Investing in women

A recent gathering of a group called Women in Super looked at findings from a Financial Markets Authority survey that showed men tend to know more about investing than women and are more confident at it. Women tend to avoid varied and risky investments compared with men, and tend to have less money over time as a result, research shows. This week on Your Money with Mary Holm, she discusses the findings from the Financial Markets Authority and others, which was explored at a recent gathering of a group called Women in Super. Mary says the FMA - which she is on the board of - is concerned that women are not involved enough in investing. She says research has found a wide variety of ways men are more involved in investing than women. "Men are more likely to read the annual statement, to have compared their scheme with other schemes, to have checked whether they're on track to meet their retirement savings goals," she says. "Men are also more inclined to be investing in shares, more inclined to be in a lot of different investments whereas women are in cash. "Men were more knowledgeable and more confident about investing, they knew how to use investor materials more than the women did, they knew what the FMA is." She says even simple things like that have an impact. "It doesn't really matter if people don't know what the FMA is, but it is good if people know there is some government body there doing work that enables us to be more confident." She says that by the end of a person's life that's equivalent to tens of thousands of dollars, and while "men do trade more often than is good for them", it's also true that risk pays off. She says simply sticking to more conservative Kiwisaver fund schemes, for example, has a big impact. "In Kiwisaver, there are actually slightly more women than men, but they're much more likely to be in the low-risk funds, much less likely to be in growth or aggressive funds, which is where the men are. "Largely as a result of that, some ANZ research found that women's balances were 28 percent lower than men's." No caption"Sometimes women can quite often end up doing better but they don't take enough risk.""Women want to be more certain about their money but the price of that is that they're missing out on potential growth and they're not getting as much protection from inflation. "If they're investing in lower-risk funds then inflation is more likely to eat a fairly big hole in their returns." …Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details