Investing and Global Finance News

Economic Impact of International Women’s Day

On March 8, women around the world called for more equality for women, with a particular emphasis on wages and rights.  Lima Charlie’s recent blog discussed the impact that this will have, with data from the Boston Consulting Group which found that:

“between 2010 and 2015, private wealth held by women rose from 34 trillion dollars to 51 trillion dollars. As a portion of all private wealth, women’s wealth also experienced an uptick from 28% to 30%. In just two years, women are projected to hold 72 trillion dollars, or a little under one-third of the total.”

What kind of consequence, Lima Charlie asks, does this have for “risk-assessment and asset management?”  Quite significant ones as has been recognized by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics considering the “stark differences in risk attitudes between the genders: while women are more likely to purchase and retain, men are usually more ready to buy rapidly. Investors view this as a tendency to consider risk more carefully among the former, than the latter.”

In another article in The Economist, this belief was supported with the conclusion that this will generate:

“big implications for asset managers. Take risk-profiling. Surveys show that men’s attitudes to risk are typically more gung-ho, whereas women are more likely to buy and hold, which leads advisers to conclude that men are less risk-averse. And men are more likely to say that they understand financial concepts, which might seem to suggest that they are more financially literate.”

Plus, Morgan Stanley found that while 67% of men were interested in sustainable investing (financial returns with social/environmental goals), that figure was 84% for women.

 

 

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