Women Are Inheriting the Wealth. The System isn’t Built for Them.
There is a comforting story circulating about women and money. Women are earning more, inheriting more, founding companies, signing deals, and stepping into decision making roles that once felt out of reach. Progress, the story goes, will take care of the rest.
Progress does not teach you how a trust works, or what happens when a guarantee is called, or why a clause buried on page thirty matters more than the headline number.
What continues to hold many women wealth holders back is not confidence, ambition, or intelligence. It is the quieter problem of access to real financial and legal education. The kind that explains how money actually behaves once it is locked inside documents, structures, and rules. The kind that makes it possible to spot risk early rather than clean it up later.
This matters because the scale of women’s wealth is no longer marginal. McKinsey estimates that by 2023 women controlled around $60 trillion in assets under management, roughly a third of the global total. That figure reflects a shift in who is expected to make decisions about investment strategy, property, business ownership, philanthropy, and succession. The centre of gravity is moving. The skills pipeline has not caught up.
Women arrive at this moment carrying structural disadvantages that compound over time. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics reports that the gender pay gap for full time employees remains meaningful, with women earning less on average than men. Women also live longer. ONS life tables show that female life expectancy at birth exceeds that of men by several years. Longer lives stretch capital further and punish vague planning. A strategy that looks reasonable at fifty can unravel at eighty five if nobody understood the details.
It is also worth remembering how recently women were excluded, by law, from full financial agency. Under coverture, a married woman’s legal identity and property were effectively subsumed by her husband’s. The Married Women’s Property Acts of the late nineteenth century began to unwind that framework, slowly and unevenly. The law has changed, but habits linger. In many families and institutions, women are still expected to be informed without being trained, decisive without being fully briefed.
Modern wealth is less forgiving of that arrangement because it is increasingly legal in nature. Assets live inside trusts, companies, pension wrappers, shareholder agreements, loan covenants, and cross border tax rules. Understanding markets without understanding structure leaves you exposed. Wealth does not leak at the surface. It leaks through definitions, defaults, and technicalities.
This is not a niche concern for beginners. The OECD’s 2023 financial literacy survey found that across participating countries and economies, only 34 percent of adults reached the minimum target score. That means most people are navigating financial decisions with limited grounding. Add complexity, multiple advisers, and high stakes, and the cost of a misunderstanding grows fast.
Legal blind spots are often the most expensive because they surface at moments of stress. Relationship changes, caregiving responsibilities, inheritance, business exits, illness, or aging parents all force decisions under pressure. Without education, women are left relying on assumptions or default advice at precisely the wrong time.
Cohabitation remains a quiet trap. Many couples assume long term living arrangements create legal protections. In England and Wales, they do not. Parliament’s Commons Library makes clear that cohabitation carries no general legal status comparable to marriage or civil partnership, and that many people do not realise this. For women with assets, that misunderstanding can shape outcomes around property ownership, financial claims on separation, and what happens on death.
There is another discomfort people avoid naming. Delegation can slide into dependence. Many women wealth holders work with capable advisers, and should. The problem arises when delegation replaces understanding. If you cannot tell whether advice is cautious, conflicted, or simply convenient for the adviser, you are not exercising control. You are outsourcing it.
This would matter less if trust in financial institutions were high. It is not. The FCA’s Financial Lives survey shows that confidence in the financial services industry remains limited, with a significant proportion of adults questioning whether firms are honest and transparent. Education does not fix incentive structures, but it changes the balance of power. It equips women to ask direct questions about fees, downside risk, liquidity, and governance, and to notice when answers are evasive or rushed.
When women are properly educated in both finance and law, the shift is visible. It is not performative confidence. It is practical authority. It shows up in the ability to read an agreement and understand where leverage sits. It shows up in property purchases that reflect reality rather than optimism. It shows up in powers of attorney arranged before crisis, beneficiaries reviewed after life changes, and structures designed to cope with complexity rather than ignore it.
This is not about suspicion or hostility toward advisers. It is about stewardship. Wealth is rarely just personal. It affects children, partners, employees, charities, and future generations. The more wealth a woman holds, the more consequential her decisions become, and the less acceptable it is to leave those decisions to custom and assumption.
If women are to hold a growing share of the world’s wealth, symbolic inclusion is not enough. Education is the missing infrastructure. Without it, wealth looks impressive and behaves precariously. With it, wealth becomes something women can direct with clarity, intention, and resilience, even when conditions change.]