What Would Women Fund If Money Were No Object?

Something extraordinary is happening, and I don't think we have started to understand it yet.

According to Citizens Private Bank, women are projected to control approximately two-thirds of America's private wealth in the next decade.

Two-thirds.

We're talking about women potentially controlling substantially more private wealth than men. Not a slightly bigger piece of the pie. Most of a whole blueberry pie.

Now, that's a projection, not a guarantee, and different financial institutions measure wealth differently. But even the possibility is staggering.

For generations, women have had ideas about how to improve the world. We've imagined better schools, healthier families, safer communities, and entirely different ways of doing things. We've started organizations, volunteered, advocated, raised money, and occasionally shouted from the rooftops trying to get someone to pay attention.

But how many extraordinary ideas never got off the ground because the women who conceived them couldn't get the funding? And what happens when we don't have to ask anymore?

I have a feeling it's going to be a party we've never been able to throw before.

First, Let's Talk About the Kids

Education will be one of the big winners.

Not just scholarships and university endowments, although certainly those. I'm talking about school lunches, music programs, art classes, theater, and the after-school programs that can make an enormous difference in a child's life. Imagine women deciding that children shouldn't have to rely on the luck of their ZIP code to receive a decent education, a nutritious lunch, or the opportunity to discover they're brilliant at playing the cello.

What about teachers? Women in charge of larger sums of wealth can help to ensure that teachers finally get paid what they deserve.

And instead of spending decades lobbying for funding, they simply fund it. Or create something entirely new that changes the way we help children grow.

What might education look like if we stopped asking what school districts can afford and started asking what children actually need?

Don't Get Me Started On Women's Health.

Actually, do.

For all our extraordinary medical advances, women's healthcare has been under-researched and underfunded for far too long. Reproductive health and education. Prenatal care. Menopause. Auto-immune diseases. Conditions that disproportionately affect women. The list is long, and the research gaps infuriating.

We've spent generations living in female bodies while much of the medical establishment treated those bodies as variations on a (studied) male default. When more women control the research dollars, those priorities will change.

Imagine a world in which women's health research isn't something we have to keep fighting to make important. It's important because we say it is. And we can pay for it.

What About Second Chances?

Here's another area I believe women will fund: helping people rebuild their lives.

People leaving prison who genuinely want to start over. Women and children escaping domestic abuse. Families experiencing homelessness. People who have fallen through the cracks of systems that weren't particularly interested in catching them.

I'm not suggesting we hand everyone a check and hope for the best. In The Soul of Money, Lynne Twist explores the difference between outright giving, which can perpetuate dependency, and self-sufficient giving that creates dignity, partnership, and lasting change. That distinction has stayed with me.

What if we invested in programs that actually helped people become self-sufficient? Housing initiatives, job training, rehabilitation, education, and entirely new approaches we haven't thought of yet?

Not because everyone is going to become a saint when she gets rich. Because women who care about these issues may finally have the resources to do something substantial about them.

Who Has the Money and Who Has the Ideas?

I have a theory about this, based partly on my own experience.

I think older generations of women may be drawn toward philanthropy, while younger women may be more interested in invention. Because, seriously...

We're tired.

Many of us have spent decades building businesses, raising families, managing careers, and generally keeping the wheels on the bus. We've worked hard, sometimes ridiculously hard, and some of us have absolutely no desire to sign up for another round of 24/7 founder mentality.

We want to enjoy our lives. We want luxury. We want beautiful homes, wonderful experiences, travel, freedom, and the ability to wake up in the morning and decide what would delight us that day. And we want to know our money is doing some good. Why on earth should those things be mutually exclusive?

Meanwhile, younger women are coming up with ideas, inventions, companies, and solutions that may never have existed before. They see problems differently. They have access to technologies that previous generations could barely imagine.

What happens when women with the resources meet women with the ideas?

Personally, I love the idea of investing in founders who are creating solutions to problems I care about. I'd like those investments to generate returns, too, so I can keep investing.

Other women will prefer outright philanthropy, and I know plenty who already do. Some will establish foundations. Others will support existing organizations. Some will build institutions, and some will simply fund extraordinary people and get out of their way.

There's no single right way to do this. And done right, nobody has to give up the villa in Tuscany to participate.

What Haven't We Even Imagined Yet?

This is where it gets really interesting to me.

Because I've just named a handful of things women might fund. Education. Healthcare. Second chances. The arts. Programs that strengthen families and communities.

These aren't exactly revolutionary ideas. What excites me is everything we haven't thought of.

What has a woman been imagining for the last twenty years that she's never had the money to pursue? What brilliant invention is sitting in someone's notebook because investors didn't understand the problem it was meant to solve?

What would happen if women began funding research, businesses, community projects, and social initiatives that previously couldn't get anyone's attention? What if the women receiving this wealth decided to support ideas that don't fit neatly into the priorities of the institutions that traditionally controlled the money?

We might see entirely new industries, or different approaches to longstanding problems. Solutions that don't resemble anything currently available. Or we might see familiar problems finally receiving the attention and resources they deserved all along. Both will be vast improvements from where we are now.

For much of history, significant financial decisions have been made predominantly by men. In turn, that has shaped what gets built, what gets researched, what gets funded, and what gets left waiting.

Now imagine a substantial shift in who gets to make those decisions. I'm not suggesting women are inherently more compassionate, generous, or enlightened than men. We've all met enough women to know better.

But we do have different experiences, different perspectives, and sometimes very different ideas about what deserves attention. And for the first time, we may be approaching a point when women collectively control more American private wealth than men.

That's not just a financial milestone. It's an invitation to imagine what could happen next.

Because the ideas have been waiting. The women have been waiting. And the money is on its way.

Ladies, I think it's time to start planning the party. If you want more of this information, sign up for my next masterclass right here: https://wealthierwokshops.com

Love,
Halle