Advisers rank growing wealth eighth among women's priorities; women rank it first

Affluent and high-net-worth women put growing their wealth at the top of their financial priorities, at 46%, ahead of preserving it (43%) and creating retirement income (32%), according to BlackRock's new report, Future of Wealth: Women, Money and the Growing Opportunity for Advisors. The advisers BlackRock also surveyed — 84% of them male — guessed that women's priorities ran a different order: preserving wealth first (38%), supporting family members second (34%), preparing for life transitions third (30%), retirement income fourth (29%) and growing wealth eighth (21%).

On preservation the two groups are close, the women placing it second and the advisers placing it first. The distance opens on growth, the priority the women named first and the advisers named eighth, a 25-point spread, and on the two items the advisers ranked that the women did not put in their top three at all.

Read side by side, those two lists are about different things. The women's top three are all decisions about their own money: grow it, keep it, convert it into income. Two of the advisers' top three concern other people — supporting family members and preparing for life transitions. That is a service-model difference as much as a research finding, since a client whose stated first priority is growth may read a family-transition agenda as somebody else's plan.

The agreement on preservation is worth something by itself. Advisers are not underestimating how much these clients worry about holding on to what they have; preservation is the one topic both sides place at the top of the list, which means a practice does not have to sell the idea of protecting the balance. What goes unaddressed is growth, and the assumption about where the balance came from in the first place.

On how the money gets used the two groups are closer: 69% of the advisers assumed women use their wealth mostly for family financial support, while 40% of the women said the same. Retirement income drew 32% from the women and 29% from the advisers, three points apart on a list where most other answers diverge by double digits.

Where the money came from is the larger misread. Asked what contributes most to women's wealth, 63% of the responding advisers believed it came passively from inheritance or gifts, 62% thought it arrived through marriage or partnership and 49% credited women's own salaries or career earnings. The women answered near the reverse: 79% said their salary or career earnings contributed most, with a minority crediting a marriage or partnership (31%) and inheritances or gifts (27%). The source most advisers named first is the one the women named last, and the source the women named first is the one fewer than half the advisers credited.

Both sets of answers sum well past 100%, which suggests respondents could name more than one source; the coverage does not describe how the question was put.

BlackRock frames the shift it is documenting directly: women have historically been seen as receiving wealth through inheritance or transfers, and they are increasingly building and controlling it on their own. The size of the opportunity sits in a projection the report cites from McKinsey & Co.'s 2024 data, which puts $34 trillion in U.S. investable assets under women's control by 2030. If that lands anywhere near the schedule, the opening conversation with a wealthy woman becomes one of the more consequential ones a practice will have this decade.

Those adviser estimates order themselves the same way: inheritance first, marriage second, the client's own career third. Asking whether a client built the money or received it costs one question and routes what follows — growth and tax planning in one case, protection and transfer work in the other — which is a cheaper change to make in a discovery process than in a service model.

A second study approaches the same client from a different angle. AllianceBernstein's Wealth Beyond Measure 2026, drawn from 107 respondents with an average net worth of $200 million, found 28.6% of the ultra-high-net-worth women concerned about preserving wealth, against 4% of the men. Confidence ran the other way: 80% of the men said they were confident they were preserving their wealth, compared with 57.1% of the women.

Three-quarters of that sample was male, the respondent count is small, and the group is wealthier than the affluent and high-net-worth women BlackRock surveyed, so those figures corroborate a direction rather than a size. The direction is a client who is both more concerned about losing the money and less sure she is protecting it than the men in a comparable bracket, which in a review meeting tends to present as a request for reassurance more than a request for a new strategy.

What the two surveys hand an adviser is a set of opening questions with the wrong answers documented — inheritance, marriage, family support, transitions — collected at a moment when women are the ones building the balance. The BlackRock adviser sample was 84% male, and the coverage does not break the adviser responses out by gender. A practice can count something closer to home than any of these percentages: how many of last quarter's first meetings opened with a question about where the money came from, rather than with an assumption about it.