Why women often feel embarrassed to talk about money

The co-founders of a new training course want to remove the “ick factor” many women have about discussing personal finance.

Women are socialised not to talk about money and will share about their sex lives and almost anything else before speaking of it, says gender equity strategist Angela Meyer.

With therapist Rachel Davies, she’s training women about money psychology via Hi Money and the new book Money Money Money.

“We really want more money in the hands of more women and part of that is actually talking about it,” Meyer tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning.

Meyer was doing some work for an Australian superannuation company when she realised how “terrible” the retirement savings gap was for women, and that too often “their lifetime of caring was rewarded by retiring into poverty”.

“For me, that was a real catalyst to really want to do something about my relationship with money because it had been very fraught.

“I knew how to budget. I could use a retirement income calculator, but something just wasn’t shifting for me. That was partly because of my money story and the way that I’d been brought up and what money meant to me in my life.

“I’d never even thought about having a relationship with money. I just was like, ‘Money’s over here, and maybe someday the Lotto gods will sweep in, and I will somehow be sorted,’ which actually is not that uncommon a feeling or an idea.

“We are told it’s really important for you to be independent, but no one really sits you down and talks to you about money.”

Women often feel embarrassed to talk about money, Davies guesses, because there’s something “not very feminine” about it.

“There’s a slight yuck. It’s a little bit gross to want to talk about money as a woman.”

Exploring her own harsh treatment of money itself was the catalyst for changing her relationship with it.

“I don’t respect it, I use it, I don’t look at it. I binge it, I purge it, I do all this crazy stuff that I’d never, ever do to a friend.

“For me, it wasn’t about budgeting or tools. It was like, ‘oh, I feel all sorts of ways about money’. And until I clear that up, I’m not going to want to look at a calculator.”

To get rid of the “ick factor” women feel about money discussion, we need to “socialise” the conversation, Meyer says.

“Money equals freedom, and it equals security and so many other things. And if we don’t talk about this stuff… then we don’t have the opportunity to experience those things.

“We really want more money in the hands of more women, and part of that is actually talking about it.”