Typecasting aspirations of wealth has not helped diversify the three-comma club. According to Forbes’s annual tally, less than 12 percent of the world’s billionaires are women, and almost three-quarters of that dismal stat inherited their fortunes.

If we want to close the wealth gap, we have to come at it from every angle. We have to stop paying women 80 cents to a man’s dollar and women of color substantially less than that. We have to start raising girls the way we raise boys. A T. Rowe Price survey shows that in 2017, parents of only boys still save more and pay more for their sons’ educations than parents who have only girls do.

This trickles down to the way we socialize kids — girls are expected to be caretakers, boys the ones who will deliver a return. If you want to create your own wealth, the confidence to take calculated risks is a necessary skill. Placing the needs of others above your own is not.

I have always wrestled with what has been expected of me as a woman versus what I expect of myself. The conflicting messages of millennial womanhood: to be ambitious but never bossy, strong but skinny, honest but polite, supportive of my fellow sisters’ success while the culture gets off on girl fights. Only in fiction have I been able to create women who aggressively seek money and power the way men seek money and power. Women who will kill to protect their measly slice of the pie.

I often commiserate with other female authors about the catch-22 of publicity campaigns. We must talk ourselves up despite knowing that women who do so are disliked. Researchers have found that women are actually punished when they succeed at traditionally masculine endeavors. Meanwhile male authors on our panels monopolize the mic to the great delight of the crowd.

Self-promotion, for us, is a complicated dance with steps men will never have to learn. Oh, to be Daniel Mallory, who wrote “The Woman in the Window” under the gender-ambiguous pen name A. J. Finn. Mr. Mallory told a reporter that his foreign sales — in 37 territories, at the time — “might be a record for a debut novel.” It wasn’t a record. I knew it wasn’t because my first book sold to 38.