The gender pay gap probably begins with that first piggy bank
We internalise the belief that money isn’t our business
To be clear. I am very much up for gender pay equality. The more revealing reports, the better. But there are other things needed too in the push for parity – salary differentials are the final stage of a filtering process that needs to be tackled long before that point.
What gets overlooked in the rush to tackle the tangible and easily measured bits of financial inequality is how differently men and women (or boys and girls) are brought up to consider the world of money.
My parents opened my first bank account for me when I was six. They put in five pounds and in return I got a green money box that sorted coins into their different categories as they rolled down the slope at the top. All being well, I saw how every tower of coins cupped in its respective semi-circular groove would rise to the top unhindered by the need for withdrawal.
If one lived within one’s means – which at this point meant nine pence every Thursday to keep up with Nurse Nancy’s tribulations in my weekly Twinkle comic and five pence-worth of cola bottles – one could deposit the towers at the bank in full, against the day when one no longer had any means at all.
The inaugural hit of dopamine to my preternaturally pessimistic juvenile system provided by this realisation has yet to be surpassed. I was reborn. And also, in ways I was not to appreciate for many years, unsexed. It sparked, you see, a strong and enduring interest in my finances and in money generally – what it could be used for, what could be done with it, how you could make more of it. My father, as pathological a saver as my mother but with more time on his hands to spell out nebulous concepts to his daughters, explained interest to me.
“If you give me a pound,” he said, “I will use it for a month as part of my money and then give it back to you with an extra 10p.” I did, and he did – a rate of return, incidentally, that I have never bettered.
But as my savings accrued, so did the disapproval. Not from my family, obviously, but from the world at large. Just like they weren’t supposed to be interested in football, physics or getting a decent job, girls weren’t supposed to be interested in money. Money, of course, is power.
The disparity between men and women’s relationship with money could be seen in the reactions to the end of child benefit for those earning over a certain substantial amount.
Among the relatively well-educated, high-earning (before they took maternity leave and/or became stayat-home mothers) and, we might assume, empowered women, two astonishing notes of panic were sounded. First, that child benefit was the only money that was “theirs” – their husbands’ income apparently conceptualised as something he doled out portions of to his wife and any children she had.
And second, that it was the only money they didn’t feel guilty about spending on coffee or wine with friends. I have not time nor patience to unpick all that is entangled in that little psychical ball. Suffice to say that it is not easy to envisage the same reaction from men.
We internalise the unspoken but pervasive belief that money is not really a women’s business. And of course there is a small part of the brain that we don’t talk about at feminist parties: a certain attraction to the idea that we won’t have to take full financial responsibility for ourselves because a knight on a fully-diversified portfolio will, eventually, save us.
Notwithstanding efforts on the part of websites such as Holly Mackay’s Boringmoney. co.uk to make matters more accessible to beginners (among whom women are disproportionately numbered), on the most part, those who might be expected to want to entice us to take an interest in financial matters… do not. Adverts for investment services are not designed to appeal to a wide demographic. They’re mostly men in kayaks, navigating rapids. I don’t know why kayaks are such a big thing in finance – is everyone invested in Big Paddle? – but they are.
The language used around the subject is equally alienating. As the campaign by Starling Bank, #Makemoneyequal, pointed out, 65 per cent of financial writing aimed at women defines them as “splurgers” – excessive spenders who need to “cut back on coffees” in order to “save for those Louboutins”.
Meanwhile, 70 per cent of articles on money in men’s magazines make it clear that financial success makes them more of a man. All these factors help impoverish women literally and metaphorically. We need access not just to money but the knowledge that tells us what can be done with it. The cost otherwise is too high.