Enfances, Familles, Générations (Sep 2024)
Travail de la dette et inégalités de patrimoine : perspective de genre
Abstract
Research Framework: Existing studies agree that the work involved in managing debts and their consequences is mostly undertaken by women. We know that this debt work involves more deprivation and sacrifice, but we do not know its effects on women’s wealth.Objectives : This article identifies processes explaining the link between debt work and the decline of women’s wealth.Methodology: This article is based on 44 semi-structured interviews conducted in Switzerland with overindebted couples with or without children as part of two debt-related research projects funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2016-2022).Results: We show that the predominance of women in debt work can be explained by the fact that it is not just financial and administrative work. It is experienced as parental and conjugal care work. Concern for and preservation of family members’ well-being, especially children, leads women to invest their own assets. Perceived as a means of doing gender in a situation of over-indebtedness by acting as a “good” mother and spouse, this work and the inequalities it produces are not called into question.Conclusion : The financialization of everyday life implies new forms of financial work, such as debt work, which reinforce wealth inequalities within the family, with men’s wealth and that of their children being preserved to the prejudice of women’s wealth. In this regard, the financial assets of each family members have different meanings, with women’s wealth becoming an adjustment variable in the event of economic difficulties, enabling family status and good family relations to be maintained.Contribution : By focusing on the financial burdens carried by women, this article offers a new approach to understanding the gendered processes involved in the constitution of wealth inequalities, which until now have focused mainly on gendered access to money and inheritance.
