Gender and Age Divisions Among the Economic Power Elite: A Comparative Analysis of 16 Countries from the World Elite Database (WED)

This chapter introduces the World Elite Database (WED) project, which addresses the challenge of standardization and comparability across elite populations, starting with individuals and organizations that occupy positions of economic power. It provides a descriptive overview of two sets of early findings related to age and gender for economic elites across 16 different countries: Argentina, Chile, China, Denmark, France, Finland, Italy, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The chapter finds significant variation across countries in terms of gender ratios, but also that women are more likely to be among the elites enforcing the economic rules of the game. Their participation in the economic elite is also associated with gender equality institutions across countries, while the women among the wealth elite and corporate leadership positions are not associated with national institutional patterns. It also finds wide variation in the age of economic elites, which is only weakly correlated to national structural factors, such as life expectancy and the timing of a country’s integration into the modern global economy. Combining gender and age patterns, the chapter finds another striking regularity: across countries and categories of economic elites, the women are on average younger that the men.