Why female wealth is growing faster than the products built for it

In the UAE, 84% of women say they are considering starting their own business, while women identify as entrepreneurs at nearly the same rate as men, with 49% compared with 47%, according to Mastercard’s 2025 research. Across the wider region, that ambition is being backed by real capital shifts: McKinsey estimates women already control roughly a third of retail financial assets in the US and EU, a share projected to climb to 40–45% by 2030.  

Those two figures, one about ambition, one about capital already in hand, describe the same shift from different angles. Women are building, owning and directing money faster than much of the financial system was designed to handle it. The real issue is that financial products have not evolved as quickly as the wealth of the women they are meant to serve. 

The customer is changing faster than the industry itself  

Female wealth is still often discussed as a transfer story: money inherited from parents or spouses. In practice, the picture is different. Women are also creating wealth through executive careers, entrepreneurship, property ownership and private investment. Moreover, McKinsey's research shows that wealth held by women grew 51% between 2018 and 2023, outpacing the 43% growth in global financial wealth overall.  

This is a change in who holds financial authority, not just who inherits it. More women are becoming the person who chooses the investment, signs the deal or backs the founder. The drive to build already exists, while the ecosystem around it continues to develop. 

The products have not moved at the same speed  

Female wealth is not growing because the financial system has been redesigned around women. It is growing even though much of that redesign has yet to happen.  

Banks, investment firms and insurers have become far more comfortable marketing to women. The product underneath often changes far less. A new campaign may still rest on lending rules, advisory models or retirement assumptions built decades ago. These systems were designed for people with steady careers, predictable pay rises, established collateral and ready access to professional networks. 

That is a poor fit for many founders, internationally mobile executives or women whose earnings shift around periods of caregiving. The solution is not to create a separate category of simplified products for women. It is to design better products in the first place.  A founder may need business finance and personal wealth planning to work together. An investor with property and company interests across several countries may need advice that connects ownership, succession and liquidity. The wealth is there, but the products designed to serve it often fail to reflect how it was built. 

Capital still decides who gets to scale  

For entrepreneurs, the mismatch shows up earliest and most concretely. Ambition does not become a scalable company without capital, and the Gulf's numbers make the gap explicit. Mastercard's research found that 68% of women across the wider EEMEA region see a lack of funding as the single biggest barrier to launching a business, marginally ahead of men (66%) citing the same constraint.  

The question is not only how much capital is available, but how that capital is accessed. Introductions lead to meetings. Familiar founder profiles feel easier to assess. A previous investor makes the next one more comfortable. These patterns look neutral while quietly directing capital through the same networks, cycle after cycle.  

More females on the investment side of the table changes that. Broader experience changes what an investment committee can recognise: a market problem that once looked too niche can suddenly look obvious, and a founder whose route does not match the usual pattern gets judged on the business rather than the pattern. The next wave of female wealth in the region will be shaped not only by women raising capital, but by women allocating it.  

Earning power shapes wealth long before an investment account exists  

Access to capital is one part of the equation. What happens to a woman's earning trajectory over a career is the other, and it is where wealth starts accumulating.  

Returnship programmes, structured routes back into the workforce for experienced professionals after a career break, treat time away as a transition to manage rather than evidence that capability disappeared. A smoother return protects future earnings, retirement savings and the capital available to start a business or invest later. Better re-entry pathways are not simply an employee benefit. They influence who can accumulate wealth over an entire lifetime, and financial products built around an uninterrupted career will keep missing a large part of the market until those changes.  

The Gulf has a chance to build differently  

The Gulf is not separate from this global shift. In some respects, it is moving through it faster. Entrepreneurial intent among UAE women is among the highest recorded anywhere, while property, fintech and digital investment are being rebuilt at speed across the region. That combination creates an unusual opening: the Gulf can design new financial models while its customer base is still forming, rather than retrofitting old ones.  

Amira Sajwani reflects that next phase. Her work spans real estate, proptech, company building and investment through ventures including PRYPCO and AlphaHAS, and she operates on both sides of the market at once, building platforms, backing ideas and widening the routes through which people participate in them. Products tend to improve when the people designing them understand the problem first-hand, and as more women in the region become founders, investors and operators themselves, gaps that once looked permanent start to look like commercial opportunities instead.  

The region will not close every gap simply by moving quickly. But it does have room to ask better questions earlier: who is a product really built for, which financial life does it assume, and who was missing when the investment decision was made?  

Future products will be built closer to the problem  

Women are already reshaping who owns and directs capital, in the Gulf as much as anywhere. The financial products built around that wealth have yet to fully keep pace. The strongest response will not be a louder campaign aimed at a single idea of what a female investor looks like, because women do not share one financial journey. The opportunity is to build products that recognise how wealth is earned, interrupted, combined, transferred and invested.  

For women entering business or investment in the region today, that gap highlights both what is missing and where the opportunity begins.  

The capital is already moving. The more consequential question is who will design where it goes next.