This  Debate on Equality will take place on October 7th, 2020, from 6pm to 7:30pm, and will be dedicated to the presentation of Le Genre du Capital, by Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac. The conference will be held in French.

Why do women accumulate fewer assets than men? Why do marital separations impoverish women while they do not prevent men from becoming wealthy?

In this book, Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac explain why the gender wealth gap is grossly underestimated by statistical surveys, which focus on households rather than individuals. They describe the cognitive biases and patterns of domination that result in unequal sharing in moments of conjugal breakdown and inheritance, favoring male rather than female accumulation of capital. The main of these patterns is the process they call reversed accounting, which Céline Bessière analyzes in detail in this  2019 Socio-Economic Review article. As families and legal professionals strive to preserve real estate and businesses, or to minimize taxes, they produce inventories, estimations and distributions of assets which end up disadvantaging women, even though shares may appear to be formally equal. Reversed accounting is a common logic of practice, in which the result comes first and computation only after, as a means to legitimize the sharing that has been (forcefully) agreed on.

Authors

? Céline Bessière is a sociologist and professor at Université Paris-Dauphine.  Her research focuses on the economic and legal dimensions of the family: inheritance transfers, separations marriage, organization of domestic economies, division of labor between spouses, etc.
? Sibylle Gollac is a sociologist and researcher at the CNRS. Her research focuses on social mobility and the role of heritage in the reproduction of social class and gender relations, as well as on the place of the economic and legal in kinship relations and gender inequalities.

They both participated in the Collectif Onze, which published Au tribunal des couples.

Event Details:

? Céline Bessière, Sibylle Gollac, Le Genre du Capital,  La Découverte, 2020

? Paris School of Economics : 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 Paris – Amphithéâtre

The conference will be held in French.