In December 2025, Forbes published its 22nd annual list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. The names at the top were familiar to me: Ursula von der Leyen, Christine Lagarde, Lisa Su of AMD, Jane Fraser of Citi. There were 44 CEOs, the highest count in five years. Thirteen billionaires, with a combined net worth of $180.5 billion. Daniela Amodei of Anthropic, one of the most important AI companies on earth, appeared for the first time. Collectively, these women commanded roughly $37 trillion in economic power and influenced over a billion people. It is a remarkable document. It is also, unmistakably, a list of exceptions.

The question this article sets out to answer is direct: is it time for women to overtake the financial world? The Forbes list suggests the talent exists. Women are leading the European Central Bank, the world’s most valuable semiconductor company, and billion-dollar AI firms. But the list’s power is precisely that it can still name them individually. There are not yet too many to count. AI and finance sit at the centre of the 2025 rankings because they are the sectors generating the most wealth and influence on earth right now. They are also the sectors where the gap between individual female achievement and structural female exclusion is widest, and where the collapse of public trust in male-dominated power, exposed most brutally by the Epstein files, is most urgent.

The Epstein Files and the Crisis of Trust

In January 2026, the US Department of Justice released over 3.5 million pages of documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein. The names that kept appearing belonged to the most powerful men in the same industries Forbes was celebrating women for leading: technology and finance. Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Zuckerberg. None have been accused of participating in Epstein’s crimes. But the files paint a portrait of a world of extraordinary wealth, almost entirely populated by men, operating behind closed doors. NBC News identified correspondence with at least twenty tech executives. The phrase “the girls” appears more than 6,500 times. Peter Thiel features in over 2,200 files, Bill Gates in more than 2,500.

A month later, Peter Mandelson, the Labour grandee whom Keir Starmer had appointed as British Ambassador to the United States, was facing a Metropolitan Police criminal investigation. The Epstein files revealed he had allegedly received payments from Epstein, described him as his “best pal,” and, while serving as Business Secretary during the 2008 financial crisis, had shared market-sensitive government information with him. By February 2026, Mandelson had resigned from the Labour Party and the House of Lords. The US House Oversight Committee was requesting he submit to questioning.

Two countries, two political traditions, the same architecture. The Bullingdon Club, the University of Oxford’s all-male dining society, had already given Britain two Conservative Prime Ministers and a Chancellor. Now the Epstein files were exposing the Labour version: elite male networks through which access, capital, and influence flow regardless of party. This is not a left-right issue. It is a gender-and-power issue. And it is the context in which the Forbes list must be read.

 When a September 2025 Marist Poll found that 90% of Americans wanted the Epstein files released, the message was not complicated: the public no longer trusts the men who have been running things. The question of whether women should be running them instead is no longer theoretical.

First in the Classroom, Last in the Boardroom

For anyone who sat their GCSEs in the last decade, this will sound familiar. In 2025, 24.5% of girls’ entries achieved grade 7/A or above, compared to 19.4% of boys. At the standard pass, 70.5% of girls passed against 64.3% of boys. At university, women are the majority and graduate at higher rates. By every metric that educational institutions claim to value, women are winning.

And then the metrics stop mattering post-graduation. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 report found that among tertiary-educated women in the workforce, just 29.5% reach top leadership. The ONS gender pay gap stood at 12.8% in April 2025. Among FTSE 100 companies, 9.4% of CEOs were women. This is what makes the Forbes list both inspiring and damning: it celebrates the women who broke through, while implicitly confirming how few of them there are.

None of this is to diminish the essential work that men overwhelmingly do in construction, infrastructure, emergency services, and energy production. Nor is there anything wrong with traditional family arrangements that are genuinely chosen. The issue is the gap between what credentials promise and what structures deliver. When women systematically outperform men in education and are then locked out of leadership, something other than merit is doing the selecting. That something has a shape: it looks like the Bullingdon Club’s conveyor belt to Downing Street, like the PPE pipeline (57% being male applicants, three of the last six Prime Ministers), like Epstein’s Palo Alto dinners.

The AI Boom and Who Gets to Build It

The Forbes 2025 list places AI at its centre for good reason. In 2025, investors poured over $200 billion into AI startups, roughly half of all global venture funding. More than fifty people became AI billionaires. Lisa Su of AMD struck a deal with OpenAI potentially worth tens of billions. Daniela Amodei is co-running one of the most consequential AI safety companies in existence. These women are not tokens. They are shaping the technology that will define the century.

But behind the names on the Forbes list, the numbers tell a different story. The AI workforce is approximately 71% male, dropping to 15% at leadership level. The World Economic Forum estimates 123 years to gender parity at current rates. Harvard Business School found a 25% gender gap in AI tool adoption, with women more likely to question the ethics of AI and more likely to fear workplace judgement for using it. Women made up just 42% of ChatGPT users and only 27% of app downloads. If women disproportionately distrust and disengage from the technology reshaping the economy, the consequences will compound for decades.

The venture capital industry funding this revolution is worse still. Women hold 15.4% of VC partner roles. All-female-founded startups received 2.3% of US venture capital in 2024, a figure unchanged in thirty years. A 2025 survey of 361 venture capitalists found that 26.9% believed women’s participation in founding teams was “overrated,” 15.3% considered women “poor entrepreneurs,” and 11.9% would not invest in women-led ventures. Meanwhile, female-founded startups generate 78 cents for every dollar of funding, compared to 31 cents for male-founded startups.

 The financial case is overwhelming. But the industry will not act on it, because the people making the decisions are drawn from the same networks the Epstein files just exposed.

Rachel Reeves demonstrates the answer 

So: is it time for women to overtake the financial world? 

To answer that, let’s consider Rachel Reeves, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer in July 2024, and was the first woman to hold the office in 708 years. She read PPE at Oxford, holds a master’s in economics from the London School of Economics, and spent six years as an economist at the Bank of England. Whatever you think of her policy record, she is precisely the kind of figure the Forbes list is celebrating: a woman with genuine expertise who reached the top of economic decision-making.

But Reeves also exposes the system’s contradictions. British MPs earn less than a starting hospital consultant. The Spectator argued this year that paying MPs a quarter of a million pounds would transform the talent pool without denting the national budget.  Furthermore, there is a direct line between low pay and the Mandelson scandal: when public service cannot sustain a career in its own right, the temptation to supplement income, through the kind of private relationships that defined Mandelson’s connection to Epstein, grows stronger. Podcasts like The Rest is Politics have normalised the idea that governance benefits from people who actually know what they are talking about. The logical next step is paying for that expertise, rather than relying on a system that selects for those who can afford to serve it.The answer to the question, then, is not simply “yes.”  Yes - women outperform men in education. Women-founded startups generate superior returns. The Forbes list proves that when women reach the top of AI and finance, they lead as well as or better than their male counterparts. But the answer is also “no”. Women not running the financial world is not due to  a lack of talent. It is due to the persistence of male networks, from the Bullingdon Club to Sand Hill Road to Epstein’s contacts list, that allocate opportunity on the basis of access rather than ability.

Girls are outperforming boys in classrooms across the UK. Women generate superior returns wherever they are given the chance. A country that educates women to the highest standard and then blocks them from leadership is not being conservative. It is wasteful. The question is not whether it is time for women to overtake the financial world. The question is how much longer we can afford to pretend they should not.

The boys’ club is not at the end of the world. But it may well be shaping one.