More Women Than Men on Forbes List of Top-Earning Celebs Under 30

One of Forbes’ many lists of People Who Have More Money Than You was released today. This one can be categorized as Young People Who Have More Money Than You and while the usual suspects are on it, this list is particularly notable because it is full of vaginas.

As follows, here are your richest stars under 30 and how much they earned between June 2012 and June 2013:

1. Lady Gaga: $80 million

2. Justin Bieber: $58 million

3. Taylor Swift: $55 million

4. Calvin Harris: $46 million

5. Rihanna: $43 million

6. Katy Perry: $39 million

7. Adele: $25 million

8. Jennifer Lawrence: $26 million

9. Kristen Stewart: $22 million

10. Taylor Lautner: $22 million

Two notable things: Seven of the ten celebrities here are women, and seven of the ten are also in music, with the remaining three positions going to actors. Above everything else, this list speaks to the incredible versatility musicians have in making money these days. They have managed to become not just musicians but multi-faceted performers. Despite all the talk about the music industry going down the tubes, they’ve managed to parlay themselves into viable and desirable brands that prompt fans to eagerly jump aboard with each iteration these stars put forth. That’s something that actors, who play constantly shifting personas and have to try to control their “real” image through magazines articles, have a harder time making money off of. There’s a reason that the top five of this year’s Forbes Top 100 Celebrities were Oprah Winfrey, Lady Gaga, Steven Spielberg, Beyoncé and Madonna. Two of those people are entrepreneurs and three are musicians turned entrepreneurs.

It’s because these musicians have become performers that women like Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry owe their large fortunes largely to endorsement deals and their choice to put their names on things like fragrances. A list like this proves that female celebrities have done a better job at finding opportunities to do this than male celebrities. For instance, Katy Perry has prompted everything under the sun, even eyelashes, while Brad Pitt was ruthlessly mocked for his Chanel No. 5 ad. There are also more opportunities for women to attach themselves to selling things than there are socially acceptable things for men to do the same with. A glance at the success (and family tension because of it) that the Kardashian daughters have achieved while their brother Rob has been left to his ill-fated sock line is enough to show the divide between the value of men and women’s “stuff.” Underlying all of this is the well-known belief that female sexuality sells.

Even Justin Bieber, who is number two on the Forbes list, is successful largely because he’s sold stuff to women. His multiple perfumes are marketed specifically to teenage girls, who were targeted for their buying power decades ago. Take “Girlfriend“: it’s described as scent “designed to evoke that intimate feeling of holding on to Justin and never letting go.” That’s something that is designed to make the buyer feel sexy, in a different way that someone who buys Katy Perry’s fragrance is supposed to feel sexy, but with the same outcome of feelin’ good.

Ultimately, shopping has yet to become such a “sport” for men as it is for women. When men do become “shopaholics”, it’s taken as a surprising and bizarre turn of events. A list like this latest one from Forbes shows that though female celebrities have managed to use the assumptions about what women want (STUFF) to their monetary advantage, it’s perhaps less because any of them are the new Artist Formerly/Again Known As Prince and more because they’ve figured out a way to make more money than he ever did off of more than just music.