Symmetric products of equivariantly formal spaces

Abstract: Let X be a CW complex with a continuous action of a topological group G. We show that if X is equivariantly formal for singular cohomology with coefficients in a field, then so are all symmetric products of X and in fact all its Gamma-products. In particular, symmetric products of quasi-projective M-varieties are again M-varieties. This generalizes a result by Biswas and D'Mello about symmetric products of M-curves. We also discuss several related questions.