Income, or pay, is a flow of money: it’s usually the money that people get from their employers. Wealth, on the other hand, is a stock of money. Wealth is the value of all assets that a person (or household) owns: their house, car, jewelry, stocks and bonds, the money in their bank accounts.
Wealth is an important measure of economic well-being because it is closely tied to economic security. In the case of job loss or critical emergencies, it is a person’s stock of wealth that will keep them financially afloat – or not. Wealth is usually also the resource that allows people to take somewhat risky economic decisions, like making potentially profitable investments or starting a business.
While the gender gap in pay has consistently been measured in Western countries since the middle of the twentieth century, researchers and national statistics agencies have lacked data on wealth to be able to calculate a gender wealth gap. Indeed, in many countries, it is still not possible to do so. In almost all countries, the measurement of wealth for men and women separately is imperfect.
In a 2018 publication, my coauthors and I analyzed the gender wealth gap in eight European countries. The figure below makes the main point well. Women are concentrated at the lower end of the wealth distribution – meaning that they are more likely to hold less wealth than men. We found that overall, the gender wealth gap was 31.7% – far higher than the EU average for the gender pay gap (the 2022 gap calculated by the European Commission was 13%).
