Twenty-seven years ago, in 1987, when Forbes Magazine began to track the fortunes of billionaires worldwide, the list only featured eight women. This year, their number grew to 138, compared to 1,426 on the full list.

The female percentage has been rising steadily from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 9.7 percent in 2013. Also the increase in the number of female billionaires outpaced that of all billionaires, by 17.3 and 10.2 times respectively.

This year, Liliane Bettencourt, a major shareholder in cosmetics giant L'Oreal, replaced WalMart's Christy Walton as the world's richest woman and she ranks as the ninth richest person on earth with a net worth of 30 billion US dollars. 90-year-old Bettencourt has been a regular on each of the 27 billionaire lists Forbes has released so far.

Alongside Liliane, another 11 women were among the planet's 100 wealthiest.

The ten richest women amassed 181.4 billion US dollars altogether by March 2013, compared with the 449.5 billion assembled by the ten richest men, and most of them attained wealth through inheritance. As home to the largest number of billionaires, the United States is also the cradle for four of the top 10 richest women.

Also read: Top 10 world'srichest peopole 2013: Forbes
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Forbes Magazine released the 2013 World’s Billionaires list on Monday, March 4, and found that the world currently counts 1426 billionaires, with a combined net worth of a massive 5.4 trillion US dollars. Mexico's telecom tycoon Carlos Slim Helu is the richest man on earth with a personal wealth of 73 billion US dollars.

Following are the top 10 richest women on the Forbes billionaire ranking 2013:

 Dirce Navarro De Camargo & family

2013 net worth: US$11.5 billion

Age: unknown

Source: construction

Country of citizenship: Brazil

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