Gender and Wealth in Demographic Research: A Research Brief on a New Method and Application
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Gender and Wealth in Demographic Research: A Research Brief on a New Method and Application Doron Shiffer‑Sebba1 · Julia Behrman2 Received: 26 April 2020 / Accepted: 21 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract Gender differences in wealth are central to understanding gender stratification and demographic processes, but limited gender-disaggregated wealth data make it complicated to measure population-level gender-based wealth differentials. This research brief highlights a novel way to measure population-level gender differences in homeownership—a central measure of wealth—using a case study from two large diverse American cities. Rather than starting at the couple level and assuming joint ownership on property titles of married couples (the default in many surveys), we start at the property title level and examine owners’ gender for each property by applying a gender prediction algorithm to local administrative data from tax assessors in Philadelphia and Detroit. We then add community-level information from the American Community Survey (ACS). We document higher female ownership in both cities, although sole-female owners are also more likely to own lower value homes, suggesting enduring gender stratification. Using a representative household survey from Detroit, we also show how conventional survey data can dramatically overestimate joint couple property ownership and underestimate sole male and female ownership. Keywords Homeownership · Gender · Wealth · Inequality
Introduction Around the world there are considerable gender-based inequalities in wealth that have large and important implications for gender stratification, social inequality, and demographic outcomes (De Neve et al. 2015; Deere et al. 2013; Deere and Doss * Doron Shiffer‑Sebba [email protected] Julia Behrman [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA
2
Department of Sociology, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
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2006; Denton and Boos 2007; Doss et al. 2014; Ruel and Hauser 2013; Yamauchi and Tiongco 2013). Nonetheless, in the United States and many other high-income countries it has often been complicated to measure gender-based wealth differentials at the population level due to a lack of gender-disaggregated wealth data. Datasets commonly used to explore asset ownership typically ask whether homes and other large assets are owned by the household, which does not allow for a gender analysis of asset ownership when there is more than one adult in the household.1 Understanding gender differences in assets at the population level is crucial to understandings of ongoing processes of gender stratification in wealth that arise from factors such as the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, and so on. Due to the data limitations described above, scholars interested in exploring gender patterns of asset ownership often focus on single-person households or assume that married couple
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