What Percent of the 1% Is Female?
It’s small and getting even smaller
Inequality rises all the way to the top.
Earlier this year, Gabriel Zucman, a prominent economist at the University of California, Berkeley, came to a grim conclusion about inequality in the United States: The concentration of wealth has “returned to levels last seen during the Roaring Twenties.” This trend has not escaped politicians’ attention, and the now-historic levels of income and wealth inequality have emerged as central issues in the Democratic presidential primary. Several candidates have put out ambitious proposals to tax wealth and address the country’s staggering racial wealth gap.
Yet for all the research and all the chatter, relatively scant attention has been paid to the fact that gender income gaps at the top of the income spectrum are dramatic and have also worsened in recent decades, reflecting a general erosion of female power. When it comes to joining the ranks of the 1%, women are falling even further behind.
A 2019 paper by Jill E. Yavorsky, Lisa A. Keister, and Yue Qian published in the American Sociological Review looked at households in the top 1% of the income distribution — that is, a total household income of at least $845,000 (in 2016 dollars) — and attempted to determine which partner’s earnings were driving the household…
