Is Gendered Financial Advice Better For Women?

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When Haley Kowalewski started her full-time job as a recruiter at Apple, she found herself in a room full of women colleagues trying to figure out retirement funds. No one knew where to begin. “I couldn’t believe no one knew anything,” she tells PS. “Even my boss was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.'”

Discouraged by the lack of financial literacy among her colleagues, Kowalewski set out on a journey to claim her financial future. Today, she runs Femme Financial, an educational platform that helps women learn how to budget, save for retirement, and navigate the stock market. Of her combined 346,000 Instagram and TikTok followers, 95 percent are women.

Kowalewski’s platform was unique when it launched three years ago, but now, it’s one of many. Some popular financial education accounts marketed exclusively to women include @_sheinvests, @hotgirlfinance, and @fearless.female.finance. In the last two years, financial wellness books with titles geared towards women, like “Rich AF,” “Cash Is Queen,” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Funds,” have hit the market. Companies like Ellevest, Financielle, and Your Juno promote themselves as financial wellness companies for women; they tout slogans like “Get your shit together!” and “The best app for your financial glow up!”

Experts Featured in This Article

Haley Kowalewski is the founder of Femme Financial coaching service.

Tori Dunlap is the founder of money and career platform Her First $100K, host of the “Financial Feminist” podcast, and author of “Financial Feminist.”

Ylva Baeckström, PhD, is a senior lecturer in finance at King’s College London and author of “Gender and Finance: Addressing Inequality in the Financial Services Industry.”

Bernice Ledbetter, EdD, is the founding director of the Center for Women in Leadership at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School.

These outlets are a stark contrast to the men-dominated, suit-and-tie face of finance we once knew. What’s more, by teaching women how to save and invest, they’re seeking to bridge the gap that leaves women in the US with a median retirement savings that’s 50 percent lower than that of men. But does personal financial education need to be divided between genders? Although finance educators like Kowalewski believe there’s an advantage to creating women-geared content, other experts argue that type of messaging can perpetuate existing stereotypes.

Financial literacy entrepreneur and author Tori Dunlap says there’s no question that financial education should be identity-based. “It’s so obvious to me that to talk about finance, we have to talk about all of the systemic barriers that women face in managing their money,” she says. “[Her First $100K] takes a very jargon-heavy, non-approachable topic and makes it into something women feel they can participate in and ask questions about without fear of judgment.”

In Dunlap’s experience, personal financial advice has historically looked very different depending on its intended audience. When targeted at men, it focuses on expansion — buy real estate, start a business, and invest — while for women, it focuses on shrinking — stop buying coffee, stop getting manicures, and deprive yourself to the point of no enjoyment. “The advice for men is always, ‘Here are five hot stocks right now,'” Dunlap says. “For women, it’s, ‘Here are five meals you can make for under five dollars.'”

Kowalewski agrees, adding that she believes this difference is largely due to the roles men and women have traditionally played in the household. “Men went out to earn, while women protected what the family already had,” she says. “Dads sat down with their sons and taught them about the stock market. Who managed the money in your house growing up: mom or dad?”

Kowalewski sees the effects of these gendered conversations in her practice. “Women come into my one-on-ones and cry,” she says. “Many of them will say I’m the first person they’ve ever talked to about money.” Because many girls aren’t taught about building their wealth growing up, women are often less confident and more risk-averse than men when investing in the stock market, according to research from investing advice company The Motley Fool. However, this lack of confidence can actually earn women better returns, according to finance professor Ylva Baeckström. Women investors generally outperform men because they invest with the long-term in mind, while men make more impulsive decisions that don’t pay off, she says.

Dr. Baeckström also claims women typically feel more confident, and therefore invest more money, when advised by a woman financial adviser. Learning about personal finance from a fellow woman can make the topic more inviting. Larissa Machiels, a 25-year-old sustainability consultant from London, certainly sees the appeal. “I am regularly part of meetings where all my male colleagues are talking about investing, and I feel silly for not knowing what things mean,” she tells PS. “There’s an accessibility issue that I thought [these sites] could help me solve, and that’s what piqued my interest. [They seem] like a very friendly place to learn the basics of investing — I imagine I won’t feel embarrassed to raise my hand or ask a silly question.”

Bernice Ledbetter, a women’s leadership expert at Pepperdine, sees the opportunities women can bring other women when they provide online personal financial education. That said, she has concerns. “I think the risk some of these influencers take is the possibility of being perceived as trite,” she tells PS, noting influencers who share their latest diets or makeup fixations alongside budgeting advice. Ledbetter notes that some pages are more about the presenters themselves, and their ability to influence, rather than about helping women: “It makes one wonder about the depth of content they are going to provide.”

While some accounts have useful content that doesn’t feel condescending towards women, Dr. Ledbetter says hard-hitting financial advice, like how to choose a good investment account or how to go about getting a mortgage, can sometimes get lost in the shuffle. “Some that present as finance pages are more about building confidence and life management,” she says. “The finance piece exists in a salad — that can be deceptive.”

Dr. Baeckström agrees. “As a woman, I find it quite patronizing,” she says of any financial advice that is specifically geared toward women. “If you’re reading a book about finance specifically written for women, in a way it tells you that you couldn’t understand a book that was written for men.”

Dr. Baeckström believes the solution to equity in financial education is not to add a girls’ club right next to the boys’, but rather to rethink how we talk about finance generally. “The industry was created for alpha males, so the language is very alpha rather than catering to the mass market,” she says. “Now the only women making it to the top are alpha females. What they need to do is get a bunch of diverse people around the table and reinvent the language to make it accessible to all.”

Kowalewski and Dunlap, however, are confident that women need more women role models to learn how to budget, save, and invest. It’s particularly important to them because they understand the impact of women gaining wealth. “Women reinvest back into the community when they have money,” Kowalewski says, citing research by Bank of America. “Any time you ask women what they’d do if they got rich, donate is at the top of the list. Guys just want to buy a lot of stuff.”

Ultimately, the impact of more women achieving financial wellness fuels Kowalewski and Dunlap’s passion for educating women. “The world gets better when women have more money,” Dunlap says. “If I can get more money in the hands of women, the entire world starts to change.”

Samantha Fink is a PS contributor and freelance writer covering lifestyle and entertainment. Her other work can be found in Cosmopolitan, Business Insider, Yahoo!, The WholeNote, and The Bookseller. Samantha graduated from Queen’s University with degrees in English and psychology, and she has a master’s degree in journalism from City, University of London.