“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.