When it comes to finances, women’s worst enemies might just be their parents, who might unknowingly prepare female children for financial failure.

That’s a problem because not only do women not earn as much as men, but they face harsh financial shortfalls when it comes time to retire, and these things are exacerbated by women’s longer life spans.

It starts with the way they are nurtured, said Brie Williams, the head of practice management at State Street Global Advisors.

“If we step back and look at the retirement gap in terms of environmental and social factors, think about how you act if you are with a young male or female child,” said Williams. “We tend to say ‘Goodbye, good riddance’ to the boys when it’s time for them to leave, and to cuddle and coddle girls more before sending them off. That’s conditioning their individual response for the next time they want to take a risk.”

And yet women, often anecdotally referred to as risk-averse investors, may not be that way inherently, explained Williams, noting that many of the financial industry’s assumptions about female clients may be a result of nurturing, not biology.

Williams made these comments at a panel discussion held by the National Association of State Treasurers at the organization’s Treasury Management Training Symposium earlier this month.

Also on the panel, called “Mind the Gaps,” was Massachusetts Treasurer Deborah Goldberg, who said American children in general have financial literacy issues, which is why her state financial education programs start with kindergarten age children.

“It has to start very young,” Goldberg said. “Young kids think ATM machines make money, and they don’t even see their parents paying bills, because it’s all online.”

While the session was focused on the gender retirement gap, much of the public officials’ discussion revolved around the earnings gap, where women make an estimated 70 to 80 cents to a man’s dollar.

The Massachusetts financial empowerment programs are largely directed to closing the gender wage gap, which is a contributing factor to both the retirement gap and the earnings gap.

“Women face a gender pay gap that impacts them for their entire lives,” said Alayna van Tassel, deputy treasurer and director of the Office of Economic Empowerment in Massachusetts. “When they take home less money, it impacts their ability to save for retirement and to pay off their student loans. The pay gap affects everything we’re doing and underscores and inspires everything that we do with our programming.”

The pay gap, anecdotally, lies somewhere between the 30 cents earnings gap cited by Goldberg and van Tassel and close to parity with men. Feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers has estimated that when differences in education, job tenure, hours worked and occupation are accounted for, the actual pay gap narrows to “around five cents.”

Williams said that women’s financial burden could be alleviated if the gap in advice is closed as well.

“Women are clearly falling behind when it comes to being prepared for retirement,” Williams said. “We need to stop having these conversations and look at this problem in a new light: It’s not just a pay gap. It’s also their investment patterns. Are women making different decisions? Are they being too risk-averse? Are they comfortable with financial advisors? Those are the factors that when combined together create a gap like this.”

The panelists highlighted several programs dedicated to creating more investment-savvy, financially confident women. While private sector programs highlighted the advice and investing gap, public programs focused on financial literacy and the wage gap.

In Massachusetts, said van Tassel, “We’ve created the Women’s Economic Empowerment Series, which ties financial literacy to wage equality. It’s a four-week program that’s open to women for free. We spend three weeks on financial literacy, with a fourth week that is a salary negotiation workshop. We know that salary negotiations is one of the reasons that the wage gap continues to exist.”

BNY Mellon Investment Management’s Elizabeth Young, a vice president and senior investment strategist, described a program the firm has created designed to help women understand their financial behaviors, set clear goals and work toward them in an easy-to-follow process.

“What does it look like when women walk into an advisor’s office?” Young said. “I think a lot of the time women are intimidated by the conversations. They don’t know what financial planning means; they think they’re going to walk in and see a bunch of charts and numbers. The industry has come a long way over the past 10 to 15 years. Rather than focusing on benchmarks and indices, advisors are starting to focus on goals-based and outcome-based investing.”

Thus, BNY Mellon has tried to present planning topics to women in a different way, using graphics that represent goals and time lines.

Gina Joynes, the deputy treasurer of communications in West Virginia, has helped her office launch a financial literacy initiative that brings women in for educational retreats around the state.

So far, the state has hosted 33 conferences, reaching 10,000 attendees. The daylong seminars feature keynotes and sessions from female financial planners.

However, focusing efforts on women alone only solves half the behavioral problem. Men may still unknowingly nurture their young daughters to be timid, uncertain and unconfident financial decision-makers.

Thus, Goldberg has deemed the women’s retirement gap as a bipartisan, gender-neutral problem.

“These are long-term cultural barriers that have evolved over time,” Goldberg said. “No one is consciously going out and doing these things. We’ve had plenty of men at our round tables who’ve said that they just didn’t understand what was happening and didn’t know what to do about it. Many were parents of daughters who saw what’s happening to their children as they grow up.”

The industry is missing a huge opportunity to embrace women as clients at a time when they’re becoming the primary breadwinners and the financial decision-makers of their households, said Williams, largely because women are stereotyped, even by the programs and initiatives designed to engage them in financial planning.

“We have a misperception that women are overly emotional, indecisive and self-doubting,” she said, adding that such myths must be debunked.