Good news – British women are getting rich, fast. They’re earning a lot – the average female salary may still be 17 per cent below that of the opposite sex, but the figures are shifting. Earlier this year, four in ten women over 40 told a survey conducted by Women and Home magazine and IceSave that they out-earned their partners.

You only have to casually cast your eye down the columns of statistics to get an idea of the extent to which women have become financially dominant. 150,000 women per year are starting their own businesses in the UK; five million women have assets of over £25,000 excluding property and pensions; 360,000 with £750,000 or more; 100,000 fully-fledged millionaires (young ones, at that – 40 per cent of them are under 44); noticeably more than there are examples of the male variety. By 2025, women are forecast to control around 60 per cent of the nation’s wealth. Good news, indeed.

Of course, it’s what you do with it that counts – but before we start collectively eyeing up that Louis Vuitton handbag we’d do well to note that modern, affluent females typically aren’t putting much thought into ploughing those incomes into creating long-term wealth. Simply put, we aren’t investing enough.

The same Investec survey that produced the revealing statistics above also showed that women, on average, squirrel away about 25 per cent of their wealth in cash, and that more than two million have over £25,000 gathering dust in a bank account. Worse, 60 per cent of women say they have no pension arrangements; one in five say it isn’t even a priority for them.

Stagnant, unimaginative financial thinking, at best. So what’s holding us back? Two things. First, it’s probably fair to say women are naturally more risk-averse than men. We hate the idea of losing any of the money we’ve built up, so we think we are doing the best thing for our futures by taking the least risky approach: holding cash. We’re wrong. There’s nothing wrong with liquid capital, but simply keeping it under lock and key won’t make you rich. After tax, the interest on most savings accounts is only just enough to keep pace with inflation, if you’re lucky. Understanding these trends is even more vital for women than it is for men – we are the ones who take career breaks, and hence the ones who end up with no income for years on end – which makes it vital that we make our money work as hard for us after we’ve earned it as we did to earn it in the first place.

The second reason women hesitate to invest is born of another kind of fear – not that of losing money, but an all-round suspicion of finance in general. We have somehow been brainwashed into thinking that investing is terribly complicated and really only for the experts. But this simply isn’t true. Anything can sound complicated if it speaks in impenetrable jargon (something the financial services industry is really, really good at), and churns out reams of trying material written in this arcane tongue. But you don’t need to speak an alien language to understand money and markets (in my book, I cover the whole investing thing in about 40 pages and I’m pretty sure I haven’t missed anything out). Even better news for women is that there is a good amount of evidence to suggest that, once we get down to it, we are actually rather better at investing our wealth than men. So what are we waiting for?

Merryn Somerset Webb Is the author of Love is Not Enough: The Smart Woman's Guide to Money.