Gender and wealth accumulation: an international perspective.

This article examines the persistent global gender wealth gap, exploring why women accumulate less wealth than men despite advances in gender equality. It highlights key contributing factors such as gendered labor divisions, lifetime earnings disparities, differences in asset ownership and investment returns, and the impact of marital property and inheritance laws. The article also discusses methodological challenges in measuring gender wealth gaps across diverse national contexts and emphasizes the importance of individual-level wealth data to capture within-household inequalities. Finally, it calls for expanded intersectional and international research, including attention to race, class, and LGBTQIA+ perspectives, and urges scholars to critically examine the institutional and cultural processes that sustain both gendered wealth disparities and extreme wealth concentration.