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Elizabeth Renzetti is a journalist and novelist based in Toronto whose latest book is What She Said: Conversations About Equality, from which this essay has been adapted.
When my kids were small, I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about my financial future, possibly because I was more consumed with questions such as “Can they get scurvy from eating chicken nuggets four nights in a row?” My husband and I were a team, and if that meant I was a utility player warming the bench while he led the batting order, well, that was just the trade-off that made the household run like a championship outfit. (Spoiler alert: We did not run like a championship outlet. We were more Bad News Bears than New York Yankees.)
Except it wasn’t just our household; it was thousands of households, maybe millions, where similar trade-offs were made. This relationship between the specific and the universal became clear to me only when I read Claudia Goldin’s book Career and Family, which contains much of the research that won her a Nobel Prize in economics in 2023. I found my own life story in its pages.
Much of Dr. Goldin’s research concerns the divergence between college-educated men and women, who start out earning roughly the same amount after graduation, only to have their earnings trajectories split once they have children. The culprit, Dr. Goldin says, is partly “greedy work.” That is, in a heterosexual partnership with children, one person is free to take on the demanding job that requires overtime, or be on call all the time, or do the after-hours wooing of clients. The other person is on call for the kids, or the aging parents. And who is the one who is more often on call for family duty? Hello, gender norms! Nice to hear from you again.
As Dr. Goldin writes, “The good news? It isn’t you, it’s the system. The bad news? It isn’t you, it’s the system. Even a woman who is getting a salary that could be verified as ‘fair and unbiased’ may still earn less than a comparable man in the same profession if she is unable to put in the longer hours or be on call because of the constraints of family and children.”
My husband, Globe and Mail journalist Doug Saunders, received a pay bonus as a foreign correspondent for being available to fly off to cover a natural disaster or assassination at a moment’s notice. Two people with children cannot both have that luxury, unless Mary Poppins is on speed dial. I dropped my hours to part-time. When Doug was home, he gave 100 per cent to our little team. He could not have been more committed to family life. The problem was that his greedy work was a very jealous rival.
Many men do step up when they’re at home, of course. But they also benefit, at least monetarily, from our world of greedy work. Dr. Goldin points out that while employers are allowed to exploit some workers and maintain inflexible labour policies, these earning gaps will remain. And while it might be difficult, nothing will change until those who gain most from the system ask for changes. “We need men to lean out at work,” she writes, and to “support their male colleagues on parental leave, vote for public policies that subsidize childcare, and get their firms to change their greedy ways by letting them know their families are worth even more than their jobs.”
A few years ago, I sat with my friend Christine, indulging in our favourite pastime: complaining about our families and worrying about money. When we became friends in our 30s, we discovered that we’d both spent our teenage years living in an infamous cluster of high-rises in downtown Toronto. It was the only place her immigrant parents could afford to live, and the only place my mother could afford, once she’d escaped her marriage. There were cockroaches everywhere in our apartment: in the pipes and the wires and the closets. I used to dream sometimes that they were in my hair.
“This is what I do when I’m thinking about spending money I shouldn’t,” Christine said. “I picture myself at 80, and I’m stealing money from her. I’m literally mugging this little old lady.”
“Future-you?”
“I’m robbing future-me. And future-me is really pissed that present-me squandered all that cash.”
What is money good for? Ensuring we don’t live out our old age in penury, for one thing. Christine and I had similar trajectories, quite apart from living in roachville: We both took time away from our careers to have children. When her kids were small, Christine opted for the flexibility of contract work. I went part-time at my newspaper job. I had a choice between cutting my hours or having my head explode. Since I couldn’t make bake-sale cookies with a semi-intact head, I chose to go part-time. But it meant that my income, and my pension, would be substantially less than my husband’s.
This is where the personal meets the systemic, once again. Women around the world retire with 75 per cent of the wealth accumulated by men at retirement, according to a 2022 report from the financial-services company WTW and the World Economic Forum. Canada’s gender pension gap is 18 per cent, versus nearly 22 per cent across all OECD economies.
There is a reason that so many of us fear for the future, making grim jokes about how we’re going to end up living together, and huddling, like broke-ass Golden Girls, around the radiant heat of the stove. Humour is a shield against pain.
In early 2023, it seemed like everyone I knew was talking about a bleak article written by journalist Moira Welsh in the Toronto Star about senior women skidding into poverty. “After raising children and working lower-paying jobs with no private pensions, women in their senior years have a statistically higher risk of poverty than men,” she wrote. The women she interviewed had done everything “right” – they’d worked and raised families, and yet in the years when they should have been relaxing with their feet up, they were instead terrified they’d be evicted because they couldn’t pay their rent.
You can make all the right moves and still end up with no properties at the end of the game. It’s not you; it’s the way the game’s designed. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2022 estimates that we only have another 132 years to reach gender parity. While the WEF measures criteria from health to education, it also notes that the problem of money isn’t just one of income, but wealth accumulation, investment and pensions: “As women are under-represented in higher-paid positions, the amount they can direct toward savings and investments, and the corresponding earning-based contributions to wealth, is often lower than that of men. In addition, specific life events related to care responsibilities, part-time work and career breaks affect women disproportionately compared to men, as they lower the rate of workforce participation and/or time spent in employment.”
In Financial Feminist, Tori Dunlap states that every single female client she’s ever advised has expressed fear about investing their money. Every single one! That’s a lot of dough collecting dust in savings accounts (I would know; I’m one of those scaredy-cats). Ms. Dunlap writes, “That’s a HUGE problem, because the investing gap leads to a wealth gap, costing us not only millions over the course of our lifetimes, but also limiting our options and lifestyle choices, including the ability to stop working one day.”
The reasons for this reluctance are complex, as she points out, and some are rooted in the expectations that hound women from Day 1. It’s okay to want money to put in your children’s college fund, for example, but not to want money for yourself as a bridge to a better future. But quite apart from that, the world of investing and financial literacy has been designed for years to shut women out. As Ms. Dunlap puts it, “Financial advice – but especially investing advice – is gatekept by straight white dudes.” In a headline-grabbing report from 2022, the British financial-advice company Boring Money said that women in Britain were missing out on investments equal to the GDP of Switzerland. (The GDP of Switzerland is US$800-billion, for those of you who are not Jeopardy! champions.) There were three million fewer women than men holding private pensions or investments in Britain.
A slightly less flashy but equally fascinating report from the financial-services company BNY Mellon came to similar conclusions – and backed up Ms. Dunlap’s observations about who gets good financial advice. Eighty-six per cent of the money managers in the report admitted that their default client, the person they thought about when preparing advice, was a man. They agreed that having more women asset managers would help, but half of them had fewer than 10 per cent female analysts or advisers on their teams.
If the GDP-of-Switzerland number seems wild, BNY Mellon pegged the investment gap even higher: Women could potentially add US$3-trillion to global investments. And if this seems like pumping air into the lungs of an exploitative economic system, the report points out that this could be a good thing for the planet – women are more likely than men to want investments that are environmentally useful and socially progressive.
In 2017, when three Danish women wanted to start Female Invest, a financial-advice website aimed at women, they found little financial support for the idea. People who could have lent them money “didn’t believe women were interested in investing,” one of the founders, Anna-Sophie Hartvigsen, told the Financial Times. “More and more women understand that money is not about buying more stuff, it’s about buying freedom and living life on your terms.”
Freedom for each of us individually is wonderful, but we don’t, thankfully, live in an Ayn Rand novel. We are in it not just for ourselves, but for each other. We know that women, when investing, look for returns beyond the financial; they want to support causes and companies that improve the health of the planet and the people on it. What’s the use of capital if you can’t make someone else’s life a little richer along the way?