Women must take financial decisions confidently

We are familiar with the historically wide gap between men and women when it comes to earning, investing and making decisions about money. While deep-rooted social issues, patriarchal mindset, oppression of women, tightly defined gender-roles, etc. contributed towards this, today, things have changed a lot. More and more women are going out to work, pursuing passions, supporting households, supporting themselves, improving the standard of living of previously single-income households and finding the confidence to have an opinion (that they always deserved to have) and make their own decisions.

Be decisive
As encouraging as this is, there is an area I would like to talk about where girls and women are yet to catch up as much as their male counter-parts, and that is the confidence to make money and investment decisions. Now, this is a not just a social piece I am writing here, and I understand that you can’t expect women who may have not have had the opportunity to have any say in any money decisions to one day wake up and start taking calls on which shares to buy and how much insurance to take and how to save taxes. While I will talk about what is a good way to bring this stratum of women into the fold of financial decision-making in a separate article, I want to talk today about young girls who have received full education and have been working post this education and also women who have been working for some years now.

I have personally seen this as a personal finance professional and a lot of my peers concur on this too, that when it comes to taking investments-related decisions, their clients that fall in said category are often a little low on confidence and turn to their father/brothers/husbands/sons for help.

Family opinion may not be based on legitimate investing ideologies
Now, I am all for seeking help or taking the opinion of family and loved ones for financial decisions. I help people make investment decisions for a living but I still seek my family’s opinion when it comes to our own investment, and that is how families should work. The problem is where these male family members (I don’t mean to generalize, and there are senior female family members weighing in too, but I am trying to tackle a different issue here) give their opinion that these women and girls treat as highly valuable (again, I agree with the concept) but, at times, these male family members have opinions that are not based on legitimate investing ideologies, information and knowledge.

They say things that they believe to be true, and they have never been known anything different because they were always expected to know how to make money decisions by default. And they started making these decisions and assumed they knew everything.

I have had clients whose fathers advise them about investing in newer financial products when they themselves have never invested in anything beyond gold and FDs and some insurance products. Like I said, they have not known better but that does not mean the women who seek their advice also never will.

Social pressure
Talking about young girls and boys the same age, I was once asked in a panel discussion why was there a confidence issue between the two genders and my simple answer was that girls are more conscious about taking the right decision (this is also because of the immense social pressure on the gender for having to prove themselves) compared to boys who were more comfortable “winging it”, taking a decision based on a hunch or whatever they knew at that point in time. Girls, should we not try and do this too?

I am not promoting taking financial decisions in a whimsical way, but having the confidence to at least start making the first financial decisions on your own.

(The author is founder, SOLUFIN. Views expressed are personal)