The richest woman in the world, Lilliane Bettencourt, has passed away at the age of 94. Bettencourt, an heiress to cosmetics giant L’Oreal, had a fortune of 33 billion euros (40 billion US dollars), and was the 14th richest person in the world according to Forbes.

The death of Bettencourt highlights the huge gender disparity when it comes to making it onto the list of the world’s mega-rich – only 11 percent of billionaires are women. However, 2017 has seen the number of female billionaires hit a new peak of 226, as women around the world increasingly enter entrepreneurship and make their own fortunes – and China is leading the way.

While many of those 226 female billionaires are heiresses – including Walmart’s Alice Walton, now the world’s richest woman with a fortune of 33.8 billion US dollars – China is way out in front when it comes to female self-made billionaires. 

The Hurun Report revealed earlier this year that 56 Chinese women have made more than a billion US dollars on their own grounds, far ahead of 15 in the US and eight in the UK. In fact, China nearly has nearly double the amount of female self-made billionaires than the rest of the top 10 countries combined (30 billionaires). 

While tech continues to be a sector dominated by male CEOs, half of the world’s female tech billionaires are Chinese. They include Wang Laichun, chair of Luxshare Precision Industry (2.6 billion US dollars); touch screen queen Lam Wai Ying, who heads up Biel Crystal alongside her husband (5.2 billion US dollars); and Zhou Qunfei, the founder of Lens Technology. Zhou has an estimated worth of 10 billion US dollars. All three are in charge of top-of-the-range manufacturing companies that supply products to Apple.

The wealthiest woman in China (and Asia) is currently Yang Huiyan, who at the age of 35 has amassed a net worth of seven billion US dollars from her 55 percent majority stake in her father’s property company Country Garden Holdings. China’s netizens are also fascinated by China’s "youngest billionaire," a 24-year-old woman named Zhang Zetian, who made her fortune after marrying JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong in 2015.

However, while the top 10 Chinese female billionaires struggle to compete with their male counterparts when it comes to total wealth (38.02 billion US dollars versus 176.5 billion US dollars, according to Forbes), they match them when it comes to age – the men’s top 10 have an average age of 52.8 versus 52.9 for the women. Of the 10 Chinese billionaires aged under 40, only three are women.

Many of China’s wealthiest people built up their fortunes from nothing, and there are many rags-to-riches tales among the female billionaires. Zhou Qunfei was a 15-year-old high school dropout and factory worker from a poor family in Hunan Province, who built up her glass technology empire by seizing the initiative in the early 2000s when mobile phones went main stream.

Likewise, Beijing-born Zhang Xin, the billionaire founder of property giant SOHO, also started as a low-level factory worker who went on to amass a net worth of 3.2 billion US dollars.