{"id":911,"date":"2021-10-23T22:37:18","date_gmt":"2021-10-24T02:37:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/researchbdev.wpengine.com\/zorina-khan\/?p=911"},"modified":"2025-05-23T10:59:20","modified_gmt":"2025-05-23T14:59:20","slug":"women-and-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/life-on-the-margin\/women-and-wealth\/","title":{"rendered":"Women and Wealth in the New Gilded Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today<\/a> in the 1870s, to protest an incipient era of \u201cwasteful and ridiculous excess.”\u00a0 The American aristocracy inhabited luxurious palaces in Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco.\u00a0 Short lists like the New York Four Hundred<\/a> enumerated the elite families who mattered, such as the Astors, Vanderbilts, van Rensselaers.\u00a0 Social reformers decried the poverty and want among the Four Million<\/a> at the other end of the economic scale.<\/p>\n

Fans of free markets and populist \u201cprogressives\u201d both pay close attention to wealthy elites.\u00a0 The former group regards individual economic success as a reassuring sign that entrepreneurship and enterprise is being rewarded.\u00a0 The latter favour a zero-sum model, where wealth occurs at the expense of others, and unequal income therefore offers an index of the evils of capitalism.\u00a0 During the first Gilded Age, outrage about the enormous disparities of wealth were triggered by a firm belief in this tradeoff.\u00a0 However, as C. D. Wright found in 1897<\/a>, \u201cIt is true that the rich are growing richer,\u201d but at the same time \u201cthe poor are growing better off.\u201d\u00a0 The benefits of unparalleled productivity and economic growth did not accrue just to the Astors and Vanderbilts, but also enhanced the standard of living of the vast majority of the population.<\/p>\n

The Gilded Age: a Tale of 2021<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Are we currently living in a new Gilded Age<\/a> embodied by the multi-billionaires of the Forbes 400, with their excesses of utopian cities<\/a> and space tourism<\/a>? \u00a0Inclusion on 2021 The Forbes 400 list<\/a> for the United States requires net worth of at least $2.9 billion. \u00a0It\u2019s worth emphasizing that the Forbes 400 entrants were drawn from a field of 22 million millionaires in the United States.<\/a><\/p>\n

The vast majority of men on this list (79.1 percent) earned their wealth from individual initiative, risk-taking, and successful business enterprises. \u00a0The youngest newcomer, Sam Bankman-Fried is worth over $22 billion at age 29, owing to his creation of an exchange for crypto derivatives.\u00a0 Of the 56 women on the Forbes list, just 17.8 percent earned their wealth themselves. However, the wealthiest 400 out of a population of 333,479,557 people are clearly unlikely to be representative.\u00a0 These data underestimate women\u2019s achievements, and obscure an underlying pattern of increasing entrepreneurial opportunities and socioeconomic mobility.<\/p>\n

Self-Made Women Millionaires<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The top 100 \u201cself-made\u201dwomen<\/a> in the United States made the cutoff if they earned at least $225 million. The notion of self-made riches captures the difference between passive income (inheritance or marriage) and returns to active entrepreneurial risk-taking and innovation. \u00a0For those who are concerned about unwarranted transmission of riches through inheritance, it should be reassuring that a significant number of wealthy women earned upward mobility through their own efforts.\u00a0 Two thirds were founders or cofounders of firms. \u00a0Whitney Wolfe Herd, a billionaire at age 32, was one of the founders of a corporation for online dating apps. Anne Wojcicki is the cofounder and CEO of 23andMe, a DNA testing firm. \u00a0Jessica Iclisoy\u2019s fortune of $260 million arose from the creation of a firm that offers organic baby products.<\/p>\n

These entrepreneurial women are disproportionately from minority and immigrant backgrounds. Twenty percent were born overseas, in countries such as Barbados, Burma, Romania, China, and India.\u00a0 Moreover, twenty two percent of these successful entrepreneurs comprised racial\/ethnic minorities, including 14 percent Asian, 7 percent Black, and 1 percent Hispanic. Thai Lee, an immigrant from South Korea, became the successful CEO of an innovative IT company.\u00a0 Neha Narkhede, who earned a self-made score of 80 percent, is 37 years of age and was born in India.\u00a0 She worked at LinkedIn as a software engineer, and started a cloud computing software company with two colleagues, which made Narkhede a billionaire when it went public.<\/p>\n

The Globalization of the Gilded Age<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

The number of wealthy individuals beyond the United States is increasing significantly, amounting to a world total<\/a> of 2755 billionaires.\u00a0 Twelve percent, or 328 women, appeared on the Forbes list of billionaires in 2021, relative to 241 a year before.\u00a0 The richest women, Fran\u00e7oise Bettencourt Meyers (granddaughter of the founder of L\u2019Or\u00e9al), and Alice Walton (daughter of Sam Walton of Wal-Mart) passively inherited their assets.\u00a0 However, among these women billionaires, 66 were actively involved in managing and increasing their inherited assets. \u00a0Miuccia Prada and her husband are joint CEOs of the Prada family business, which earned sales of $2.9 billion in 2020.<\/p>\n

Moreover, a total of 108 of the world\u2019s richest women billionaires were self-made entrepreneurs, many of them from China.\u00a0 Zhou Qunfei worked as a migrant worker in the special economic zone of Shenzhen, and at the age of 22 used her savings to start a small family business.\u00a0 Lens Technology<\/a> quickly grew and scaled up to become the dominant firm in the industry.\u00a0 The firm provided touch screens for leading mobile-phone makers including Samsung and the Apple iPhone, and currently employs some 200,000 workers.\u00a0 Zhong Huijuan is the chief executive of Hansoh Pharmaceutical<\/a>, which produces treatments for cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.<\/p>\n

The American Model of Private Philanthropy<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In the nineteenth century, James Bryce noted<\/a> that \u201cin works of active benevolence, no country has surpassed, and perhaps none has equalled, the United States.\u201d The supposed \u201crobber barons\u201d and baronesses directed enormous sums to worthy causes, including aid for women, blacks and other minorities.\u00a0 Both Rockefeller Sr and Jr donated over $500 million to Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes. Spelman College owed its existence to the generosity of John D. Rockefeller, in honour of his wife Laura Spelman, and she too left the majority of her fortune<\/a> to the college and other charitable institutions.\u00a0 Russell Sage bequeathed his entire fortune of $66 million to his wife, because he felt that she would be more adept at philanthropy.<\/p>\n

The Giving Pledge<\/a>, \u201ca commitment by the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to dedicate the majority of their wealth to giving back,\u201d reflects a globalization of the American model of entrepreneurial altruism. \u00a0In general, decisions about charitable giving<\/a> are jointly made within the household.\u00a0 As women gain more independent control over large fortunes, support for women, though still a minor share of philanthropic giving, has been increasing.\u00a0 Melinda Gates has pledged $1 billion for women\u2019s causes. Dagman Dolby\u2019s<\/a> charitable foundation promised to \u201cplace special emphasis on equality and support for women and girls.\u201d \u00a0MacKenzie Scott<\/a> has donated $6 billion, with \u201ca specific focus on empowering women and girls.\u201d\u00a0 As Sarah Blakely emphasized,<\/a> \u201cwe would all be in a much better place if half the human race (women) were empowered to prosper,\u201d so directing resources towards women \u201coffers one of the greatest returns on investment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are we currently living in a new Gilded Age embodied by the multi-billionaires of the Forbes 400, with their excesses of utopian cities and space tourism? Inclusion on The Forbes 400 list for 2021 requires net worth of at least $2.9 billion. However, these data underestimate women\u2019s achievements, and conceal an underlying pattern of increasing entrepreneurial opportunities, socioeconomic mobility, and philanthropy by \u201crobber baronesses.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":140,"featured_media":919,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1,6],"tags":[33,28,31,36,22],"class_list":{"0":"post-911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economics-of-for-the-common-good","8":"category-life-on-the-margin","9":"category-women-in-the-republic-of-enterprise","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-diversity","12":"tag-economics","13":"tag-finance","14":"tag-women","15":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/140"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/research.bowdoin.edu\/zorina-khan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}