BlackRock finds 45% of women with $10 million or more in investable assets are unadvised

BlackRock's first survey of women investors lands on a pair of figures an RIA principal can read as a prospect list: 35% of women with $2 million or more in investable assets are unadvised, and among women with $10 million or more that share rises to 45%. InvestmentNews, which reported the findings, frames the gap as a risk for advisors who misjudge the households walking in the door.

The report, "Future of Wealth: Women, Money & The Growing Opportunity for Advisors," was fielded by Escalent, which surveyed 1,067 affluent and high-net-worth women investors and 409 financial advisors across the U.S. between July 29 and Aug. 23, 2026. It is the inaugural edition, which means it sets a baseline and offers nothing to measure against; whether the advice gap is narrowing or widening is not a question this data answers.

The scale behind that gap has been sized before. Women are projected to control $34 trillion in U.S. investable assets by 2030, per McKinsey's 2024 report "The new face of wealth: The rise of the female investor," and Cerulli Associates' 2024 high-net-worth study estimates $47 trillion in generational wealth transferring to women by 2048. BlackRock is citing both rather than producing them, and each has circulated long enough to serve as the industry's working estimate of the prize. A national projection, though, tells a firm less than its own client file does: the useful question is how many of those households sit within an hour of the office, and no study supplies that count.

The first divergence concerns timing. Advisors associate women's financial lives with widowhood, divorce and retirement, while the women surveyed named career promotions, marriage and becoming a parent as the events that most shaped their financial trajectories. One list describes a household inheriting a balance sheet; the other describes a household building one. A firm that markets around the transitions advisors watch for is positioning itself for the moment assets arrive, rather than for the decade of decisions that precede it.

Career earnings are the source of wealth women name most often, cited by 79% of respondents, against an advisor estimate of 49%. The spread widens at higher asset levels: 41% of women with $5 million or more cite equity compensation as a source of wealth, compared with 19% of women below that threshold. Equity-heavy balance sheets are where a standard intake process is most likely to misfire — concentrated positions and vesting schedules ask different questions than a retirement questionnaire does. Whether that cohort accounts for much of the 45% unadvised figure is a fair guess, though the study does not break the number down that way.

The priority gap reads the same way. Asked for their top objectives over the next five years, women ranked growing their wealth first, cited by 46%. Advisors placed that goal eighth among what they believe women prioritize, behind wealth preservation, family support and life transitions. Preservation is a defensible instinct, and no planner argues against raising it with a client near retirement; the ranking suggests advisors are opening with the preservation conversation before establishing whether the client is in it.

Tax planning produced another miss. Women ranked tax-efficient financial decisions as their single top need for professional guidance, cited by 43%, and the report says advisors are underestimating client expectations in that area. For a firm, that is an ownership question — who in the shop is accountable for the answer, and whether the client ever hears it — and it is the need clients tend to notice when it goes unaddressed.

Taken together, the gaps point one direction. On life transitions, on the source of wealth, on the top five-year objective and on the top need for guidance, advisors describe a client base that is older, more inheritance-driven and more preservation-minded than the one the survey reports. That is a reasonable description of the book most firms already have. It is a poor description of the book the 79% and the 41% are arriving from, and whether the mismatch shows up in attrition is not something a survey of assumptions can measure: the study asks advisors what they believe and women what they want, and it does not follow either group forward.

What the data cannot settle is why the unadvised share is higher among the wealthier cohort; the coverage does not say. The shape of the number is worth sitting with on its own, since the households with the most to plan are the least likely to be paying for planning. The cohort to watch is the equity-compensation group — the 41% of women above $5 million who name it as a source of wealth. It can also say that the goal women rank first is the goal advisors rank eighth among what they believe women prioritize, and that 45% of the wealthiest women surveyed are not paying anyone for advice.