The world currently has about 2,043 billionaires and 89% of them are men, indicates data released by Forbes in their 2017 World’s Billionaires List.
So while the wage gap for average workers marches slowly towards parity, becoming one of the the richest of the rich appears to be the final boy’s-club frontier.
Forbes’ list, which calculated the net worths of the world’s wealthiest individuals based on stock prices and exchange rates from around the world, provides a snapshot ranking of the world’s wealthy elite.
Combined, these 2,043 billionaires control US$7.67 trillion; or about double the entire nominal gross domestic product of Germany.
The wealthiest woman on this year’s list, coming in at number 14, was Liliane Bettencourt. At the time of her death in September 2017, the L’Oréal heiress had amassed a net worth of $39.5 billion.
These are powerful people, and their numbers are growing.
The first Forbes World’s Billionaires List identified just 140 billionaires worldwide in 1987. Only eight of them, or 5.7%, were women.
Fifteen years later, the 2002 list counted a total 497 billionaires, 35 of which, or 7%, were women.
Today, 11% of all global billionaires are women. Slowly, female billionaires are coming onto the list and rising through its ranks.
But when considering the number of overall billionaires has increased almost 1,400% since 1987, while the number of female billionaires has risen only 5.3 percentage points since the same year, the glass ceiling becomes glaringly obvious, even this high up.
Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, predicted that at the current pace, it would take nearly 100 years for women to make up half the population of even the top one percenters.
“The higher up you move in the income distribution, the lower the proportion of women,” said Zucman to the New York Times.
In 2016, Zucman co-authored a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research analyzing the role of gender in income inequality.
“We are still a long, long way from gender equality at the top,” Zucman said.
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