Why Aren’t There More Female Billionaires?
Women have been rapidly climbing the employment and wage ladders in recent decades. But only a small fraction have made it to the top rungs — and their progress may be slowing.
New research shows that after making big strides in the 1980s and ‘90s, the number of women breaking into the top 1 percent of earners has stalled. Women account for only 16 percent of the 1 percent, a number that has remained essentially flat over the past decade, according to a paper by three economists. And they account for only 11 percent of the top 0.1 percent of earners.
The threshold for making the top 1 percent of earners in 2014 was $390,000, while it was $1.32 million for the top 0.1 percent, according to the definitions of income used in the research.
“The higher up you move in the income distribution, the lower the proportion of women,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the paper, which analyzes gender in the 1 percent. “It shows that there is a fundamental form of inequality at the top related to gender.”
“在收入阶梯上越往上走，女性的比例越低，”加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)的经济学教授加布里埃尔·祖克曼(Gabriel Zucman)说。他是这篇分析1%赚钱最多人士性别比例的论文的一位作者。“这表明，收入顶端存在一种最基本的与性别相关的不平等。”
The world of billionaires and millionaires, measured by wealth, also remains a predominantly male club. Of the nearly 2,500 billionaires in the world, only 294 (around 12 percent) are women, according to Wealth-X, a research firm.
The number of female billionaires is growing only half as fast as the male billionaire population, Wealth-X says. And women may even be losing ground in the millionaire population: Worldwide, the number of women worth $30 million or more declined in 2015, even as the equivalent male population grew.
Of course, women are making inroads among the rich. By some measures, there are more wealthy or high-earning women than ever, in the United States and around the world. In 2000, there were 11 female billionaires on the planet, according to Forbes; by 2016, there were 190. (Forbes and Wealth-X have different tallies for the female billionaire population.)
Yet cracking the “diamond ceiling” appears to be getting harder. According to the paper that Zucman and two other economists wrote for the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research — his collaborators were the well-known Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley — women tripled their share of the top 1 percent of earners from 1980-2000, to 9.2 percent. Yet from 2000-14, their share grew only to 11.5 percent.
然而，打破“钻石天花板”似乎正变得越来越困难。根据祖克曼和另外两位经济学家（分别是巴黎经济学院[Paris School of Economics]著名的托马·皮克提[Thomas Piketty]以及加州大学伯克利分校的伊曼纽尔·赛斯[Emmanuel Saez]）为非营利组织美国国家经济研究局(National Bureau of Economic Research)撰写的那篇论文，从1980年至2000年，女性在赚钱最多的1%人口中所占的比例涨了两倍，达到9.2%。但是，从2000年至2014年，她们所占的比例仅增长至11.5%。
At the current pace, Zucman predicted, it would take nearly 100 years for women to make up half the population of the top 1 percenters. “We are still a long, long way from gender equality at the top,” he said.
The slowdown stands in stark contrast to the gains made by women in the broader workforce. Median pretax income for working-age women more than quintupled between 1962 and 2014, to $20,000. It’s still far below the median pretax income for men, which, at $35,000, has stayed roughly the same since 1964, according to the research paper. (The paper uses “labor income” as its definition of income, which does not include capital gains and certain other sources of wealth.)
The women’s wealth gap would be even worse without inherited fortunes. According to Wealth-X, of the 294 female billionaires in the world, only 49 are self-made. The rest owe their fortunes partly or entirely from an inheritance.
So why are there so few women at the top of the wealth pyramid? And what needs to change?
Julia Pimsleur, founder of the multimillion-dollar Little Pim language-instruction company and daughter of language training entrepreneur Paul Pimsleur, said discrimination in the executive suite and the world of venture capital remained a stubborn force.
价值数以百万美元计的小皮姆语言指导公司(Little Pim)创始人、语言培训企业家保罗·皮姆斯勒(Paul Pimsleur)的女儿朱莉娅·皮姆斯勒(Julia Pimsleur)说，企业高层和风险资本界的歧视依然是一股固执的力量。
“There is unconscious bias in the system,” she said. “I believe there are many men who would like to see more women at the top.”
“I don’t think they’re all actively trying to keep women out,” she added, “but some discrimination still exists.”
Yet Pimsleur also advised that women who want to reach the top may need to adjust their priorities.
“They have to put themselves at the top in their minds,” she said. “It has to start with ‘I’m going to be the CEO.’ And then it’s, ‘What do I need to do to get there?’ And then you go out and become that person.”
She said the notion that women simply didn’t place as much importance on pursuing outsize wealth was misleading.
“Women want the triple win — money, meaning and mobility,” she said. “They want the big dollars. But they also want to do something that adds value. And they want freedom and flexibility.”