What is the gender investing gap?
In an article for Money Magazine, Sallie Krawcheck, CEO and CoFounder of Ellevest, details what the gender investing gap is and how to fix it. This is a small excerpt of her article which you can see in it’s entirety here: http://time.com/money/5141680/investing-finance-gender-gap-pay-inequality/
Sallie says: “Simply put, women don’t invest as much as men do. And they don’t invest as early as men do, either. Of all the assets women control—both inside and outside their portfolios—they keep a full 71% in cash, according to a survey by BlackRock, whereas men hold 60%. Cash may feel like zero risk, but it also has zero potential to grow as stocks do over time. And even with low inflation, the purchasing power of that cash will decline over time. So the price of certainty you get with cash is high.
How high? We recently published the Ellevest 2018 Money Census, in which we asked 1,000 women about all things money. Nearly half of women weren’t even aware there was an investing gap. And when asked to estimate how costly it was to them, their average guess was $113,000.
Not even close. We ran some projections based on the wage gap, typical asset allocation strategies, and a gender-specific salary curve. The true cost for the average woman at the time she retires may run two to seven times that amount. Depending on your salary and the market’s performance, the real cost of the investing gap over a 35-year career span could be more than $1 million. Yes, I said a million.”