Grant funds journal’s look at gender, wealth inequalities

Grant
funds journal’s look at gender, wealth inequalities

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News Staff

The Journal of
Feminist Economics was recently awarded a $120,000 grant
from the Ford Foundation to publish a special issue about
women and the distribution of wealth.

The multidisciplinary
special issue will be published in 2006 and will include
seven to 12 articles.

Cheryl Doss,
a lecturer in economics at Yale University and director
of graduate studies for the Program in International Relations
at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, and
Carmen Diana Deere, an economics professor at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst, are the guest editors of the
special issue, “Women and the Distribution of Wealth.”

Diana Strassmann,
editor of Feminist Economics and a senior research fellow
at Rice University, said the grant will give the journal
the opportunity to report on more research on gender inequalities
in wealth and assets.

“The special
issue provides an opportunity to encourage and give visibility
to the importance and potential significance of detailed
scholarly research on this topic,” she said. “The
grant will advance current knowledge of the relationship
between women’s welfare and the distribution of assets
by gender.

“Although
women are half of the world’s population and one-third
of the official labor force, it has been estimated that
they do two-thirds of the world’s work. However, they
earn only one-tenth of the world’s income and own a
mere 1 percent of the world’s property,” she said.

Strassmann said
more data needs to be collected on whether assets are owned
by women or men. Researchers have usually collected data
only at the household level and have not looked at how assets
are owned by individual household members.

“Wealth
may be inherited, transferred among the living or accumulated
through work or investments over the life cycle,” she
said. “However, differences in inheritance and property
laws and measurement problems have made precise estimates
of the relative importance of these different forms of asset
accumulation difficult to determine.”

Gender inequality
can often vary by countries within a given region and also
within certain regions of a country. These inequalities
depend on factors such as inheritance norms and practices,
marital regimes, state land distribution programs and the
role of land markets.

“Owning
assets may give women additional bargaining power within
the household, the community and in public arenas,”
Strassmann said. “It may also help keep them out of
poverty, lead to better outcomes for children or result
in better outcomes for women in case of separation, divorce
or widowhood.”

Writers have
submitted topics that include historical issues, estimation
of the gender distribution of wealth, differences by gender,
ethnicity and immigrant status. The subject matter also
includes the marital status of women and wealth outcomes,
the relationship between women’s labor force participation
and asset accumulation and female entrepreneurs.

“The majority
of the proposed papers analyze the factors that determine
the gender distribution of wealth and the obstacles to women’s
accumulation of assets,” Strassmann said. “The
32 authors of the 24 potential papers reflect a good balance
between economists and non-economists, with sociologists,
anthropologists, political scientists, historians or scholars
in other disciplines contributing approximately half of
the papers.”

The aim of the
special issue is to provide information on the consequences
of an unequal distribution of wealth.

“If the
research shows that the consequences of vast inequalities
in the distribution of wealth are pernicious, we expect
that policies will begin to be developed that make use of
such knowledge,” she said.

This current
grant is the largest one the journal has been awarded. The
journal was recently awarded a $65,000 grant by the Swedish
International Development Agency to create a special issue
on gender and aging to be published in 2005. In 2002, the
journal was awarded $65,000 by the Ford Foundation to publish
a special issue on single mothers that will be published
in July.