How can we close the $160 trillion women’s wealth gap?

Across the world, countries are losing $160 trillion due to the lifetime earnings differences between women and men. It’s a situation that doesn’t just affect women, who’ve been blocked from higher earnings, jobs, and capital. It affects everyone — leaving trillions on the table instead of catapulting gross domestic product growth. “It is really hard for women to get their businesses capitalized, both in the United States and around the world,” said philanthropist Melinda French Gates, speaking at the Global Inclusive Growth Summit in Washington, D.C., on Thursday morning. “And yet, there is so much opportunity.” French Gates was at the summit — which was hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, with Devex as the media partner, on the sidelines of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings — to push for women’s increased access to affordable capital. She was also there to showcase solutions, with venture capital investor Fatoumata Bâ and actress and activist Rosario Dawson at her side. Together, the three women highlighted the wealth disparities between women and men, and what investing in women could mean for the world. Bâ highlighted recent numbers from the African Development Bank, which found that bridging the $42 billion spending gap for female entrepreneurs in Africa would unlock $300 billion of extra GDP — a figure 10 times that of her home country, Senegal. Across the world, that loss is even larger, with recent figures estimating up to $6 trillion could be generated globally if women entrepreneurs had access to the same resources as men. “To me, it’s a matter of equity — but it’s also a business case,” Bâ said. “Women entrepreneurs are capable.” It’s something Bâ knows firsthand. Just over a decade ago, the Senegalese entrepreneur founded Janngo, a capital fund that supports innovative technology startups in Africa. Today, Janngo has deployed more than 35 million euros to 18 female-led businesses, Bâ said — investments that have now sparked 20,000 jobs across the African continent. Dawson, who runs a Ghana-based social enterprise called Studio 189, told a story of a smaller scale: That of her first employee Helen. After starting to sew for Studio 189, which focuses on high-end “African-inspired” clothing, Helen began to transform — going from working in a factory to becoming a manager assistant to becoming that manager. Eventually, Helen got a university degree and opened up her own business, and today, she’s paying for her children to attend college themselves. “Investing in women has an absolute cumulative effect,” Dawson said. “We have to make it very clear to folks that [by failing to invest in women], they’re leaving not just money on the table, but progress on the table.” Despite progress on some fronts, many challenges continue to block funding for women everywhere — especially on the African continent. For Dawson, many of those barriers are rooted in equity and the many obstacles women have to overcome to even get to work in the first place. For Bâ, it’s access and the fact that venture capital funding is often restricted by geography. And for French Gates, it’s health, and how without access to birth control or basic reproductive care, education and jobs are less than an afterthought. “If we capitalize women, and we open up their entrepreneurial nature and their possibilities, we’re going to have an amazing compounding effect around the world,” French Gates said. Update, April 22, 2024: This article has been updated to clarify that the summit was hosted by the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth.