17/06/2025

Felix Schaff

European University Institute

"Before the U-Curve: Inter-Family Roots of Preindustrial Gender Inequality"

Abstract

Are the deep historical causes of gender inequality to be found in exogenous forces, such as, geography, technological change or disasters, or also in humanly-devised institutions? We address this question by exploiting one of Europe's most characteristic and persistent institutional dividing lines, the difference between partible and impartible inheritance, together with household-level data on female wealth and independence from the registers of the 1545 Turk Tax from southwest Germany. Under partible inheritance, daughters receive the same share of property as their brothers, and widows receive a substantial share of the couple's property, by law. Under impartible inheritance, by contrast, daughters and wives have to bargain with male family members over property, because there was no legal provision guaranteeing them a fixed share. We find that females were about fifty percent wealthier under partible inheritance, and about thirty percent more independent, as measured with the female household headship rate. These effects are about as large as the impact of the Industrial Revolution on gender inequality in the Goldin-framework.

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