Success, for me, is synonymous with making money. I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting comp to boot.

To accomplish this, I spent months researching the publishing marketplace before sitting down to write my first book. I pushed to be the one to adapt it for the studio. Now I am working toward producing, directing or running my own show. TV is where the money is, and to be perfectly blunt about it, I want to be rich.

“Rich” is still a man’s word. The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which is devoted to increasing female representation onscreen, has a motto that may explain why: “If she can see it, she can be it.” Until recently, much of the content we consumed was by and for men. If the women movie makers created cared about money, they showed it by scheming to marry rich, rakish antiheroes.

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.

I used to hope someone else might trumpet my foreign sales for me, thinking only men got to be bumptious and beloved. Then Gillian Flynn baldly declared in Chicago magazine that the first page of her next novel is “the greatest first page that’s ever been written.” Reese Witherspoon told WSJ Magazine that if acting hadn’t worked out, she’d have become the premier surgeon and pediatric cardiologist at Vanderbilt University. And Ellen Pompeo let it rip in The Hollywood Reporter, swanking about what it took to become the highest-paid actress on a prime-time drama.

The research tells me I shouldn’t, but I like all these women more for their bluster.

If she can see it, she can be it. I want to be it for little girls whose parents aren’t saving for their educations, whose friends make fun of them for wanting too much from their lives. I want to make the kind of money that allows me to jet to Mexico on a Tuesday, to meaningfully contribute to nasty politicians, to afford a shark of a lawyer if any man ever lays a finger on me again.

The future holds the possibility to be great or terrible, and since it has not yet occurred it remains simultaneously both.

For instance they were never taught that Columbus was a slave owner.

Women who will kill to protect their measly slice of the pie.

Les Grobstein's huge hog is proof that God has a sense of humor, isn't it?