Here is a fact that I think most of us didn’t know: Women members of Congress are wealthier than men in Congress.
That is the central finding of a new article by political scientists Rachel Bernhard, Andrew Eggers, and Marko Klašnja, titled “A Rich Woman’s World? Wealth and Gendered Paths to Office.” They built a database of U.S. House members’ wealth from 1980 to 2018, drawing on their financial disclosures.
They find that women in the House are 50% wealthier than men in the House, adjusting for both party and decade. Here’s a graph showing the trend over time in inflation-adjusted dollars, separately for each party and gender.
This “gender wealth gap” is puzzling. In general, women are less wealthy than men. And the literature on women in politics has often found that they confront disadvantages that men do not have. So, what is going on here?
Some possible explanations did not pan out. It’s not that women are elected from districts that just tend to elect wealthier candidates, period. And it’s not that women are more likely to have high-prestige, high-earning career paths prior to their election; indeed, if anything it is the opposite. Women are also not more likely to come from political dynasties, nor do they earn more while in Congress (such as by investing their salaries, earning royalties, and so on). Finally, the gap can’t be explained by other demographic factors, like occupation, age, or race.
Instead, the explanation stems from characteristics of the household: Women members of Congress are more likely to have a high-earning spouse. As the authors put it, they’re part of a “power couple.” Men members tend to come from very different households – ones in which their wives “take on flexible, lower-paying work and a disproportionate share of household responsibilities.” Women who want to run for Congress are therefore more likely to either not have childcare responsibilities or have the wealth to hire others to help with childcare.
Several pieces of evidence support this household explanation:
- Congresswomen have fewer children than congressmen.
- The gender wealth gap is larger in households with more children.
- The spouses of congresswomen have a larger share of household assets than spouses of congressmen – and this is especially true in families with children.
All of these findings speak to an important question: why women continue to be underrepresented in political office. An important part of that literature argues that women are simply less likely to run in the first place and that family obligations may be an important part of their calculus. The “gender wealth gap” is consistent with that idea. Women who want to run for office are more likely to need household wealth that helps them manage those obligations. Men who run for office don’t face that challenge to the same extent. They can just rely on their wives.
The authors conclude with this sobering statement: “Not only is it not a rich woman’s world, but it looks like we have not come very far from the advice women would have heard a century ago: ‘marry well.’”
