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Demography (2013) 50:11551176
DOI 10.1007/s13524-012-0182-0
Erin Ruel & Robert M. Hauser
Published online: 21 December 2012# Population Association of America 2012
Abstract To assess and explain the United States gender wealth gap, we use the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine wealth accumulated by a single cohort over 50 years by gender, by marital status, and limited to the respondents who are their familys best financial reporters. We find large gender wealth gaps between currently married men and women, and between never-married men and women. The never-married accumulate less wealth than the currently married, and there is a marital disruption cost to wealth accumulation. The status-attainment model shows the most power in explaining gender wealth gaps between these groups explaining about one-third to one-half of the gap, followed by the human-capital explanation. In other words, a lifetime of lower earnings for women translates into greatly reduced wealth accumulation. After controlling for the full model, we find that a gender wealth gap remains between married men and women that we speculate may be related to gender differences in investment strategies and selection effects.
Keywords Gender . Net worth . Wealth gap . Wisconsin Longitudinal Study
Introduction
A burgeoning body of literature has found that women do not accumulate as much wealth as men, resulting in a gender wealth gap (Deere and Doss 2006; Denton and Boos 2007; Ozawa and Lee 2006; Warren et al. 2001; Yamokoski and Keister 2006). A limitation acknowledged by this body of research is that gender is confounded with marital status, making it difficult to assess and explain the size of the gender wealth
E. Ruel (*)
Department of Sociology, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 5020, Atlanta, GA 30302-5020, USA e-mail: [email protected]
R. M. Hauser
Center for Demography of Health and Aging, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI, USA
Explaining the Gender Wealth Gap
1156 E. Ruel, R.M. Hauser
gap. In other words, wealth is an attribute of families; assets accumulated by men or women in the same household tend to be conflated both in reality and by data-collection methods. For example, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics asks the household head about assets owned by the family. The head is defined as a man, even in cohabitating households; therefore, women usually report on...