Asian women, including female entrepreneurs from India, are generating more wealth than women in any other region of the world even as their affluence and influence grows globally, a study indicated on Sunday.
The report published by Barclays Wealth, Britain's leading wealth manager said that "the affluence and influence of women is growing globally and is increasingly fuelled by their own individual enterprises - highlighting that the perception of inheritance and marriage as the lead sources of female wealth is out-dated."
A vast majority of women, particularly from Asia and India were generating their wealth independently.
The survey titled 'Barclays Wealth Insights: a Question of Gender' said: ". . . compared to any other global regions, the wealth generated by female entrepreneurship is highest in Asia, where 26 per cent cite income from a business as their main source of wealth."
Globally, only 20 per cent of women show income from a business as the main source of wealth. The survey said that today's global picture of female wealth was largely driven by earnings and business ownership (83.9 per cent), or by personal investments (32.8 per cent), which compares
favourably to marriage (24.7 per cent), divorce (2.2 per cent) and inheritance (19.9 per cent).
Barclays used wealthy female Indian entrepreneurs including Kalpana Morparia, joint MD of ICICI Bank, and Perween Warsi, the multi-millionaire CEO of S&A foods, on its "insights panel" for the survey.
A healthy 64 per cent of women globally cite income from their job as the main source of their wealth and this is most prominent in the US where the figure rises to 75 per cent. The US leads the international field in the number of women in management positions, with 89 per cent of S&P 500 companies having at least one woman on their board.
The report noted that wealth generated by female entrepreneurship was the highest in Asia. "Women are often more thoughtful and purpose-driven when it comes to investment behaviour," it said.
Between 2006 and 2007 the number of women featured on the Sunday Times Rich List increased from 81 to 92, and the combined wealth of Britain's richest women is now £33.27 billion.
It is predicted that by 2010, 35 per cent of millionaires in the United Kingdom will be women.
Education is considered by women to be the single most important factor of wealth generation. School education was cited as key for Middle Eastern and African women (55.6 per cent), while European (55.7 per cent) and North American women (60 per cent) cited a university education as most important.
According to the survey, Asian women have highest confidence for tax planning (41.5 per cent), and Middle East and African women claim greatest knowledge for retirement planning (42.3 per cent), and investing in hedge funds (42.3 per cent).
