The Forbes Billionaires List Is Missing More Than Just Names

After writing about the lack of women in cybersecurity venture capital in my last blog, I found myself sitting with a larger truth. The gap we see in that sector is not isolated. It is part of a deeper and more systemic pattern that stretches across the entire landscape of wealth creation and economic influence. So I went looking for the data to support what I suspected. I studied this year’s Forbes Billionaires List, and the findings were as stark as they were familiar.

Out of 2,781 billionaires globally, only 369 are women. That means just over 13 percent of the world’s billionaires are female. And of those 369 women, only 100 are considered self-made. Compare that to the more than 2,100 self-made men on the same list, and the imbalance becomes undeniable. This is not just about representation in tech or venture. This is about a global pattern of who gets to create, hold, and shape capital at scale.

What stands out even more is how these fortunes are built. Among the richest women, the dominant path to wealth is inheritance. Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the world’s wealthiest woman, inherited her stake in L’Oréal. Alice Walton inherited her position through Walmart. Julia Koch inherited her husband’s shares in Koch Industries. In fact, nine of the ten richest women in the world inherited their wealth.

In contrast, the self-made men who dominate the top of the list built their fortunes through platforms, infrastructure, and scale. They founded companies in tech, finance, hardware, AI, and logistics. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman are examples of individuals who built ecosystems, not just products. Their wealth reflects the compounding power of ownership, equity, and strategic control, not personal brand visibility or access to legacy assets.

This contrast matters. It signals what we continue to undervalue and what remains structurally out of reach for most women.

There are exceptions, of course. Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey, and Taylor Swift are self-made billionaires who leveraged visibility and brand into long-term value. Their success is real. But it is also a reflection of how narrow the pathways to wealth creation remain for women. In most cases, those pathways still depend on personal labor, presence, and performance. The ability to scale beyond those inputs , to build platforms that generate value whether or not you are in the room , is still far less available to women.

Diane Hendricks is an important example. She is the highest-ranked self-made woman in the United States, with a net worth of $21.9 billion. She co-founded ABC Supply, one of the largest wholesale distributors of roofing and building materials in the country. Her story is not about inheritance or fame. It is about building and owning a company that generates wealth across cycles and industries. And yet, she remains relatively unknown outside of business circles.

This is the real conversation we need to be having. Wealth creation at this level is not about headlines. It is about long-term ownership, strategic capital, and decision-making power. If women are to take their rightful place in shaping the economic future, we need to widen the aperture through which value is recognized and supported.

The same dynamics I wrote about in cybersecurity are at play here. Women founders in technical spaces still raise less, are funded later, and exit smaller. They are underrepresented in investment committees and boardrooms. They are less likely to be given the benefit of the doubt, and more likely to be asked to prove traction before capital is deployed. These patterns are not incidental. They are structural.

If we want more women on these wealth lists, and more importantly, if we want more women shaping markets, industries, and futures, we need to start earlier and invest differently. We need to support women who are building in sectors that produce durable economic value. AI, clean tech, cybersecurity, advanced manufacturing, enterprise software, and supply chain infrastructure. These are not just growth areas. They are power centers.

We also need more women writing checks. More women leading funds. More women are positioned as allocators of capital, not just seekers of it. And we need men in these systems who are willing to challenge the homogeneity of their networks, who are willing to back women not as a token effort, but as a strategic imperative.

This is not about visibility for its own sake. It is about power. It is about agency. It is about reshaping who gets to influence the future, who gets to participate in its upside, and who gets to build wealth that lasts beyond the next quarter or media cycle.

This piece is a continuation of the conversation I started in cybersecurity, but it reaches far beyond any one industry. It is a call to investors, operators, founders, and policymakers to stop treating the underrepresentation of women in wealth creation as a secondary issue. It is fundamental. It affects what gets built, who gets protected, where resources flow, and whose needs are prioritized.

Women are not just founders or CEOs. They are visionaries, engineers, fund managers, and strategists. They are building resilient, scalable, and high-impact companies. What they need is not inspiration. What they need is capital. What they deserve is equity, in every sense of the word.

The future will not become more inclusive on its own. We have to make it so.