes, we also analyzed statistical data

from the French Wealth Survey. We did new eld research to round out

our understanding of family wealth arrangements in all their diversity,

focusing this time on two extraordinary moments that formalize these

arrangements and lay them out in explicit detail: the breakdown of a

marriage or long-term relationships, and estate planning and settlement.

12 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

Breaking up and inheriting are distinctive family events because they

are so highly codied under family, scal, and civil law. Relatives may have

to meet with legal professionals who work more or less diligently with them

throughout their encounter with the law, although the likelihood and tone

of this encounter varies considerably according to their social class, race,

and gender. is phase of research brought us into new worlds: legal of-

ces and family courts. e resulting ndings contribute to sociolegal lit-

erature exploring how experiences of civil justice may reect, deepen, or

make up for inequality, and can furthermore endorse and conceal it.



answered Rebecca Sandefur’s call for a broad empirical focus when studying

access to civil justice: we conducted a comparative study investigating dif-

ferent social groups, concentrated on uses of the law in a broad array of

institutions for the resolution of dierences over inheritance and conjugal

separation, and rooted our examination of the law in the broader sociology

of inequality.



Legal counsel is oered mainly by two professions in France, and both

may be involved in family economic aairs, depending on the complexity

of a situation and the assets involved. Lawyers represent their clients in court

or by privately ordering their aairs. Notaires are specialized in contracts

and scal law and are legally mandated to evaluate and distribute family

assets (they draw up and settle wills, manage the transfer of deeds in prop-

erty transactions, draft prenuptial agreements, oversee the liquidation of

marital property, and much more). Unlike lawyers, they do not represent

one client but act for both parties, more like mediators. ough the studies

leading to the family case studies were conducted individually, we did our

research on notaires together. Our materials on family courts and lawyers

were collected under the auspices of a larger collective study begun in

.



Here, too, we changed all names and avoided giving precise loca-

tions while providing enough information for readers to understand the

situation and follow our analysis. In some cases, details of specic events

had to be slightly modied to avoid possible identication of the legal pro-

fessionals, their clients, and other litigants involved.

e Gender of Capital

Certain social classes monopolize wealth and strive to preserve it when

passing it on to the next generation, while other social classes are persis-

tently deprived of wealth. All the while, women accumulate less wealth

INTRODUCTION 13

than men. Class inequality and gender inequality are intertwined, and

studies in some countries, particularly in the United States, are able to doc-

ument a racial dimension to wealth inequality. Age and generation are

also factors, as we shall soon see. We take an intersectional approach to

understanding these inequalities by connecting them to multiple kinds of

social domination. Our study of family wealth arrangements explores the

physical and symbolic places where these inseparable dynamics of inequality

play out.

Examining where and when family wealth is accumulated and distrib-

uted demands breaking with the common notion of the family as a haven

of aectionate peace amid a heartless, capitalist world.



e family must

be considered as an economic institution like any other, a place where

wealth is produced, circulated, controlled, and assigned value. We develop

this argument in Chapter, situating it in scholarship on the family and

inequality. In Chapter, we use family case studies and statistical data to

describe how these mechanisms of wealth production, circulation, control,

and evaluation are integrated into family strategies of social reproduction

that aim to maintain and strengthen the status of the family group. We

demonstrate that these strategies are detrimental to women’s accumulation

of wealth.

Next, we enter the oces of legal professionals, where family economic

arrangements are discreetly formalized in legal language and made ocial.

Family members may meet various legal professionals who will help them

to “domesticate” family and property law, to an extent that depends on

their social class. e work of notaires and lawyers exacerbates economic

inequality between social classes by aiding and abetting the maintenance

and transfer of wealth within the most auent families while simulta-

neously serving to conceal, endorse, and legitimate the gender wealth gap

(Chapter). e partition of estates and the liquidation of conjugal assets

are moments of formalized accounting. is accounting may look neutral

and technical, but it incorporates gender norms that ultimately favor men,

especially those from higher economic classes. is sexist accounting does

not necessarily come from a conscious or explicit will of legal professionals

to dispossess women of their property, but it does contribute to further en-

trenching gender inequality in practice (Chapter). Family nancial deci-

sions that contribute to economic inequality are seldom contested, in the

name of keeping the family peace and stability, and they are costly for

women to overturn. Wealth arrangements during separations and estate

14 THE GENDER OF CAPITAL

settlements may furthermore run up against tax arrangements. Tax avoid-

ance is a common family unier, but often to the detriment of less fortu-

nate family members, who are usually women (Chapter).

In Chapter we demonstrate that the legal system fails to counter these

sexist mechanisms when married or unmarried couples separate. is is

partly because the legal tools for balancing the economic consequences of

separation are inegalitarian in practice, and partly because judges (including

female judges) apply these rules according to a mostly subconscious, sexist

conception of men’s and women’s respective contributions to their family’s

wealth. In families with no assets to split, only expenses to share, women

not only have to take charge of the daily lives of their children but are also

responsible for all the paperwork necessary to obtain public support. From

the perspective of family courts and the state bureaucracy, it seems quite

normal that women should have to beg for economic help from welfare or

their former partner (Chapter).

Women are expected to care for children, feed them, help them with

their homework, and plan extracurricular activities. Expected to do the

housework, maintain and decorate the home, be prepared to serve drinks

or coee at a moment’s notice, plan family dinners and meals with friends.

Expected to ll in at the cash register in the shop, be a joint guarantor for

a business loan thanks to their secure status as a civil servant, organize din-

ners for the clients of a husband whose work obliged her to follow him to

another country . . . all of these practices are common to women in the

bourgeoisie through the working classes, and all contribute to the family’s

wealth, if only because they free men from obligations that would hold back

their careers. ese activities require signicant amounts of time as well as

a variety of resources, especially cultural ones. When the time comes for

the division of an estate or conjugal property, women’s contributions to the

family’s wealth (usually in the form of unpaid labor) are invisible, denied,

or at best discussed to little eect. Pierre Bourdieu’s denition of capital—a

set of accumulated material and symbolic resources from which one can

secure social prot—has informed the overarching nding laid out in this

book.



To wit: despite the active contribution of women’s work to the pro-

duction, accumulation, and transfer of family wealth, capital is still domi-

nated by men in the twenty-rst century.

315

agriculture, , , . See also farms and

farmers; land

aid: family, ; housing, ; intergenera-

tional, . See also legal aid

Algeria and Algerians, x, , , –, .