$124 Trillion Wealth Transfer Will Hand Women $54 Trillion by 2048

By Daniel Okafor

$124 trillion in wealth will change hands by 2048, and women will receive $54 trillion of it, according to Cerulli Associates. Children inherit $52 trillion. Charity receives $18 trillion. Deloitte's Beth Meagher calls that flow the force remaking how money gets invested, and she said executives underestimate it.

Meagher, Deloitte's U.S. federal health sector leader, laid out the numbers at Fortune's 26th annual Most Powerful Women conference in Santa Barbara. Women entrepreneurs, she said, now rank among the fastest-growing sources of wealth concentration, up more than 125% over the past decade. Women veterans show roughly 300% growth over the past couple of years, the Deloitte executive pointed out.

"These trends are changing everything," Meagher told Fortune executive editorial director Diane Brady onstage. "I think we spend a lot of time on frontier models, and we probably spend a lot of time on geopolitical [issues]. And this shift is something that I think we have a tremendous opportunity to lead from the front of."

Who saw the shift first?

Seema Hingorani spotted the problem more than a decade before the wealth transfer became a conference talking point. In the early 2010s, while working at the New York City Pension Fund, she noticed that every asset manager in the world came to meet with her, yet each had few to no women on their investment teams. The managers called it a "pipeline issue." Hingorani did not buy it.

She founded a nonprofit, Girls Who Invest, to move more women into the industry. Since 2011, 5,000 college women have completed the program. The organization receives around 4,000 applications a year and supports 700 women annually.

Hingorani now serves as managing director and senior client advisor at Morgan Stanley. She said the bank has run an incubator for the past seven years that invests in women starting tech businesses. When those founders scale billion-dollar companies, she argued, they will want women guiding their financial decisions.

"[Women are] going to have all the wealth," Hingorani said. "[For] those women—you guys—do you want to have a male financial advisor? If you had a choice, would you want to have a woman financial advisor? A lot of firms out there are hiring all my women, because they get it."

What changes in philanthropy?

The shift reaches beyond portfolio construction. Carmen James Randolph, founding president and CEO of the Women's Foundation of the South, said the South ranks among the fastest-growing regions in the country, with 41.5% of America's women of color among its constituents. That mix, she said, creates a new frontier for wealth creation and investment, and it is rewriting old-school models of philanthropy.

"I've worked in philanthropy now for about 28 years, and I understand that at its best, philanthropy can be a catalyst for what's possible," Randolph explained onstage. "Old models see philanthropy as charity, and new wealth recipients do not see philanthropy as charity. They want to understand and see firsthand the impact that their dollars can have."

Where will the money go?

The Deloitte and Morgan Stanley executives agree that women want to invest differently from previous generations. They pair social impact with financial returns rather than treating the two as a trade-off.

Meagher said women poised to inherit substantial wealth focus on three areas:

• Health
• Education
• Justice

The focus on health is already reshaping services. Meagher said she has watched wealth advisors start offering health services specifically. Randolph's foundation is placing a large bet on improving maternal healthcare in southern states where emergency and routine medical care are hard to reach.

Hingorani added that every trustee she works with holds an interest in affordable housing, even where the return runs smaller than what a venture fund could pay.

"Women are looking to pull their investments so that they can have an outsized impact," Meagher said.

Why the numbers force a response?

The arithmetic sets a deadline. Cerulli's projection runs through 2048, and the $54 trillion slice heading to women exceeds what goes to children. A wealth-management industry that, as Hingorani described it, once wrote off the absence of women as a pipeline issue will face heirs who control the majority of the transfer and who ask different questions about impact. Firms that hired graduates of programs like Girls Who Invest are, in Hingorani's words, the ones that "get it" — and the next two decades will show how many others move in time.