On April 12, the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, in collaboration with the Berkeley Economy & Society Initiative, Social Matrix, and Center of Excellence in French and Francophone Studies invited Professor of Sociology at Paris Dauphine University Céline Bessière to give the Annual Stone Lecture.
Bessiére, who was later joined by co-author Sibylle Gollac via Zoom, presented the main findings of their new book The Gender of Capital to an audience of roughly 50 people. The lecture focused on how, even in countries with egalitarian wage and property laws, gendered economic inequality persists.
While global poverty has declined in recent decades, wealth inequality has increased steadily since the 1980s. According to Professor Bessiére, it is impossible to understand this rise without understanding how the family functions as an economic unit. This is because today, 60% of the private wealth held by individuals in Europe is a product of inheritance, and the number is only rising.
While The Gender of Capital acknowledges that there are many laws throughout European countries to ensure that inheritance is divided equally between sons and daughters, Professor Bessiére and Gollac’s thesis is that these laws have not gone far enough to ensure fair distributions. Through their research, consulting data from the French Household Wealth Survey and collecting data from directly sitting in on thousands of family court cases, they argue that despite the monetary value of inherited assets technically being equal, the types of assets typically allocated along gendered lines ensure the perpetuation of gendered wealth inequality.
Specifically, while women often receive monetary assets and liquid wealth, men are far more likely to receive “structuring assets” like real estate property and family businesses that serve to grow over time. To further rub salt in the wound, Bessiére and Gollac found in their research that while family finance lawyers are notaries have a legal obligation to first take an inventory and valuation of the assets and then distribute them equally, in practice, the distribution of assets typically happens first, followed by an “ex-post” valuation to ensure the distribution is in accordance with the law. This ultimately results in men not only receiving assets that increase in value over time, but women typically receiving monetary assets with inflated values.
Professor Bessiére and Golac conclude in The Gender of Capital that family lawyers and notaries thus legitimize sexism under the law, stamping distributions as equal that nonetheless further gendered wealth inequality.