Gendering finance

Mareike Beck

Chapter 48 in Handbook on Gender in World Politics, 2026, pp 318-323 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter explores how finance is gendered both at the global and the everyday level, challenging the conventional view of financial markets as neutral or objective. The first section shows that global financial institutions have historically been male dominated, while financial crises have disproportionately affected women. While debates such as the ‘Lehman Sisters’ vs. ‘Lehman Brothers’ have helped to highlight and alleviate the lack of women leadership in global financial governance, this has often relied on simplified and essentialising gendered representations about women as ‘prudent financial investors’ as opposed to ‘risk-taking’ or ‘entrepreneurial’ men. By contrast, feminist finance scholars show that gendered dynamics extend beyond binary representations to the very structure of financial governance and the nature of finance itself. The second section examines how the financialisation of everyday life is gendered. As social reproduction becomes increasingly dependent on financial markets—and vice versa—households, particularly women, bear the burden of managing private debt and asset accumulation. Typically, women are overrepresented in precarious debt arrangements, from payday loans to subprime mortgages, while men disproportionately benefit from financial asset ownership. The chapter underscores that feminist finance scholars address how gendered asset and debt work is key for how financialisation sustains itself and how its distributional politics amplifies wealth disparities along gender, class, and racial lines.

Keywords: Asset-based Welfare; Crisis; Financial Governance; Everyday Finance; Asset-based Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781803923765
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781803923772.00059 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21594_48

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().