Gendering Tax Optimization: Insights from Ethnography of Wealthy Families from the Top One Percent Across Continental Europe

Globally, women accumulate less wealth than men. The gender wealth gap is most pronounced at the top of the wealth distribution. However, little is known about how wealthy men and women actually manage their wealth, although there are several indications that women are excluded or exclude themselves from the main decision sites and moments. For the last three years, Céline Bessière has conducted family case studies among the wealthy; she also interviewed their legal and financial advisors (private bankers, family officers, estate planners, tax lawyers, portfolio managers, etc.) and attended these professionals’ client meetings. In a period of significant political debate on the taxation of wealth and inheritance, tax optimization is omnipresent in the interactions between the wealthy and their advisors. In her talk, Céline Bessière discusses how the resulting tax strategies – including estate planning and tax migration – are gendered, with consequences for wealth inequality.

Céline Bessière is a professor of sociology at Paris-Dauphine University and currently a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. For the last 25 years she has been studying the material, economic, and legal dimensions of family, in particular through the analysis of inheritance and marital breakdown. Her new project is about gender and wealth accumulation in the affluent classes in Europe. Her research is located at the crossroads of several fields: economic sociology, sociology of the family, elite studies, sociology of law and justice, and sociology of gender and class. She coauthored with Sibylle Gollac The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2023) and coedited with Maude Pugliese in 2025 the special issue of Socio-Economic Review on “Gender and Wealth Accumulation: An International Perspective.”