Historically, legal discrimination has prevented women from accumulating wealth. This is true in both Western legal traditions: common law and Roman law. Family law is a big part of this story since discrimination was mostly against married women and daughters’ access to assets in matters of inheritance.In Civil law territories such as France, inheritance is supposed to be equally shared among daughters and sons since the Napoleonic Civil code in 1804. Marriage is based on a community of property, allowing married women to keep ownership of their personal assets and to accumulate wealth during the marriage, through this community, half of which belongs to each spouse. However, until the middle of the 20thcentury, a husband retained almost absolute power over the assets. A married woman needed her husband’s authorization to accept inheritance and to give away, buy, or sell assets. Only in 1965 did married women gain the right to work, to open a bank account and to contract with others, without their husband's authorization. Since 1985, spouses are formally treated in an equal way. All mentions of "husband" and "wife" have disappeared from the Civil code concerning assets. France, as all Western countries, has a gender neutral law concerning asset ownership.Despite this formally equal law, the gender gap is still strong in many Western countries (Deere and Doss, 2006; Chang, 2010; Sierminska, 2017; Schneebaum et al., 2018). In France, the gender wealth gap has even widened in the last twenty years (Fremeaux and Leturcq, 2018b).This paper argues that legal professionals and the families contribute to the widening, the legitimation and the concealment of the gender wealth gap. It is based on ethnographic observation, the study of legal files and the confrontation with statistical data on gender wealth inequality in France. Despite a formally equal law, family wealth arrangements in moments of estate planning and marital breakdown reproduce gender inequality.The main legal professionals involved are lawyers and notaries. Their practices, in concert with families, can be described as reversed accounting, a mode of reasoning in which the result comes first and the computation after. Because families and legal professionals strive to preserve certain assets, they produce inventories, estimations and distributions of assets which disadvantage women, even though the shares appear formally equal. Female legal professionals as well as female clients endorse this concern, and thus contribute to the gender wealth gap.

中文翻译：

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反向会计：法国的法律专业人士，家庭和性别贫富差距

历史上，法律歧视阻止妇女积累财富。在西方法律传统中都是如此：普通法和罗马法。家庭法是这个故事的重要组成部分，因为歧视主要是针对已婚妇女和女儿在继承问题上获得财产的权利。在法国等民法地区，自拿破仑民事以来，继承权在女儿和儿子之间平均分配《婚姻法》是1804年制定的。婚姻是建立在财产共同体的基础上的，允许已婚妇女通过婚姻共同体保持自己的个人财产所有权并在婚姻期间积累财富，该共同体中有一半属于每个配偶。但是，直到20世纪中叶，丈夫几乎保留了对资产的绝对权力。已婚妇女需要得到丈夫的同意才能接受继承权，并放弃，购买或出售资产。直到1965年，已婚妇女在未经丈夫许可的情况下才有权工作，开设银行账户并与他人订立合同。自1985年以来，对配偶的正式待遇均一。关于财产的民法典中对“丈夫”和“妻子”的所有提及均已消失。法国与所有西方国家一样，在资产所有权方面具有两性平等的法律，尽管这种形式上平等的法律，但许多西方国家的性别差距仍然很大（Deere and Doss，2006; Chang，2010; Sierminska，2017; Schneebaum et al。 。，2018）。在法国，性别财富差距在过去二十年中甚至有所扩大（Fremeaux and Leturcq，2018b）。本文认为，法律专业人士及其家庭为性别财富鸿沟的扩大，合法化和隐瞒做出了贡献。它基于人种学的观察，法律文件的研究以及与法国性别财富不平等的统计数据的对立。尽管法律形式上是平等的，但在财产规划和婚姻破裂时的家庭财富安排仍会重现性别不平等，其中涉及的主要法律专业人员是律师和公证人。他们的做法与家庭相一致，可以描述为反向会计，这是一种推理模式，其中结果优先，然后计算。由于家庭和法律专业人士努力保护某些资产，因此他们会编制清单，估算和分配资产，这些资产使妇女处于不利地位，即使份额看起来在形式上相等。女性法律专业人士和女性客户对此表示赞同，从而加剧了性别财富差距。