Drop the stereotypes about breadwinner women and their risk tolerance: As it turns out, they’re probably not afraid to invest.
Executive women, as it turns out, have an investing risk appetite similar to those of their male counterparts, according to a survey of over 450 primary household breadwinners.
This comes from the first “Executive Investors” survey conducted by Chicago-based FlexShares Exchange Traded Funds. It found that 26% of women respondents and 27% of male respondents regarded their risk profile as “moderately aggressive” or “aggressive.” Women were also far less likely to identify themselves as “conservative” investors—while 31% of the men in the survey identified as conservative, only 14% of the women did.
The FlexShares survey also found that as breadwinners, women suffered from no deficit of investing confidence. When ranking their investment knowledge on a scale of 1 to 10, the mean response for women, 7.3, was only slightly lower than the mean response among men, 8.1. Women and men rated themselves similarly when asked about their abilities to perform certain financial planning tasks like retirement planning, managing investments and budgeting.
The genders diverged when survey takers asked them about their financial priorities, with the men in the survey revealing themselves to be more family-oriented than the women. Men named “providing for future generations” and “taking care of my dependents financially” as their top two financial goals, while women named “to know that I’m prepared for the worst” and “planning for retirement” as their top priorities.
The survey also discovered a blurring of traditional gender roles in the home, with both men and women indicating that they take on 50% or more of the responsibility for caregiving of children, parents and other dependents. In fact, half of the men in the survey said they were responsible for most of the eldercare in their family, compared with 41% of the women. More executive men said they took on the majority of the childcare responsibilities, 49% of men compared with 45% of women.
As a result, the executive men in the survey were more likely to say they were struggling with their work-life balance than the executive women: While one-third of the men said they had difficulty with work-life balance, only 29% of the women said the same.
The survey also found that high-earning executive women were likely to be loyal to their financial advisors. Only one in five of the women in the survey said they had thought about leaving their advisor in the past year, while two in five men said they had considered changing advisors. Women were also more likely than men to say they had a “personal” relationship with their advisor.
In the FlexShares survey, men were also more likely to be interested in socially responsible investing than women. When asked to rate their interest in socially responsible strategies on a scale of 1 to 10, men’s average answer was 7.5, while women on average answered 6.8.
The survey was conducted in March and April 2019 among 461 men and women between the ages of 35 and 65 with annual household incomes of more than $200,000 and investable assets of $1 million, or over $250,000 for respondents between the ages of 35 and 39.