Financial Empowerment for Women – Strategies for Closing the Gender Wealth Gap
Financial empowerment empowers women to navigate the economic environment, make informed financial decisions, protect their wealth and build resilience. Now is the time for organisations to support women on their path toward financial empowerment.
Step one of accessing basic financial tools should include providing access to an account, phone and cash-in cash-out (CICO) services.
1. Build a Savings Plan
Women tend to struggle when it comes to saving. Their earnings tend to be lower, they face greater costs for childcare and may miss work due to caring responsibilities resulting in reduced retirement savings and Social Security benefits.
Financial empowerment gives women the power to make informed decisions regarding how they spend and invest their income, creating a stronger financial safety net for herself and her family. Empowerment can serve as an engine of economic growth and inclusion while helping address some of the root causes of poverty worldwide.
There are various approaches to creating a savings plan, including setting specific goals and working with an advisor. Your long-term goals might range from paying off your mortgage early or setting aside an emergency fund; setting an achievable timeline helps maintain motivation while making sure your goal will be reached by its intended date.
2. Develop a Budget
Women tend to struggle more with setting financial goals and understanding long-term savings strategies and retirement planning than their male counterparts do, yet providing clear, targeted communications can ease money worries and anxiety.
Strategic philanthropy that prioritizes initiatives with high return-on-investment can be transformative. For instance, programmes that directly increase women’s earnings and financial independence have proven to have 20 times higher return than typical corporate donations – this type of giving transforms aid into investments which foster economic growth and wealth creation.
3. Create a Savings Goal
Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that women generally accumulate less wealth than men, creating the gender wealth gap. Unfortunately, however, this distinction can be hard to accurately measure since data collection often mixes marital status and wealth accumulation together and because assets such as investments, emergency savings accounts, debt obligations, inheritances or retirement accounts tend to be reported by household heads rather than individual homeowners.
Financial literacy is key to closing the gender gap, including providing women with education on different types of assets and helping them create savings goals that match up with their individual financial needs.
Resilience building for women involves helping them save in emergency situations and develop their own sources of income (through small businesses or entrepreneurship). By doing this, they will take advantage of more financial empowerment benefits – greater opportunities in career selection, larger safety net against unexpected health costs or financial shocks and enhanced economic growth.
4. Create a Financial Plan for Retirement
Closing the gender pay gap requires an integrated strategy. Women need education and support throughout their career – from building the necessary foundations early to making sure savings account for individual circumstances in retirement planning. Resources including mentoring relationships as well as financial tools must also be accessible for women to help close this chasm.
As well as expanding their financial literacy, it is also crucial that women address any confidence deficits which might impede them from using their skills. Many barriers to financial empowerment arise due to social norms; therefore, collaboration with local stakeholders and communities to address them effectively is crucial.
Reducing tax distortions that penalize working women by forcing them to pay higher income taxes than men will encourage more women to work and reduce inequality in household income. Also, closing the credit gap will enable women to invest in their own businesses and secure the future for themselves and their families.