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Wealth inequality is extreme and growing in the United States, and researchers have begun to explore the factors that are associated with membership in the top one percent of net worth owners. We contribute to this important literature by examining the association between gender and net worth in the U.S. super-rich. We propose that unmarried women, unmarried men, and married couples in the one percent are likely to have different levels of net worth and distinct patterns of asset holdings that reflect gender differences in income and saving, the household division of labor, work, and demographics. We use data from the 1989���2019 U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), a unique data set that contains a high-income, high-wealth sample designed to accurately represent wealthy households. We find modest differences in total net worth among unmarried women, unmarried men, and married couples with unmarried women owning slightly less net worth than either unmarried men or married couples. We also find that unmarried women hold a lower percentage of their net worth in business assets and a higher percentage of their assets as trust accounts compared to unmarried men and married couples. Our findings contribute to the literature that explores the wealth of the super-rich and highlight the role that gender plays in these families. Our results also build on research on the role that business assets and trusts play in wealthy families and suggest that women may be dependent on others for access to the super-rich., Sociologica, Vol. 15 No. 2 (2021)

Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211058026 for Community Effectiveness of Masks and Vaccines by James W. Moody, Lisa A. Keister and Dana K. Pasquale in Socius

Additional file 3. Histogram for previous opioid prescriptions.

Additional file 2. Logistic regression results for non-opioid prescriptions.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231211031684 for Do You Need Business Assets to Be Rich? by Lisa A. Keister, Mingxiang Li and Hang Young Lee in Socius

Researchers have documented racial inequalities in wealth ownership and have offered a variety of explanations to account for these differences. One potentially important contributing factor that has received little attention is racial differences in family structure. This paper explores racial differences in the structure of family of origin and family in adulthood and examines the impact of these differences on wealth accumulation patterns. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that large family size and family disruptions in childhood are negatively associated with wealth accumulation, portfolio behavior, and wealth mobility in adulthood. My analyses suggest that family size is a more important factor determining wealth accumulation for whites than for blacks or Hispanics and that family disruption is most strongly related to wealth outcomes for Hispanics. I find that family structure in adulthood is only modestly associated with overall wealth but strongly related to portfolio behavior and wealth mobility and that these relationships are relatively fixed across racial groups. My findings lend support to arguments about the importance of the role that resource dilution plays in determining life outcomes. They also suggest that efforts to reduce racial inequality in wealth ownership may be most effective if they seek to reduce the impact of deprivation early in life.