Mutual Fund Industry Recognizing Gender Gap : Investing: Financial-services group, with the view that women have different outlooks, offer investment seminars.
In the game of mutual-fund investing, questions of gender seldom come up.
After all, the numbers in the quarterly statements and performance tables tell exactly the same story whether an investor is male or female. Access to a wide variety of funds is, without question, open to anyone of either sex whose money is the proper shade of green.
But in the eyes of fund executive Bridget Macaskill, all this misses some important issues about women as managers of their own and their families’ money.
“A woman’s investment dollar is just as valuable as a man’s investment dollar,” says Macaskill, president and chief operating officer of Oppenheimer Management Corp., adviser to a $26-billion family of more than 50 funds. “But neither the financial services industry nor women themselves have focused much attention on women’s potential as investors.”
Even in the mid-1990s, she says, many women still lack the knowledge and sense of self-determination to take charge of their personal finances.
“We see many women, particularly middle-age and older, who have not a single idea of how to go about managing their finances,” Macaskill said in an interview in her World Trade Center office.
“There is a growing awareness that this is something they’ve really got to take control of.”
In the past couple of years, Macaskill and other Oppenheimer officials have conducted hundreds of investment seminars for women around the country, as part of a “Women & Investing” campaign.
“It’s a very tough message that you sometimes have to deliver,” she says, especially in cases where women need to learn “the cost of delaying making decisions.”
In retirement planning, she says, a good many women “don’t save enough, they don’t set up retirement plans soon enough, and when they do they are so conservative they tend to underinvest in equities.”
But if women in general need to get better informed, she says, most aren’t reluctant to admit it. At the seminars she has held, she says, “the turnout has been incredible.”
“Women will ask for help,” she says. “It’s a stereotypical response, but it happens. Somehow it is not demeaning to us to ask for help.
“There is a real fundamental difference in the way men and women approach financial decisions. Men tend to say ‘I make the decisions.’ Women tend to ask ‘How do I know whom to trust?’ ”
The whole subject of comparing and contrasting sexes, she acknowledges, can be touchy. In an era when financial books, products and services aimed at women are proliferating, it’s not always easy to distinguish genuine concern and idealism from opportunistic marketing ploys.
“When we started this whole thing, we had a lot of internal debate,” Macaskill says.
“In terms of investment solutions, there isn’t a difference. You don’t need separate funds for women. But there are differences. Women go about this process differently.”
Macaskill says she has talked with a good many financial advisers in the business of selling fund shares who acknowledge that they “don’t know how to go about talking to women.”
“They need to address women’s concerns,” she says. “They need to approach women differently, not because of any discriminatory thing, but because, even if you have identical financial situations, in some cases it is very appropriate to give men and women very different advice.”
For instance, she says, many women are much warier than men of trusting financial advisers, especially on the telephone. Where men often are interested in financial products, she adds, women tend to focus more on goals and overall plans.
Above all, Macaskill urges women to “have the courage to get started.”
At the seminars she holds, Macaskill says, “the age range is from the early 20s to 70 and 80. It’s in the early 20s age group where that knight-in-shining-armor image, the idea that someone else is going to take care of all this, seems to be dissolving. They are not going to leave it to somebody else.”
