Women make up 15 per cent of the Hurun Global Rich List released on March 7, 2017. In addition, 16 per cent of the billionaires under the age of 40 are women.
Of the 152 self-made female billionaires, the Chinese led the way with a staggering 79.5 per cent.
Two-thirds of the billionaires in the world are self-made; the remaining one-third inherited their wealth. The richest woman in the world is Liliane Bettencourt of L’Oreal, age 94, with US$37 billion. The richest self-made women in the world is Beijing real estate queen Chen Lihua, with a networth of US$7.2 billion.
China is now indisputably the best place in the world to be a female entrepreneur, according to Hurun Report creator Rupert Hoogewerf.
The Hurun Global Rich List is a ranking of the US dollar billionaires – the so-called ‘Nine-Zero Club’ – currently found in the world; the calculations are a snapshot of January 15, 2017.
652 billionaires are of Chinese origin, which is 29 per cent of the list. Chinese makes up 20 per cent of the world’s population.