How women and men approach money differently: risk, investment, and return | Sallie Krawcheck

How women and men approach money differently: risk, investment, and return

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Women have different financial strategies and insight than men, argues Sallie Krawcheck, the co-founder and CEO of Ellevest, a digital investment platform for women. Female investors have a different sense of why they want to make money, pursue specific goals more readily, and show a unique sense of risk awareness. Krawcheck says it's important for women to play the market and plan financially because there is a real retirement savings crisis in this country which disproportionately affects them.

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SALLIE KRAWCHECK :

Sallie Krawcheck is a financial feminist, CEO and Co-Founder of

Ellevest, a recently launched innovative digital investment platform for women. She is the Chair of Ellevate Network, the global professional women's network, and of the Pax Ellevate Global Women's Index Fund, which invests in the top-rated companies in the world for advancing women. She is also the best-selling author of Own It: The Power of Women at Work.

Before becoming an entrepreneur, she was CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, of Smith Barney and of Sanford Bernstein. Krawcheck has also been named among the top ten of Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People" in business list, as well as one of Entrepreneur Magazine's Entrepreneurs to Watch. and she has also been referred to as one of the most successful and influential executives in financial services.

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TRANSCRIPT:

So if you think about investing today it tends to be all about outperforming the market. It tends to be about making more money and it tends to be about picking and choosing the right stock, the right mutual fund. Mutual fund versus an ETF. The right money manager.

And that has worked eh, I was going to say well for the population, but frankly it has worked okay for the population. Why? Because the goal that the industry set itself a long time ago of active management and outperforming the market…well less than one percent, well less than half a percent of money managers outperform the market consistently over any five year period.

Okay, so back up. When we did our research with women the concept of “beating the market” fell completely flat. The concept of “winning” fell flat. In fact, even the concept of “making more money” fell pretty flat—sort of surprising to me, it seemed like a pretty good goal.

What worked for women were actual goals. So okay, if I’m going to put my money aside and invest my money, I want to be able to in X number of years buy my dream home, have a child, start a business, retire well, take that trip around the world that I wanted to. And so we found that women tend to be more goals-oriented and focused than men.

Another finding for us: Men tend to, if you ask them the question about their risk tolerance—which, by the way, the whole industry does—men will answer. By the way, they don’t know what it is. We only ever learn what our risk tolerance is really when we go through downturns.

But women we found were, “Oh, oh my gosh. You know what, I’m going to think about that. Let me think about that and I’ll get back to you.” And they never do. It really shuts down the conversation.

And so we instead of asking a question we know people don’t have the wherewithal to answer, instead we say “Okay, let us learn about you through taking you through the product and the capability. Tell us what your goals are and then we’ll tell you essentially how much risk you can afford.” So for an example you and I are the same person. We make the same salary. We have the same level of education. We’re the same age. And you don’t have an emergency fund so you don’t have cash set aside for a rainy, rainy day and you want to have a baby in four years.

I just need to retire, right. It doesn’t really matter what I think my risk tolerance is. You don’t get a lot of risk. I get plenty of risk.

And so we tweaked things like that as well as really – so making it goals based, approaching risk differently, taking into account again that women live longer and salaries peak sooner, forecasting out their life curves.

And then the most important change we found is that most people think of and describe women as risk-averse investors. What we found, maybe a subtle point, is women are risk-aware investors.

And what they wanted was not hey, explain risk to be in standard deviation and “Let’s really go through that statistical analysis,” but more, “Hold on, how bad ...

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