Women are still less likely to invest and more likely to be overly cautious, with the wealth management industry urged to focus more on tackling this issue.
For International Women’s Day today (8 March), Boring Money released statistics based on a survey of 6,700 adults which showed 41 percent of all investors, and only 36 percent of new investors in 2020, were women.
Holly Mackay, Boring Money’s chief executive, said the last decade had seen investing open to a different audience.
“Costs have fallen, engagement has gone up, the average age has come down and we have more smaller first-time investors than ever,” she said.
“But the one thing we have not made any change to at all is the gender investment gap. If anything, our new investor data for 2020 suggests that we are going backward.
“It would be great to see one provider in the industry really step up and seize this problem and tackle it head on, in a meaningful way.”
Amanda Cassidy, managing director at Quilter, said there was also a large gap between the number of men and women who received advice – with about 40 percent of the advised population being female.
“This can have huge ramifications for someone’s wealth particularly in the current climate when interest rates on cash savings are so low,” said Ms Cassidy.
“Part of the reason for this is that the advice and investment industry has been dominated by men for so long, and has historically catered predominantly to male consumer needs and failed to grasp that women may have different investment needs, financial goals and relate to finance differently.”
She said part of the solution was more female advisers: “Taking advice is a personal and emotive process and it is understandable that women often say that they would prefer to see a female financial adviser.”
The Boring Money research also showed women tended to over-estimate the risks of capital losses when it came to investing.
Among those currently keeping their savings in cash, women were more likely to think of risk as the danger of losing all of their money (74 percent compared to 69 percent of men), the threat of investing in a scam or that the investment company could go bust. Men were more likely to see investment risk as something with upside as well as downside.
