World's youngest billionnaire

Wealth used to be a man's world, but the gap between the sexes is narrowing when it comes to money, a new report shows.

In Britain, the number of female millionaires has been rising on the back of social trends - such as inheritance and the rapidly climbing divorce rate - and they now make up nearly half of all millionaires in the UK, according to independent market analyst¹ Datamonitor.

On top of that, a new generation of women have started to prosper² in their own right, and female entrepreneurs are increasingly growing in number.

While a male millionaire's wealth has increased by an average 9.2 per cent over the past eight years, the worth of a female millionaire has ballooned by 53.9 per cent, Datamonitor found.

The British study showed that in 1998, the average male millionaire was worth ￡2.71 million (AUS$6.51m), while the female equivalent owned just ￡1.28m.

But by 2006, the gap had narrowed to ￡2.96m for male millionaires and ￡1.97m for women.

Women make up about 46 per cent of Britain's 376,000 millionaires - and their number is growing by almost 11 per cent a year.

Some 3800 British women owned liquid assets of more than￡5m, Datamonitor said.

The number of women of "high net worth" status (classified as those with onshore liquid assets of more than ￡200,000) overtook men in 2005 - with 448,100 rich women compared to 429,300 men.

Nine of the world's fifty richest people are women.

The richest self-made woman in the world is Rosalia Mera (61) of Spain, who is worth approximately $2.4 billion.

She started off making gowns and lingerie in her home. Her business eventually grew into the apparel manufacturer Inditex, which sold $6 billion worth of clothes last year.