Patriarchal logics and gender inequalities through the financialization of housing

The emergence of a new crisis, following the spread of COVID-19 at a global level in 2020, represents the intensification of a scenario in which hundreds of thousands of individuals had already been displaced from their homes as a result of the housing crisis triggered by the burst of the real estate bubble in 2008 and the new rental boom since 2014. These urban crises, which have had a special impact on the housing sector, have doubly affected the working classes, the underclasses, and women. Such a scenario reveals two fundamental ideas. First, the social relations derived from the spheres of production and reproduction are deeply intertwined (Wöhl 2017). Second, housing is a basic node of power relations, and produces social inequalities. Thus, it is essential to explore the financial geography of everyday life and people’s agency to understand the current reality (Pollard 2012).

Although the productive model of the financialization of housing has been studied by numerous critical researchers, the social relations that are structurally derived from it, and how these social relations are linked to the spheres of reproduction—especially those related to gender, remain understudied and under-researched. Moreover, the relations between production and reproduction are starting to be addressed from the perspective of feminist political economy, introducing the financialization of everyday life as an intensifier of gender exploitation (Pollard 2012). However, the interaction of the financialization of everyday life with housing has not yet been specifically explored. Therefore, although the existing literature can be used as a starting point for this study, there is still a gap in the knowledge related to how gender relations are specifically rearticulated through the financialization of housing.

This article provides a systematic review of studies published in international scientific journals addressing the relations between financialization, housing, and gender. It aims to identify the existing gaps in the knowledge on the abovementioned relations through the elaboration of their rigorous assessment. Ultimately, the study aims to indicate the research that should be conducted in future studies.

In this context, the specific research questions that this article seeks to answer are as follows: What are the current academic discussions that address the relations between the financialization of economies, housing, and gender? How are gender relations structurally articulated under the financialization of housing? What are the patriarchal structures that support the financialization of housing and how do these structures support this financialization? What type of gender inequalities do these patriarchal structures produce? What role does housing have as a financial asset in supporting gender inequality? What are the gaps in knowledge in these aspects? What should be the direction of future research that addresses housing from the feminist urban political economy perspective?

To answer these questions, this article is structured into five sections. After the introduction and methodology, the relations between financialization and gender are analyzed, indicating the processes that explain the patriarchal structures of financialization and the types of gender inequalities generated by these structures. The fourth section focuses on the study of these patriarchal structures of financialization, specifically from the perspective of the financialization of housing. In the last section, the conclusions are presented, and the gaps detected in this field of knowledge are indicated.

The methodology of this study consisted of a systematic review of scientific articles published in international scientific journals discovered via bibliographic search engines. Furthermore, other pertinent articles have been added to fully cover the topic of the study and conduct an exhaustive review. This has also allowed us to find gaps in knowledge and present possible directions for future research regarding the concepts of financialization, housing, and gender.

The literature search was carried out in the Web of Science and Scopus bibliographic search engines. In January 2020, relating the concepts of financialization, financial, housing, household, gender, feminism, and/or women, twenty-one articles were found in Web of Science and two in Scopus. Thus, twenty-three articles in total were identified in these search engines. Out of these, three articles were published before 2007, and twenty articles were published since 2007 (Table 1). These articles are predominantly from the fields of geography, economics, feminism, sociology, and political science, and they were all published in English.

Before obtaining the results from the bibliographic search engines, the inclusion and exclusion criteria were established. One of these criteria was language, and it was decided that articles published only in Spanish, Catalan, and English would be included in the review, although no results for articles in Spanish or Catalan were found. It was also decided that the articles that did not address the concept of housing or home as a physical space or financial asset would be excluded.

The articles were grouped under the following five themes (Table 1): feminist political economy (65% of the articles); gender and financialization (8.7%); gender and mortgages (13%); housing as a financial asset (4.3%); and access to housing and gender violence (8.7%).

This is an analysis of the literature referring to the Global North, mainly from Western Europe and North America, which is where the financialization of housing had its beginnings, and where it is most advanced. This financialization is also taking place in the countries of South America, so much of this paper’s contributions can surely be observed in those countries, although that is not the focus here.

Associated with the development and implantation of neoliberalism, financialization has been defined as a pattern of accumulation, in which profits are increasingly produced through financial channels rather than through trade and the production of goods (Arrighi 1994; Krippner 2005; Aalbers 2013). According to Lapavitsas (2011), financialization is the systemic transformation of mature capitalist economies. This process has three distinctive characteristics. First, large non-financial corporations have become dependent on bank financing, as they seek external financing in open markets. Second, banks have turned toward the mediation of transactions in open markets, thus obtaining commissions and commercial profits through “hard” risk management practices. Third, the decline in public provision for housing, health, education, and pensions has increased the involvement of workers with the financial system, leading to these workers facing higher debts and becoming owners of their financial assets.

Thus, regarding the above definitions of financialization, the processes of the financialization of economies involve transformations in social relations, both of production and reproduction of everyday life (Lapavitsas 2011; Davis & Kim 2015). However, many of these “structural” relations associated with financialization are often invisible. Some authors point out that in the analyses and discourse on the functioning of financial systems, there is a “strategic silence” that consists of hiding the interactions between finance and the social organization of gender relations. Further, it consists of hiding the interactions between finance and the daily practices of social reproduction, putting up a front of gender neutrality (Bakker 1994). This is a strategy that obscures how financial governance interacts with, and reinforces, or restructures, the social organization of gender relations and the gender orders that prevail at different times and places, which hides the disadvantages faced by women and reinforces gender inequality (Young, Bakker & Elson 2011; Roberts & Elias 2018).

The feminist literature, far from being dazzled by the apparent complexity of financialization, is addressing these issues from different currents of study: feminist economics, feminist studies, and international feminist political economy. Despite their theoretical, geographical, epistemological, and methodological diversity, these studies have the common objective of unraveling and exposing a type of structural relations of capitalist economies that structure uneven gender relations and the exploitation of women. To contribute to the visibility of these relations, the fundamental characteristics that have been described so far regarding the relation between financialized capitalism and gender are elaborated in the subsequent sections. First, we describe the relations and processes that explain the patriarchal structure of financialization; second, the types of inequalities produced through this regime of accumulation.

Considering the literature review that was conducted in this study, it can be stated that the patriarchal roots of financialization are fundamentally based on the process of reprivatization of social reproduction—a process linked to the intensification of indebtedness and the gendered division of labor.

According to Roberts (2013), the concept of “social reproduction” involves three main processes: the biological reproduction of the human species; the conditions and the social construction of motherhood, including the reproduction of the labor force (i.e., subsistence, education, and practice/experience); and the reproduction and provision of the necessary care that can be privatized in families and kinship networks, or socialized by some degree through the support of the state.

The processes of social reproduction are central and necessary in the processes of capital accumulation (Luxton 2018), as the process of production cannot be sustained without the processes of social reproduction. Notably, the unity that existed between the production of use values and the reproduction of the individual in precapitalist modes of production—insofar as production is not the production of use value for obtaining exchange value—has disappeared. The overall process of production of goods now seems to be separated from the process of reproduction through value, and these processes are even considered to be in direct opposition. While the former is presented as the creation of value, the latter appears as the creation of non-value (Federici 2014). Thus, the production of goods is established as the fundamental process of capitalist production and the laws that govern it. Conversely, reproduction, which has become the creation of “non-value” in capitalism—corresponding to the fact that the individual is devalued—is set as the process of “natural” production (Federici 2014).

Therefore, this separation between production and reproduction represents one of the greatest contradictions and tensions in capitalist economies (Bakker & Gill 2003). Further, this separation is the structure that supports the maintenance of a global market based on uneven relations of gender, class, and ethnicity (Luxton 2018; Elias & Roberts 2018).

However, in the historical phase of financial capitalism, these contradictions between production and reproduction have taken another turn. In this regard, Luxton (2018) precisely points out that the success of neoliberalism depends on individuals absorbing most of the costs of social reproduction. This is because the financial system excludes the social provision of social needs of care and reproduction. Moreover, the costs associated with social provision, previously assumed by the state or employers, are diverted to families and the private sector (Schuberth & Young 2011; Young 2018; Bakker 1994; Elson & Cagatay 2000; Elson 2002).

This exclusion has been carried out through the privatization of social provision, and involves the dismantling of public services, the dispossession of rights and common goods, the sale of public goods, and the speculation in housing, health, and education. The privatization of the areas necessary for the reproduction of life, such as maternity care, education, health, housing, and care, creates a dependency on financial markets and mortgage loans. In other words, it is necessary to pay to have access to these needs, and individuals who do not have access to the necessary income to meet these payments have to get into debt to guarantee their access to these needs.

Fraser (2015) points out that the budget cuts relating to social care and the externalization of family care has resulted in a duality in the organization of social reproduction: commercialized for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot (Bayas 2017). In the countries of the Global North, many of those who agree to provide care in exchange for low wages are migrant women from countries of the Global South, leaving these women even more impoverished to care for individuals in their countries of origin (Bayas 2017).

Thus, the colonization and commercialization of the daily life of households is taking place through the progressive development of financial markets and practices (LeBaron 2010; Wöhl, Hoffmann & Schlager 2015; Wöhl 2018; Toffanin 2011, 2015; Herrera 2012; Sayer 2005; Hoskyns & Rai 2007).

In this regard, Allon (2014) conducted an analysis of financial capitalism in domestic life and the household. She pointed out that the extension of market relations, specifically financial practices, has colonized daily life, leading to a series of changes in which the daily life of households is measured through financial markets. Furthermore, Pollard (2012) analyzes how financial networks can regulate daily life and extract capital gains from different aspects of life.

Over the last few years, the number of female authors who have analyzed the tensions between capital accumulation and social reproduction (life capital) has increased (Braedley & Luxton 2010; Allon 2014; Picchio 2015; Luxton 2018; Elias & Roberts 2018).

Debt is one of the central elements of the current financialized capitalism, through which global financial institutions have pressured states to reduce social expenditures, impose austerity policies, and deprive the populations of common goods (Bayas 2017).

Debt, as David Graeber (2011) explains, has played a fundamental role in the history of humanity and the class struggle (Federici 2020). Federici (2020, p. 106) points out that, “in short, as a method of exploitation and enslavement, debt has been an instrument of class rule in all eras. This is especially the case in the current situation, in which the neoliberal turn of capitalist development has led to the emergence of a new ‘debt economy’ (Lazarrato 2013) that is not only transforming the architecture of capitalist accumulation, but also class relations and the debt itself.” The element of debt has become omnipresent and affects millions of individuals worldwide (student loan debt, mortgages, credit card debt, microfinance debt). Governments and financial institutions now use debt to accumulate wealth and undermine social solidarity (Federici 2020).

This is a process with two main characteristics. First, it is a consequence of the reprivatization of the social relations of social reproduction and the privatization of social provision. Second, it is a completely gendered process and is affected by gender inequalities (Wöhl 2011; Montgomerie & Young 2010; Roberts 2013; Young, Bakker & Elson 2011). Consequently, mortgage debt has been conceptualized as a form of “reprivatization” of the social relations of social reproduction based on the privatization of social provision (Roberts 2013).

It has been claimed that the risks of daily life—specifically, the risks that have emerged with the reprivatization of social reproduction—have been transferred to individuals, and to households and women, in particular. The well-being of households and individuals depends on individuals assuming the majority of the cost of social reproduction. This has a disproportionate impact on women, considering their increased social reproduction responsibilities (Picchio 2015; Sparr 1994; Bakker 1996; Elson 1998; Bezanson 2006; Griffin-Cohen & Brodie 2007) and exposure to gender violence (True 2010, 2012).

The separation of the spheres of production and reproduction also impacts the gendered division of labor (Roberts 2013). At the dawn of the history of capitalism, a gendered division of labor was imposed, whereby men specialized in the arts of violence and destruction, and women specialized in the activities that produce life on a daily and generational basis; over time, this division has been consolidated into a “patriarchal system in which the violent appropriation by men of women’s labor has become the dominant productive force and the engine of capitalization” (Federici, in Mies 2019, p. 17). In this gendered division of labor, women perform the duties necessary to sustain daily and generational life—specifically, duties that are outside the process of “formal production”, or outside the salaried capitalist labor market (Luxton 2018). While men perform salaried duties that are considered “productive”, women assume the main responsibilities of social reproduction (Blumberg 1978; Luxton 2018), which include unpaid reproductive labor such as care and cleaning, and paid labor in the public health and education sector (Wöhl 2017).

In the context of financialization, and through the reprivatization of social reproduction, an intensification of the gendered division of labor is proposed. This is because, as women have historically assumed the greater load of reproductive labor, the privatization of this labor assumed by the state results in the load of these tasks falling once again on women, thus increasing their workload, and, therefore, the gendered division of labor. Within this gendered division of labor, there are also differences in the impact of the privatization of reproductive labor among women (along with class, nationality, ethnicity differences, among others). This is because middle- and upper-class women can afford to pay for these services, generally from racialized, immigrant women from the Global South, who work in their homes for low wages, and under exploitative conditions (Roberts 2013).

However, to confront and expose the inequalities created by these processes, several authors have proposed expanding the concept of labor to include the unpaid labor of social reproduction. This leads to a rethinking of the assumptions that shape the understanding of social and economic life and the categories of labor, household, and gender in the context of financialization (Allon 2014; Benería 1979).

The patriarchal roots of financialization and the centrality of women in capital accumulation processes, the spheres of the reprivatization of reproduction, and the intensification of indebtedness impact the production of social inequalities and the exploitation of women, racialized minorities, and the lower classes. The gendered division of labor implied by these processes also has an impact. The following are the most explicit inequalities observed: the increase in women’s workload, the increase in their indebtedness, and the masculinization of finances. Such precarious material living conditions also have an impact on psychological, emotional, and physical health (Bayas 2017), although this impact is not discussed in detail in this article.

The collapse of the social care systems, the reprivatization of reproductive labor, and the reduction of social welfare provision in the countries of the Global North have had a social impact, partially mitigated by the increase in care labor—a precarious or unpaid reproductive labor responsibility that falls mainly on women (Bayas 2017), especially on poor and working-class women (Roberts & Elias 2018). However, women not only take on the burden of the reprivatization of social reproduction with their unpaid labor at home but also increase their paid labor outside the household (Elson 2010).

As mentioned above, financialization implies the restructuring of relations of social reproduction and the need for certain social classes to obtain mortgage loans to cover the expenses of the basic needs of daily life. This includes increasing their debt to finance consumption, education, health, and care, thus also increasing the risks of non-payment, foreclosure, and bankruptcy.

The most precarious groups—especially the working classes, single women, and racialized minorities—are the ones who get into debt to guarantee their social reproduction (Roberts 2013; Roberts & Elias 2018). However, women continue to conduct most of the work of social reproduction (Folbre & Nelson 2000; Bakker 2003; Bezanson & Luxton 2006), and, therefore, assume a higher debt burden. Roberts (2013, 24) states that women suffer a disproportionate cost of social reproduction in terms of money and time, have a higher debt burden, and face greater risks of foreclosure and bankruptcy.

Financialization is leading to an intensification of the indebtedness of these groups, and, consequently, an increase in inequalities, especially gender inequalities. Further, inequalities among women are increasing, as, among other things, upper- and middle-class women delegate reproductive work to lower-class women, and racialized immigrant women from the Global South are the most exploited (Young 2001). Moreover, single-parent families, mostly headed by women, are more likely to accumulate debt to maintain living standards (Warren 2002) and face higher risks of foreclosure and bankruptcy than other social groups (McGill 2004).

However, the creation of the need for credit has been linked to financial liberalization strategies, which involve large inflows of foreign capital, and lead to increased asset prices and the formation of speculative bubbles in the stock market and the real estate sector (Floro & Dymski 2000). One of these strategies has been the financial inclusion of women, using specific financial practices that target women as consumers—exploiting certain types of women in particular, and naturalizing financial submission within the spaces of daily life. Consequently, women are being considered as financial subjects (Allon 2014). Women and households are financial assets that, to open the frontier of accumulation, can be financed and used strategically as a flexible source of wealth.

According to Floro and Dymski (2000), financial liberalization has direct and indirect effects on gender–finance relations. The direct effects are related to, on the one hand, the possibility of extending household purchasing power through credit; on the other hand, this increases family indebtedness. The indirect effects are the association of liberalization with economic growth, the increase in the demand for female employment, and the rise in women’s income. In times of crisis, households are forced to bear greater costs, disproportionately assumed by the women in these households, thus worsening their precariousness (Floro & Dymski 2000).

In summary, the feminization of finance describes the gender relations of the global financial architecture (Elson 2002) and the usual structure of these relations that are adopted in various strategies to integrate women into a financialized property society. Furthermore, the feminization of finance represents a challenge for understanding the relations between gender–economy, production–reproduction, and lifework. This is because it implies the reconfiguration of the household as a space for financial calculation and speculation, which, therefore, requires new types of domestic work (Allon 2014).

Another issue related to financial capitalism and gender inequalities is the gender structure of financial markets and practices. Some authors point out that women are absent from key decision-making places in the financial sector (Elson 2010). The interests of women, as well as those of others who have been most affected by the recurring financial crises (workers, racial/ethnic minorities, migrants, and individuals from impoverished countries), are subordinated to the decision-making bodies that discredit other base objective thinking (Tsingou 2010). The feminist economists and international political economy scholars mention that the roots of financial crises are gendered, as they have resulted from gendered economic processes. In these processes, women were virtually absent from key decision-making places in the financial sector, and neither public nor private finances were evenly distributed. Further, these processes did not adequately adhere to women’s requirements as producers and caregivers (Roberts & Elias 2018). The economists and scholars argue that the types of speculation, competition, and risky behaviors that characterized—and have continued to characterize—high finance before the 2008 crisis are distinctively male forms of action (Allon 2014). Some female authors specify that, in discussions about financial elites, men are often characterized as testosterone-fueled, competitive, and risk-seeking, while women are often characterized as “emotional” (Nussbaum 1995), “risk-averse” (Powell & Ansic 1997), passive, and quiet (McDowell 1997; Pollard 2012).

After presenting the main debates on the relations between the financialization of economies and daily life and the relations and production of gender inequalities, this section focuses on the analysis of the literature that examines the interaction of these relations with housing. We question how gender relations are specifically rearticulated through the financialization of housing. In other words, we question the patriarchal roots of the financialization of housing and the gender inequalities that this produces. To find the answers to these questions, we conduct a brief review of the current debates on the concept of the financialization of housing and address the existing literature on gender inequalities through the financialization of housing.

The financialization of housing

Financialization has been conceptualized as a deeply spatial process that shapes social relations that favor the geographic integration of finance in the production, exchange, and consumption of built environments, while improving financial control over the production of urban space and the performance of urban governance (Sayer 2012; Clark, Larsen & Hansen 2015). Therefore, through the conversion of land into financial assets (Harvey 1982), the process of financialization has integrated urban space and housing into its central structure and facilitated the circulation of international financial capital.

The hegemony of this paradigm, since the 1970s, and in parallel with the processes of neoliberalization, has led to the dissemination of finance toward built environments, and expectations of financial profitability through increasingly higher urbanization. Within this logic, financialization, as a structural necessity, implies the permanent improvement of the exchange value, more than the use value, of urban areas and housing, meaning that the entire city is more valued as a profitable business opportunity than for its habitability (Clark 1995; Smith 2012; Harvey 2016; Saegert 2016).

The two main mechanisms for the financialization of housing since its inception are as follows. The first is the widespread access to mortgage debt, which provides massive and widespread access to home ownership. This phenomenon has led to the formation of what has been called “homeowners societies,” real estate booms, and the consequent waves of foreclosures with the burst of real estate bubbles. The second mechanism is the implementation of securitization techniques as a common means to boost the provision of credit for home ownership (Schwartz & Seabrooke 2009; Stuart 2003; Seabrooke 2006). This is a phenomenon that was not only limited to the US but also extended to English-speaking economies. Property booms also occurred in high-income countries (such as Denmark) with covered bond systems in which citizens were supported by the large welfare states, as well as in economies highly inclined toward investment and property construction as a means to perpetuate economic growth (such as Spain) (Seabrooke 2010; Langley 2008; Watson 2008).

The financialization of housing (Aalbers 2016) is part of the strategies of uneven geographical development (Smith 1984), promoting, among other processes of production of unjust spaces, the expansion of broad accumulation processes by the dispossession of housing (Vives-Miró & Rullan 2018). The geographical varieties of the large processes of dispossession of housing, expressed in different forms of urban displacement (foreclosures, evictions of tenants, and privatization of social housing by changes of use through tourism), has led to a profound housing crisis since the burst of the housing bubble in 2008.

The post-crisis reconfiguration of the productive models is based on developing new financial architectures for the accumulation of income through housing, especially rental housing (Vives-Miró 2018). The main strategies of financialization of housing that are being developed are as follows: (i) the promotion and facilitation of investment and massive acquisition of housing by real estate investment funds (Real Estate Investment Trust (REITs)) (Vives-Miró 2018); (ii) the phenomenon of the emergence and expansion of tourist rental housing platforms, such as Airbnb and HomeAway; (iii) the generation of new processes of gentrification and production of rent gaps (Vives-Miró 2018); and (iv) the acceleration of the process of privatization of social housing. The privatization and financialization of public housing have been a manifestation of the accumulation by dispossession of housing, particularly common in the welfare states of Europe, as well as the privatization, commercialization, and financialization of institutionalized common goods, such as health and education (Clark, Larsen & Hansen 2015).

The review of the literature on gender inequalities through the financialization of housing reveals the following main issues that have been addressed from this perspective: the impact of the expansion of subprime loans on class, gender, social inequalities, and ethnicity; the intensification of the gender division of labor; and the increase in gender violence.

Most studies that examine the intensification of inequalities that have led to the development of financialization processes from an intersectional perspective are case studies related to subprime mortgages. While most of these studies are conducted in American cities, they are extremely scarce or non-existent in southern Europe.

Subprime loans were introduced during the attempt to integrate marginalized sectors into the market economy, becoming new market spaces, and legitimizing the consequent exploitation (Roberts 2013). Fishbein and Woodall (2006) and Wyly et al. (2006) mention that subprime loans have targeted women and some racialized minorities and that, through these practices, these groups have been dispossessed of their homes. The results of their studies show that a woman with a below-average income is 3.3% more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than a man with the same income. Further, a woman with an above-average income is 50% more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than a man with the same income. Moreover, Dymski (2012) has demonstrated that African Americans are more than twice as likely to obtain a subprime mortgage as white Americans, and Latino Americans are 40% more likely to obtain a subprime mortgage compared with white Americans. The minority communities are more likely to have subprime mortgages and are also victims of foreclosures and the collapse of home prices (Dymski, Hernández & Mohanty 2013). Similarly, Montgomerie & Young (2010), Roberts (2013), and Young, Bakker & Elson (2011) report that 15 million subprime mortgages were granted in the US between 1998 and 2008 to individuals with low or moderate income. Such a phenomenon accounted for 10 to 13 million foreclosures, and concerned lower-class and black women in particular.

Therefore, it has been concluded that subprime mortgage loans reinforce and perpetuate gender and racial inequalities (Roberts 2013; Seabrooke 2010). They have served to redistribute wealth and asset ownership to the upper layers of the hierarchies: from poor to rich, from single women to men, from racialized minorities to white men and their normative and heterosexual families. In other words, the lower classes tend to accumulate debt, but not assets, as do many women and racialized minorities (Roberts 2013). In this respect, subprime loans have been considered as a form of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003; Strauss 2009) that are based on gender exploitation and rooted in the racial segregation of US cities (Dymski Hernández & Mohanty 2013; Rugh & Massey 2010).

Although no studies have examined the relationship between housing as a financial asset and the increase in the gendered division of labor, there is an article that states that home ownership reinforces the division of labor between men and women (Lambert 2012). It is a justified relationship if we understand that one of the main strategies of the financialization of housing is to promote access to home ownership in the form of widespread ownership through indebtedness.

Lambert (2012) states that home ownership can cause structural changes that affect domestic economies and the ways in which daily life is organized. By studying households in the peri-urban areas of Lyon, he identifies three types of households and three forms of adjustment according to the household. For qualified workers, access to home ownership is a spatial and material resource that improves proximity, mobility, and integration into local networks. For the young and less qualified working classes in large, urbanized spaces on the outskirts of the city, access to home ownership has a great cost in terms of mobility, and this is higher for women. This is because, as their salaried activity is less profitable, they are encouraged to be housewives and dedicate themselves to the care of their children, a fact that generates fragmented family ties and social isolation (Lambert 2012). And for the low and middle classes, access to home ownership is valued as a sign of class identity and an improvement in social position. Thus, this study concludes that access to property in peri-urban areas impacts the gendered division of labor, which is different among the social classes, and that this access to property reinforces those class differences, and, above all, the gender inequalities.

Another issue that is discerned in the literature on gender inequalities, associated with the increasing difficulty of access to housing, is the increase in situations of domestic violence for women when they have to share a roof with their aggressor. However, there are no studies to explain how real estate revaluation in the last few decades is one of the reasons for the lack of options faced by many women who seek a housing alternative when suffering from domestic violence.

The current debates suggest that divorce for women who face gender inequality, and especially for women who are victims of domestic violence, can mean the loss of part of the wealth accumulated through housing. Thus, home ownership not only ceases to act as an asset but also acts as a new financial risk (André, Dewilde & Muffels 2019). In this respect, it has been argued that women who suffer violence from their male partners and leave their homes are aggravating their problems due to their lack of access to financial resources. In addition, Homer, Leonard & Taylor (1984) and Pahl (1985, 1989) note that many women, when forced to leave their homes, suffer a traumatic impact due to their limited access to housing, both as owners and tenants. On the other hand, Thomas & Niner (1989) indicate that many women are left homeless due to the need to escape violence from their husband, partner, or ex-partner. Therefore, Baker et al. (2010) suggest that gender-based violence is one of the main causes of housing instability (including homelessness) at the national level for women and children. Thus, it can be concluded that housing plays an important part in the decisions made by women about whether to leave situations of domestic violence.

In this section, we present the main conclusions derived from the literature review, and state the knowledge gaps that have been detected in the literature and that can be adopted as research aims for future studies.

The review aimed to analyze the relations between financialization, gender, and housing. However, the first obvious fact is that most of the works that address these issues are focused on two of the issues, or, superficially, on all three. In other words, there is no broad scientific analysis, especially theoretical, and, to a lesser extent, empirical, on how the financialization of housing affects gender relations and how this logic is specifically patriarchal. Nevertheless, it is possible to point out some premises that are derived from studies on financialization and gender. These, from different perspectives of feminist studies, focus fundamentally on the privatization and invisibility of social reproduction activities and the increase in inequalities in relation to the impact of these phenomena on women. Conversely, the works on urban political economy and urban geography have included the main strategies for converting housing into financial assets and the impact of this on the social space of cities. From the interrelations between these theoretical bodies and their case studies, we have detailed three main premises below.

First, housing is one of the spaces that has been eliminated from social provision through the implementation of neoliberal policies. Therefore, it is one of the spaces that has been integrated into the logic of the financialization of economies and daily life. The financial markets have gained control within countries, and people have been deprived of housing as a fundamental asset of life; housing has been commercialized, privatized, and financialized. Thus, the provision of housing has become part of the private responsibilities of individuals who have had to assume the burden of housing expenses. This, in the context of increasing property values, often means that individuals have to take on debt in order to access this basic necessity. Although it is true that women are among the group of people with the most precarious economic conditions, this phenomenon means that women end up paying higher debt rates for housing. This fact also contributes to the feminization of poverty.

Second, housing is the essential space wherein reproductive activities take place. Without housing, or with difficulties in accessing housing, reproductive activities cannot be conducted or are conducted with great difficulty. All this implies an increase in the (unpaid) reproductive workload, such as the mental space and emotional energy necessary to seek and find solutions to the housing issue itself. In addition, it may imply the need for women to do other paid work to pay for housing. As most reproductive work is performed by women, this increased burden often represents an increase in women’s workload. In this context, the gendered division of labor is also reinforced.

Third, housing can be considered a meeting point between the processes of production and reproduction. However, housing has shifted from being characterized as the place of reproduction to being understood as a productive activity in itself. In other words, through financialization, housing becomes a financial asset, and hegemonic logic subordinates its use value to its exchange value. This is a clear patriarchal practice, prioritizing business over life. This logic also generates gender, class, ethnicity, and age inequalities.

Considering these main ideas, we indicate the following questions and gaps in knowledge that can be addressed in future research based on the approach of critical social sciences: How is the patriarchal logic of the financialization of housing structured? Under what strategies does the financialization of housing subordinate its use value to its exchange value, and what kind of exploitations and inequalities (and the consequent intersectional effects) are produced through the financialization of housing? What role does housing play as a financial asset in gender inequality? How are inequalities produced through the expansion of mortgage credit in order to access housing in European cities? Which specific role does housing play—as a financial asset—in the process of the feminization of poverty? How does the intensification of the gendered division of labor entailed by urban financialization occur? How does real estate revaluation generate an emotional burden for women, and what impact does it have on unpaid reproductive work, paid work done by women, and women’s health?

Working in these lines of research will allow us to move toward an ever deeper understanding of the unequal social relations that are produced through the financialization of housing.