Issue #56: Money management and the female brain - Part 1

Do women get finance?

How do companies increase profit? By increasing their revenue of course. But also, often times, when the going is tough, when revenues are tapering off, by reducing their costs and expenses.

Think of families as mini companies. We all have our personal P&L, replete with revenues, costs, and profit.

And, for years, we have been seeing our dads add to the revenue while our moms and grandmoms have managed costs frugally. Haggling on the price of tomatoes, negotiating the milk delivery charge, selling old plastic and glass bottles to the raddiwallah (scrap collector), stowing away those meagre earnings in discreet dabbas at the back of the top shelves.

We have not seen the women in our families grow money because the women in our families have never had enough disposable income to grow it further.

“I don’t get finance. My husband manages the investments in the house,” says the first working woman I talk to in a bid to understand her investment behaviour. I probe further. But no. She is steadfast and confident about her lack of confidence in finance.

The next few echo the sentiment, this seemingly obvious “not getting finance”. They break it down a bit more, walking down memory lane. ‘Perhaps that’s what I learnt in my childhood - my dad always managed the savings while mom managed the daily expenses’.

Finally, one of them wills to introspect why she never started managing her investment, no matter her childhood. “I simply didn’t have the mental bandwidth, what with young kids and a demanding job. There were classes to track and homeworks to submit, nannies to manage and drivers to be given drop routes, groceries to stock up and meal plans to finalise. Middle management was treacherous as-is, relentless in its onslaught. I just found it easier to add-on one job of mine to my husband’s list, that he was anyway doing for himself, which was investment”.

Another breaks it down further. “The time I started earning, I was conservative and stuck to fixed deposits. When I could have potentially started experimenting a bit more with investing, I was already out of the formal workplace, taking a break to care for the kids. And after that, it felt like too much effort and time to learn something anew that someone else in the family was anyway doing.”

A third gives an interesting perspective. “Have you noticed how women never talk about money management and investments with each other? The predominant topic men pick up is around investments but women have a wide variety of topics where investments don’t find a mention at all.”

But then I stumble upon a group of working women who all talk about how they manage their own money if not their entire families’ too. And they say some very relevant things which make sense, can perhaps be construed even as “tips”.

Meanwhile, all the men I ask this question to tell me about how some of their investments aren’t doing well and how they plan to stick to some others etc etc. AIFs, SGBs, and other Three Letter Acronyms (TLAs) make appearances.

The first tip, I suppose, is to start using TLAs. It makes us feel more confident, I tell you. The second tip… tune into my next article in a week’s time to hear the things women who invest have to say.

P. S. Views strictly personal. None of the events mentioned in this post refer to the organisation that I am currently associated with.