Women Saving Better for Retirement Than Men, Survey Finds

Women in the U.S. may be doing a better job saving for retirement than men, according to an industry report released Friday.

“It’s a misconception that women aren’t preparing properly for their retirement,” said Tracey Curvey, a marketing vice president at Fidelity Institutional Retirement Services Co., a unit of mutual fund giant Fidelity Investments.

While a larger percentage of men already have more than $50,000 set aside in their 401(k) retirement plans, women are more likely to be taking other retirement-planning steps, said Curvey, citing a recent survey prepared for Fidelity.

Women, for instance, more frequently contribute to individual retirement accounts, according to the survey by Chicago-based Richard Day Research. The survey included an analysis of the investing habits of 504 adults who have participated in their 401(k) plans for an average of more than nine years.

The findings come against a societal backdrop in which women live longer and are often the ones in charge of the household finances, especially these days when so many households are headed by females.

The U.S. mutual fund industry is recognizing the importance of women as part of the investment decision-making process, “but I don’t know if we as an industry have figured out how to make women full partners in the process,” said Geoff Bobroff, an industry consultant in East Greenwich, R.I.

That is changing as more women participate in the work force, and it is causing the industry to look at the services and products they offer from more than one angle, he said.

“It’s been an evolutionary process that began at the start of the 1990s,” Bobroff said.

OppenheimerFunds Inc. has been one of the more aggressive mutual fund companies in courting women investors. In 1992, the New York-based firm found that just 12% of women were responsible for making the financial decisions in their households.

Based on that research, OppenheimerFunds developed a program to educate women on the need to invest, particularly when it comes to planning for retirement, said Jane Ingalls, a company spokeswoman. The educational program that OppenheimerFunds designed includes brochures and seminars for women.

OppenheimerFunds plans to release the results of an updated survey to see how women’s investment patterns and attitudes have changed over the last five years, Ingalls said.

“The new research shows that women are significantly more interested in investing,” Ingalls said.

The U.S. 401(k) retirement plan market is already big, with assets of about $810 billion at the end of 1996, according to Spectrum Group/Access Research of Windsor, Conn. The assets of 401(k) plans have been growing at 18% a year since 1986.

Assets in traditional plans, in which companies guarantee a fixed pension on retirement, had $1.685 trillion as of the end of last year, but an annual growth rate of 8.4%, according to Spectrum.

The Fidelity survey found that men and women share similar investing styles when it comes to allocating assets in their retirement plans.

In general, men and women put similar percentages of their assets in stock and bond mutual funds, and an equal percentage of men and women--about 35%--said they recently increased the number of stock funds in their 401(k)s, according to the Richard Day Research report.

The survey also found some evidence that a higher percentage of men than women have recently shifted a portion of their retirement assets to low-risk money-market and bond funds, Curvey said.

“It’s clear from these statistics that another misnomer about women is that they aren’t as aggressive when it comes to investing,” Curvey said.