The Gender Investment Gap

So what is the gender investment gap? The term is pretty self-explanatory, but to begin with, you could take what Claer Barret, FT’s Personal Finance editor, says in this op-ed: “The majority of my readers are male. The majority of people I meet in the investment, financial advisory and asset management industries are also male. Many of the stories I report on, however, concern how deeply uncomfortable many women who have their own salaries, earned from their own careers feel about doing their own financial planning. I do not think this is a coincidence.”  You could also read this article in which Elaine Low approaches the problem from different angles. In it Sallie Krawchek, Ellevest CEO, says that the fact that the gender investment gap even exists "tells me that women are not being well served by the existing investing industry and by Wall Street." So she aims to help investors reach their goals, not beat the market. Wall Street's obsession with outperforming the stock market indexes "leaves women completely cold," she says. Sallie also writes extensively on the topic in this piece for Time. In these articles and many others, the first thing to consider regarding the gender investment gap is the fact that women earn less than men, even when doing exactly the same job. Lauren Collins makes the gender pay gap crystal clear in this piece for the New Yorker, in which she writes about Carrie Gracie’s quarrel with BBC. Another commonplace observation is that women see stock trading as risky, better suited and mainly marketed towards a men’s bragging club. And it shows: give or take, depending on the surveys you see, it seems women make up as few as less that 10% to one third of investors in stock markets. And for crypto it’s much worse: surveys and studies estimate that women make up somewhere between 4 and 16% of cryptocurrency investors.  There are more aspects to consider. This article by Zameena Mejia for CNBC talks about women holding the position of CEO in the world's 500 leading companies: this year the total number fell from 36 to 24. And as we read in girlswhoinvest.org, female investment managers in the U.S. in the $15 trillion mutual fund marketplace have fallen from 10% of the industry in 2009 to less than 7% today. In alternative asset classes, women represent 6% in private equity, 4% in real estate and 3% in hedge funds. Despite this, several studies prove that women are better investors than men and outperform them regularly. You have to conclude that the goal of girlswhoinvest.org,  having 30% of the world's investable capital managed by women by 2030, seems wise.  Of course, there are more people addressing the gender investment gap and trying to change the picture. Like Helm CEO and co-founder Lindsey Taylor Wood: her venture fund invests in female entrepreneurs. Or Howard Lindzon, StockTwits Chairman, who in his blog lists “get more woman investing” as the first of “areas that matter to my partners and I as we invest out of our third fund at Social Leverage”. It seems clear that the gender investment gap stems from a deep-rooted and multifaceted gender inequality problem. It also seems clear that people and institutions should start thinking differently and taking more decisive steps to overcome this inequality. Elaine, Claer, Zameena, Lauren, Carrie and many more in the media are bringing the issue to the forefront; Sallie, Lindsay, Howard, the team in girlswhoinvest.org and many more in the financial industry are also taking decisive steps. As for us in Goonder, our approach has always been to give universal access to professional, risk-conscious advice with two premises: make it easy and fun, and give the users control on what they invest in. Moreover, Goonder is designed to be used regularly with the aim of making your money work to get some extra income by the end of the month, and not to get rich overnight. That’s why we see it as a failure that Goonder's user base is only approximately 18% women. But let us pick up the glove: we are committed to bring that number up to 50%, where it should be. To achieve this, we hereby ask the women who have downloaded and use the Goonder app to help us build what will be Goonder 2.0. We are already putting the first stones of the future app, and we’d love to have your feedback and your help. Tell us what you do and don’t like about Goonder, tell us what you miss when you use the app, and what features we should be thinking of in order to give you a tool you would be comfortable investing with. Email us to info@goonder.com, WhatsApp us to +5491133005197, leave comments in our Instagram… whatever works for you. Help us think different, help us take decisive steps. Let’s turn this around NOW. Thanks, The Goonder team