Women reshaping philanthropy

Eleanor Cater
Philanthropy and Membership Services Director
25 July 2025

(This article is also features as an opinion piece in The Post here).

So much has been written and debated about the “great wealth transfer”, the burgeoning phenomenon that will see the baby boomer wealth changing hands over the next 25 years. It’s an outsized bulge of generational wealth that the world has never seen in size and scale before, and, here in New Zealand, it’ll see NZ$1.2 trillion in earnings, property, and other financial assets changing hands as the older generation passes on.

It turns out there’s another really interesting shift going on as well. It’s a demographic shift where women will eventually become the main drivers and decision makers around family wealth, transforming wealth management, including estate planning and philanthropy.

This has been coined the ‘horizontal wealth transfer’, a term somewhat patriarchal and simplistic in its nature as it doesn’t take into account women as co-owners of family wealth, non-nuclear families, or individual economic independence. Nevertheless, it’s a term that is sticking - and it’s easy to see why.

Bank of America research analyst Kay Hope, who studies this topic, says while men today control about two thirds of global wealth, something like 95% of the spousal inheritance will go to women, and “it’s highly likely that types of philanthropy will shift along with the wealth transfer”.

Baby boomers

Baby boomers were born between 1946 to 1964, and named for the population “boom” after the end of WW2. Stats NZ estimates women born during this time will, on average, outlive men between 3-4 years. This means that, in nuclear families at least, eventually most of the family assets will be controlled by women, before the family assets are passed onto the next generation.

Baby boomers and those born before 1966 as a group hold 60% of NZ’s wealth. The transfer of this wealth has already slowly started, and is already changing both financial services and philanthropy, since women often share their wealth quite differently to men.

The field of philanthropy has a long history, and in recent centuries was shaped by mainly wealthy men and powerful institutions whose decisions helped to steer the course of social progress. In the 21^st century, women’s impact on philanthropy has moved it towards more collaborative and participatory forms of giving.

Mackenzie Scott, co-founder of Amazon, is renowned for her spend-down and high trust approach to giving, which passes funding directly to communities, with no strings attached. Unlike ex-husband Jeff Bezos, Scott is notoriously private, though in 2021 she explained her giving philosophy: “we believe that teams with experience on the front lines of challenges will know best how to put the money to good use, we encourage them to spend it however they choose”.

In her writing, there is a humble acknowledgement that there is nothing new about this approach, which “empowers receivers by making them feel valued and by unlocking their best solutions”.

In 2024 Melinda French Gates branched off from husband Bill Gates to launch her own brand of philanthropy.French Gates has announced plans to distribute US$1billion over two years, with a central goal of uplifting women and families across the world, "because when you lift up women, you lift up humanity”.

The New Zealand experience

In recent years there has been a really interesting phenomenon in collective forms of ‘giving circles’ growing across New Zealand. These include Impact100 and local Women’s Funds and they are almost exclusively female-led, collaborative models of giving which see groups of women pool together their donations towards empowering community-led change, often with a focus on women’s causes. Today, giving circles are proactive in at least seven regional centres (Auckland, Waikato, Tauranga, Whakatane, Christchurch, Timaru and Queenstown) through local Community Foundations, and some of them are even – rather delightfully - started by groups of friends who want to collectively make an impact in a particular cause area.

Personal, invested philanthropic funds are also growing, set up through New Zealand’s 18 local Community Foundations and The Gift Trust. These funds are an alternative to the complexity and size, compliance and succession issues of setting up a separate foundation. Barbara Blake has set up The Blake Fund through Wellington’s Nikau Foundation to support organisations that contribute to the health and well-being of marginalised young people; Joy Shivas supports female entrepreneur startups through the Christchurch Foundation; Merle Cooney has established the BOOST child literacy fund through Advance Ashburton Community Foundation and Jill Ford has created a ‘Feminista Fund’ at The Gift Trust to empower and educate women and girls in low income countries.

Then of course there are the institutional foundations, some of which have a distinctive female-led strategy. The Tindall Foundation, founded by Sir Stephen and Lady Margaret Tindall in 1994, was established with Lady Margaret’s own shares from The Warehouse Group. Lady Margaret’s approach speaks to her steadfast commitment to community groups doing impactful work close to the ground.

Entrepreneur Anna Stuck, who established Clare Foundation in 2021, has a firm focus on empowering and addressing systemic injustices for women, climate initiatives and inequality, and Dame Theresa and Angela Gattung, through the Gattung Foundation, are also focusing on empowering women and addressing inequality through their philanthropic strategy. Recently, businesswoman Annette Presley has established her own philanthropic foundation, aimed at supporting the aspirations of young people and women.

Following other unfolding patterns of female-led philanthropy, greater economic independence and the ‘horizontal’ wealth shift to women is poised to reshape not only the economy but also philanthropy, as ‘women power’ begins its slow shift reshaping the community and philanthropic landscape of Aotearoa New Zealand.