LAURA DU PREEZ: Imagine how much better we would be with money on equal pay
Loading player...
While Women’s Day — or women’s month as it has become — is supposed to be a celebration of women, the articles and speeches about women and their finances seldom celebrate anything.
Instead they tell us the depressing things we already know — that we earn less and pay the price of staying at home to look after children and living longer.
While looking after children and living longer are blessings, financially they are not and together with lower pay leave us feeling helpless.
But we should celebrate the fact that as women, despite the odds against us, we may actually be doing better than men when it comes to managing our money.
The 2020 Old Mutual Savings and Investment Monitor shows that we’ve scored better on coping mechanisms when our finances are tight. It shows fewer women have done any of these not-so-great things with their money:
Borrowed from friends and family;Fallen behind on household bills;Fallen behind on credit card payments;Fallen behind on stokvel savings;Had to borrow from stokvels;Fallen behind on home loan payments;Cashed in savings; orTaken out a personal loan or loan from an employer.
The only place where we are marginally worse than men, it seems, is on managing store card payments.
With these stronger money habits, we would be at an advantage if we enjoyed greater protection during child-bearing years and gender equal pay.
This year an article on the price we pay for motherhood in the Financial Times has a coronavirus twist. Women’s finances have been more severely affected by the lockdowns as mothers are more likely than fathers to have moved out of paid work by reducing their hours or resigning to look after children, the paper says quoting research done by the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UCL Institute for Education.
The research found women were 47% more likely to have lost their jobs and 14% more likely to have been put on unpaid leave than men.
The institutes also found that children meant women were only able to do an hour of uninterrupted work for every three that men did.
When it comes to the gender pay gap, the Financial Times, in a different article, quotes the World Economic Forum as saying women around the world had another two centuries to wait for the global gender pay gap to close fully.
The WEF says across the world, women’s average annual ...
Instead they tell us the depressing things we already know — that we earn less and pay the price of staying at home to look after children and living longer.
While looking after children and living longer are blessings, financially they are not and together with lower pay leave us feeling helpless.
But we should celebrate the fact that as women, despite the odds against us, we may actually be doing better than men when it comes to managing our money.
The 2020 Old Mutual Savings and Investment Monitor shows that we’ve scored better on coping mechanisms when our finances are tight. It shows fewer women have done any of these not-so-great things with their money:
Borrowed from friends and family;Fallen behind on household bills;Fallen behind on credit card payments;Fallen behind on stokvel savings;Had to borrow from stokvels;Fallen behind on home loan payments;Cashed in savings; orTaken out a personal loan or loan from an employer.
The only place where we are marginally worse than men, it seems, is on managing store card payments.
With these stronger money habits, we would be at an advantage if we enjoyed greater protection during child-bearing years and gender equal pay.
This year an article on the price we pay for motherhood in the Financial Times has a coronavirus twist. Women’s finances have been more severely affected by the lockdowns as mothers are more likely than fathers to have moved out of paid work by reducing their hours or resigning to look after children, the paper says quoting research done by the UK’s Institute for Fiscal Studies and the UCL Institute for Education.
The research found women were 47% more likely to have lost their jobs and 14% more likely to have been put on unpaid leave than men.
The institutes also found that children meant women were only able to do an hour of uninterrupted work for every three that men did.
When it comes to the gender pay gap, the Financial Times, in a different article, quotes the World Economic Forum as saying women around the world had another two centuries to wait for the global gender pay gap to close fully.
The WEF says across the world, women’s average annual ...
