CASH CRISIS
Laura Thompson discusses her own experience of the gender pay gap, and why finance is still a feminist issue
Why finance is still a feminist issue
Some years ago, when I was writing a long article for a now-defunct magazine, I did that thing one is supposed to do and asked for more money. I had good reason: my then-boyfriend had written a comparable piece for the same publication and been better paid for it. Nevertheless, my request was turned down by the (male) editor. There was a carefully explained logic behind the refusal, but I think that if my boyfriend had been the one doing the asking, he would have got the raise. And even if he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have felt such an idiot.
A couple of years after this, my father died, and I was advised to invest some of my legacy. I was told to do things that I didn’t really understand but felt must assuredly be sound and sensible. As a result, I lost quite a chunk of money (about which I try not to think too much), and in a panic, extricated the rest and put it in the sanctuary of my bank, where it earned not much more interest than it would have done beneath the floorboards, but at least couldn’t evaporate into the financial exosphere.
I don’t blame the male adviser who told me (wrongly) how to invest it; I do regret having been advised, by another man, to take the advice. Would they have behaved differently had I, too, been a man? As with the male magazine editor, it is hard to know. They were certainly very insistent in their opinions and laughed with relaxed dismissiveness when I expressed my concerns; but knowing me, as I then was, I would have allowed them to act that way. In the end, I can only blame myself for having been too embarrassed, too idiotically compliant, to tell them to keep their paws off my legacy until I knew exactly what I should be doing with it.
A confession: I have a degree from Oxford and have written nine books, but I am truly, madly, horribly clueless about money. Its workings and machinations operate for me in a metaphorical pea-souper. I know what stocks and shares and bonds and pensions are, but in some fundamental way I don’t understand them. Indeed, the only financial transactions I understand are the ones that take place in William Hill, but even there I keep things concrete: me, horse, win, lose. Just to think of arcane variants such as spread betting is to induce that virus-like fear of money drifting away, spiralling out of reach, as it did once before.
Because of what happened, all I now care about is having as much control as possible over whatever money I still possess. And because I have so little faith in financial advice, and so weak a grasp of it, this means that it stays put, doing almost nothing, like a hibernating animal.
Am I unduly stupid in such matters? Is it because I went to stage school and was never taught maths properly? I always assumed so, but apparently it is not just me. For every Helena Morrissey, there are thousands of women who should have more money than they actually do, who have been badly advised, incomprehensibly advised, not advised at all or bested by their ex-husband’s clever lawyer. Finances, it turns out, are a feminist issue.
Of course, we know about the pay gap, of which I was an extremely minor victim. But the problem is both bigger and vaguer than that, and to me it is symbolised by the meetings I had with that bluff, charming, financial adviser. He reminded me somehow of my equally pleasant male gynaecologist who told me to have a major operation, oh yes, I had to do that, while, when I sought a second opinion, my next doctor – a woman – simply put me on the Pill and saved me untold misery.
Might the female equivalent of my financial adviser have done the same thing? Might she have spoken a different language, plainer to me; might I, indeed, have been different with her, more inclined to say what I really thought?
I did also wonder if this could be a question of age. My mother freely admits to knowing even less about money than I do, for the simple reason that my father handled everything. By that token, surely a millennial would be more clued–up than a Generation X-er like me?
Again, it appears not. There is no evidence that young women as a group – obviously there are exceptions – are building up pensions or making sensible investments; one might say that surplus income with which to be savvy is pretty scarce these days, but that is all the more reason why good counsel is needed.
How useful, if a down-to-earth adviser were to instruct every school pupil in the rudiments of financial management! I only wish that somebody would give me that instruction now. Because as things are, and feminist principles notwithstanding, I sometimes find myself yearning for the kind of man that my mother married, as quite a few of my friends have done: one who ‘deals with it all for me’. It is an answer of sorts; but not really the right one.
A confession: I have a degree from Oxford but I am truly, madly, horribly clueless about money