now this is an interesting article in TheAge.com this morning…
…in 1998 Meg Whitman took a leap of faith and accepted a job as chief executive of eBay, then a small tech firm with 30 employees. The payoff was equity in the burgeoning company.
Thanks to that decision, Whitman soon joined the ranks of the 1011 billionaires in the world. Rarer still, she’s one of just 14 female billionaires in the world right now who earned their fortunes, rather than inherited them. The richest of them is China’s Wu Yajun, worth $3.9 billion and ranked 232nd in the world in March when we published our 2010 Billionaires list. By contrast, 665 men are self-made billionaires including the three richest people in the world, Carlos Slim Helú , Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.
All of these self-made female billionaires have impressive personal stories, but the dearth of them is itself a story, and begs the question of why so few?
read on…
This is a most eye-opening read. Not only because of the low representation of self-made women billionaires (2%) but because they are there at all. I suspect this is a fairly recent phenomenon, and one which will/can only improve over time. The key of course is building such a Mother of a Business, as well as being the Mother you long to be…especially if I have anything to do with it!
