The gender investment disenfranchisement challenge

This week I joined colleagues, friends and industry partners to celebrate a year since we launched Fidelity’s Women & Money GETINvested campaign.

It’s a simple fact that the majority of women today are not investing. For various reasons they believe that investment just ‘isn’t for them’.

This lack of participation means that for many it’s a state of near disenfranchisement that magnifies other problems like the gender pay and pension gaps that build up over women’s lives: gaps that are complicated further by women’s participation in the growing gig economy. Unless these barriers are addressed and removed then women’s financial opportunities will continue to lag.

Our campaign aims to help change that, by focusing on four objectives:

• Uncover the barriers that stop women investing
• Encourage women to invest
• Identify solutions to close the gender pension gap
• And to drive change by identifying the policies that leave women behind financially

Despite many of the assumptions and stereotypes, we weren’t that surprised when our Financial Power of Women report last year found that on the whole, women are interested in investing, even though they are deterred from actually doing it. Our survey found that women say they feel as comfortable with their finances as men, and two thirds see themselves as the savviest member of the household.

However, the report found that women hold back from investing due to a lack of time, a lack of confidence, and confusion over the jargon that the investment industry uses.

Over the course of the year we have investigated these issues in depth at a series of workshops - our Women in Money Labs. We have invited experts from across the investment industry, from government, from the media and from academia to uncover and understand the personal, professional and policy barriers that women face, and to come up with potential solutions.

At these Labs we discovered how important it is that the investment industry talks about real-world outcomes rather than jargon-filled products; how technology can help bridge the gap between saving and investing; and we discussed how ‘nudges’ can be particularly effective in encouraging women to invest.

An important point of agreement from one of our labs was the fact that women do not have to face a binary choice between being a ‘saver’ or an ‘investor’ - they can sit comfortably in the middle and know that small changes can make a big difference to their financial futures. Another important lesson was how much value many women place on flexibility as a means of smoothing out the effects of being in and out of work.

While our initial focus was the UK, we have since rolled the campaign out to Australia and Japan - and soon we’ll move on to Germany. Interestingly, we’re finding similar policy considerations exist across these markets. For example, the importance of improving financial inclusion and financial education, as well as the social policy which encourages equal responsibility in the home and considering childcare as a business expense for the self-employed.

In the UK, while the government’s planned pensions dashboard has the potential to be a powerful organising tool, many women will access it too late in life to make any meaningful change to their savings behaviours. Our research also suggested that some women might even decide not to open it, fearing that their pot wouldn’t be as full as they’d want. 

In the next few weeks we’ll be exploring some of these issues further by launching new research into couples’ finances and exploring the understanding and awareness of the new ‘pension freedoms’. I’ll be writing more about these findings and would love to hear your comments, views and experience.

We’re just a year in and the response to the campaign has been amazing so far - the issues raised are clearly striking a chord. But this is just the start: we have the chance to make meaningful change which won’t just benefit women, but society and the economy as a whole.