Women are a quarter of the 1 percent

A new paper determined that women make up a smaller fraction of those with high incomes the closer you get to the top, in the famed 1 percent that everyone talks about, including politicians in America worth at least $200 million, such as Hillary Clinton.

Women have made a lot of ground in the top 10 percent, but competition is high in the 1 percent, find Tony Atkinson (Oxford University and LSE), Alessandra Casarico (Bocconi University, Milan) and Sarah Voitchovsky (Graduate Institute, Geneva and University of Melbourne), who used tax data from eight countries since the 1980s or earlier to look for the first time at the gender composition of those with top incomes from all sources, not just from earnings.

They find that:

Women are less than a third of those in the top 10% in all countries, and as few as 22% in Norway.Women are less than a quarter of the top 1% in all the countries, and less than 18% in Norway, Denmark and the UK.Only 9% of the top 0.1% in the UK are women, the lowest of the six countries compared.

Except in Australia, the presence of women at the top has increased over time. Over time, they contend the speed of the fall in the presence of women moving from the top to the very top has become more marked – there appears to be a ‘glass ceiling’ at the very top, the 1%, because they are only a quarter rather than a half. Yet no one would argue for a quota among the rich, including rich women, other than that it might be nice to have another billion dollars.

In the UK while the share of women in the top 10% and top 1% has risen since the 1990s, the share of women in the top 0.1 percent was little changed. The research shows that it is important to look not just at the gender gap in pay from work, but also at who benefits from other kinds of income, such as dividends and interest.

Yes, they believe interest and dividends and profits from capital gains are somehow sexist.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/InternationalInequalities/pdf/III-Working-Paper-5--...