The world’s collection of billionaires and millionaires may be one of the most persistent boys’ clubs: Of the nearly 2,500 billionaires in the world, only about 12% are women, according to this interesting piece in the New York Times.
Women continue to break the so-called diamond ceiling to some extent: There are more wealthy or high-earning women than ever, both in the United States and around the world. Yet the number of female billionaires is actually growing only half as fast as the ranks of male billionaires, even as women’s incomes increase in the broader workforce.
Julia Pimsleur, the founder of the multimillion-dollar Little Pim language-instruction company, blames the phenomenon on unconscious bias as well as women’s insistence on providing value and obtaining freedom and flexibility in addition to wanting the big bucks. “Women want the triple win—money, meaning and mobility,” she told the Times.
Martine Rothblatt, founder of Sirius Satellite Radio and American Therapeutics, has a different take. She associates striking it rich with working in science and technology—so bringing more girls into those industries could get more women into the ranks of the uber wealthy. “The girl who can dominate a field of robots is a woman who can dominate a field of men,” she says.