There's an Investing Gap That Costs Women Up to $1 Million. Here's How to Fix It
Today, gender equality is in the spotlight like never before. The #MeToo movement has encouraged countless women to share their stories about being harassed at work—myself included. Powerful men have lost their power, while powerful women (hi, Oprah) are putting their platforms and their money into stopping workplace harassment and abuse. It’s been incredible. And it’s just the beginning.
This movement has also highlighted the importance and power of being financially stable. Get-your-hand-off-my-leg stable. Take-this-job-and-shove-it stable. Live-my-best-life stable. Have-as-much-money-as-the-guys-do stable.
Here, we have a ways to go. Maybe you’ve heard of the gender pay gap. Frustrating, right? And costly. But there are more gaps at play: Women pay more for the debt they carry than men, and they don’t invest as much as men do. As a result, women retire with two-thirds the money of men…even though we tend to live years longer. Don’t believe me? Check the gender mix at your local nursing home: 80% of women die single, and they’re also 80% more likely to be impoverished in retirement than men. Yuck.
So there’s work to do. You may not be able to close all the gender money gaps immediately, but you can take action right now, and you should. It can change your life.
What is the gender investing gap?
Simply put, women don’t invest as much as men do. And they don’t invest as early as men do, either. Of all the assets women control—both inside and outside their portfolios—they keep a full 71% in cash, according to a survey by BlackRock, whereas men hold 60%. Cash may feel like zero risk, but it also has zero potential to grow as stocks do over time. And even with low inflation, the purchasing power of that cash will decline over time. So the price of certainty you get with cash is high.
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How high? We recently published the Ellevest 2018 Money Census, in which we asked 1,000 women about all things money. Nearly half of women weren’t even aware there was an investing gap. And when asked to estimate how costly it was to them, their average guess was $113,000.
Not even close. We ran some projections based on the wage gap, typical asset allocation strategies, and a gender-specific salary curve. The true cost for the average woman at the time she retires may run two to seven times that amount. Depending on your salary and the market’s performance, the real cost of the investing gap over a 35-year career span could be more than $1 million. Yes, I said a million.
Conventional wisdom “blames” women for this gap. We receive messages that we’re not as good at math as men; we’re not as good at investing. Um, no. Studies have found that once women do invest, they outperform men by nearly one percentage point a year. This was confirmed recently by Fidelity, which analyzed the performance of 8 million retail clients in 2016. Typically women outperform because they don’t overtrade, panic in down markets, or pay too much in fees.