The bank of Mum and Dad has a gender pay gap, with a new study finding that parents help their sons more than their daughters to buy their first home. Zoopla found that, on average, female first-time beneficiaries were given or lent £51,671 towards their first property by parents, while sons got an average of £65,004, meaning men typically got £13,333 more than women. The question on experts’ lips is, why? Is it a case of straightforward sexism? One theory is that the parents of girls pay out significant sums towards their daughters’ weddings , and make up the difference for their sons in the form of boosted gifts for deposits.
It got me thinking about the tradition that the bride’s family pay for the wedding, something many people still take as a given despite its roots in patriarchal ideas of dowries, ownership and trousseaus. As I found when I got married, it’s all very well trying to be a feminist bride, but decoupling a wedding from its historically gendered origins is not always easy. I’m married with a child, and renting in London.
I loved my wedding, but if I were to be gifted a large sum of money, I’d opt for a house deposit every time. A wedding is just one day, and though that day will be replete with lifelong memories, the money spent will never give you the sort of security that bricks and mortar can. Not wanting to eat into our saved deposit fund too much, which we had worked hard to build up over many years, and by choosing to live with flatmates.