Who Owned What? Mapping the Gender Wealth Gap in Sweden, 1850–1950

Globally, women hold less capital than men. They are underrepresented among billionaires, save less for retirement, and are overrepresented in low-paid occupations. The gender wealth gap is not a contemporary phenomenon. It has deep historical roots. Yet we know surprisingly little about how it emerged and developed over time. What did women actually own? How did they manage to accumulate assets, administer them, and pass them on? And how did their economic agency differ from that of men?

These are the questions addressed by the research project Tracking Gendered Wealth Inequality: Evidence from Sweden, 1850–1950 financed by Handelsbanken Stiftelse. The project is led by Elise Dermineur Reuterswärd, associate professor of economic history at Stockholm University, together with a doctoral student attached to the project. Our ambition is to produce the first individual-level, harmonised mapping of wealth differences between men and women in Sweden across an entire century.

Why wealth — and not just income?

Historical research on economic inequality between the sexes has long been dominated by studies of the gender pay gap. There are good reasons for this: wage data are often more readily available, and earnings are a central measure of labour-market conditions. But focusing solely on income is misleading. Wealth — the total value of an individual's financial and material assets minus debts — is a far more comprehensive measure of economic welfare and power.

Assets can be used directly (such as a home), but they can also generate interest, rental income, dividends, and capital gains. They serve as collateral for credit, as a buffer in times of crisis, and as something to pass on to the next generation. Those who own have entirely different opportunities than those who merely earn: better prospects for educating themselves and their children, greater political influence, and more economic security in times of illness or old age. Understanding the distribution of wealth is therefore a way of understanding power and opportunity in a society.

From vertical to horizontal inequality

Since Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), historical research on the distribution of wealth has flourished. Work by Guido Alfani, Erik Bengtsson, Daniel Waldenström and their colleagues, among others, has radically improved our understanding of how wealth has been accumulated and distributed over the centuries. But this scholarship has dealt almost exclusively with vertical inequality, the gap between rich and poor. The horizontal dimension, the difference between men and women, has remained in the background. Piketty's Capital, for instance, barely engages with gender at all.

A major reason for this gap is the problem of sources. Historical wealth data are typically recorded at the household level, not at the individual level. How then does one separate what a wife owned from what her husband owned, when everything was registered jointly? The studies that have nonetheless tried to measure women's wealth have therefore tended to be case studies with limited geographical and temporal scope, and often restricted to unmarried women, whose assets are easier to identify.

Why Sweden — and why 1850–1950?

Sweden is an unusually favourable case for such a study. The long continuity of parish registration, the early and consistent practice of compiling probate inventories (mandatory since 1734), the detailed tax records, and well-preserved wills make it possible to track individuals' wealth across a century and beyond. After a tax reform in 1861, income information was also included in Stockholm's population registers, meaning that even those below the tax threshold appear in the material. On top of this, Sweden was spared the large-scale destruction of assets that the wars inflicted on much of Europe, so that changes in the distribution of wealth can be interpreted as reflecting genuine economic and institutional shifts rather than the chaos of conflict.

The period 1850–1950 is also historically pivotal. This is when the patriarchal property system was gradually dismantled: unmarried women gained legal majority in 1858; married women received expanded rights over their property through the reforms of 1874 and 1920; and inheritance law was equalised between sons and daughters. It is also the period when Sweden industrialised, urbanised, democratised, and took its first steps toward the welfare state. The question is what all of this actually meant for women's real economic position. Did the wealth gap narrow as formal equality grew? Or did it persist despite legal change?

Three pillars: accumulation, transmission, and management

The project is built around three key questions that together cover the full life cycle of wealth:

Accumulation concerns how women generated and built up assets, through work, marriage, savings, credit, and investment. What strategies did they use? Which roles, norms, and legal frameworks made it possible or impossible?

Transmission concerns how wealth was passed on through inheritance. Despite formally equal inheritance rules, research has shown that sons and daughters were often treated differently in practice; family strategies, lifetime gifts, and testamentary arrangements could favour male heirs. What did these patterns look like in Sweden, and how did they change as legislation was reformed?

Management concerns the question of control. To own is one thing; to be free to dispose of what one owns is another. Marital property regimes, the institution of guardianship, and the development of credit markets all played decisive roles here. Did women have real decision-making power over their assets, or was their ownership largely formal?

Method and challenges

The project rests on an extensive microdata approach. Probate inventories, tax declarations, and wills from six selected benchmark years between 1850 and 1950 will be linked at the individual level using parish records and population registers.

The methodological challenge is twofold. First, we must separate spouses' wealth from one another, which requires reading probate inventories and tax declarations alongside parish records and genealogical information. Second, traditional mean-based measures are inadequate: because wealth distributions have long tails and women's distributions are systematically more compressed than men's, averages can be misleading. The project therefore uses percentile-based measures and a decomposition of the Gini index that allows for the analysis of inequality both between and within groups, an approach that makes it possible to compare men's and women's relative positions in the wealth distribution over time.

What will it yield?

The significance of the project extends beyond the strictly scholarly. Understanding the historical roots of the gender wealth gap is essential for understanding the contemporary one. Although women in Sweden today have the same formal rights as men, they still receive lower pensions, less capital income, and own fewer shares and less real estate. Where do the explanations for this persistent difference lie? How much is accounted for by contemporary labour-market factors, and how much is a legacy of older institutional and familial patterns?

By shifting the focus from class to gender — from vertical to horizontal inequality — the project hopes to contribute new knowledge about how the state, the family, and the market have jointly shaped women's economic agency. Ultimately, it asks a fundamental historical question: who got to own, and what did it mean to own?