Female Supremacy Articles

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Six years ago Hester was a housewife and former policewoman who decided to set up the Property Search Group, a company that checks houses for potential buyers. She now controls 600 staff working in franchised offices throughout the country and is poised to enter The Sunday Times's annual Rich List of the country's wealthiest citizens.

"The hardest thing is juggling everything, the business and my four children," said Hester. "But I have never come up against discrimination since I started the business in 1997. Being a woman has not been an issue professionally."

A report to be published this week by Datamonitor, the respected research firm, will reveal that there are now 299,300 very wealthy women in Britain compared with 271,700 men.

The number of female millionaires in Britain has been rising steadily for many years on the back of social trends, most notably equal treatment for sons and daughters in inheritance and the rapidly climbing divorce rate.

Now, the report's authors say, there has been a surge as a new generation of women, the first to have had an education genuinely equal to men's, have started to prosper in their own right. It is this group, the "sex and the city brigade" who have made their own millions, that has tipped the numbers in favour of women for the first time.