Barbara Stewart & The Financial Lives of Girls and Women

Poring over spreadsheets on her laptop in a cozy neghbourhood café in Toronto, Cassandra Rizzotto plots the next step for her blooming green enterprise.

The 27-year-old entrepreneur (at left) has spent the past half-year launching a business focused on promoting community food systems and culture, facilitating workshops, and selling products at local farmer's markets.

There’s a lot of work to do: updated branding, securing a retail location, and figuring out how money plays into it all.

While she’s been handling her personal finances for some time, she says the bigger picture of business investments and financial management is fairly new to her. Even so, she says she feels comfortable handling financial matters, and enjoys pouring over spreadsheets.

“I’m really awesome with math,” she says, admitting she comes by her knack for arithmetic honestly. “My dad’s a calculus teacher.”

And, her financial confidence isn't uncommon among other women, either.

A new Canadian public opinion survey revealed that women are good with money and they know it – although they might not like to brag about it.

The study, titled The Financial Lives of Girls and Women, probed the role women play when it comes to financial planning. The findings maintain, not at all to our surprise, that women certainly know their stuff when it comes to their own finances.

“They may be talking to people but they ultimately make the decision themselves,” says Barbara Stewart, the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) of15 years, who commissioned the research.

“The number one statistic that came out, and was a bit shocking, was that even though women consult with their spouses or partners and they sometimes consult with their financial advisers, 89 per cent of the women surveyed said that the final financial decisions rest with them.”

The study also found 63 per cent of women are confident in their own financial planning and investment abilities, and only 51 per cent of women admit to consulting their significant other before making a financial decision.

Survey interviews showed that women prefer to focus their learning on the core issues of money management, and like to let an adviser handle the “fine details.”

Rizzotto owes her fortitude to her ability to ask for help when it's needed. No pride about that. Additionally, she’s also not afraid to take risks.

“My overarching philosophy is to be diligent and frugal when it comes to spending,” she says. “You need to feel confident about investing in big purchases. Big gains require big risks. And making informed and intuitive decisions when it comes to finances and investments is important.”

Over the years the household money management equation has been inverted, with women now playing the leading role. The landscape was completely different, and to some extent old stereotypes die hard. 

“There's a lot of negative stuff out there and it just doesn't seem to match my reality of dealing with women,” Stewart (at right) says. “That why I decided to do a survey that would be based on their behaviours around money rather than what they’re just saying they do.”

Laurie Campbell, executive director of Credit Canada, thinks back to when her father would come home from work and provide her mother with the money for various expenses. In 2010, Daddy no longer does all of the doling. As more women moved into the workforce it became less and less common for men to hold the financial reins.

“Whether that was the complete reality or not is hard to know,” says Campbell. “If you look at old television shows, it definitely was the message, that the men were out their making the bacon and the wives got an allowance to cover groceries and some expenses.”

Although women have come a long way, they still might have a long ways to go when it comes to having an equal footing in the business world. In 2006 only ten women were running Fortune 500 companies.

In some research, when negative stereotypes about gender were brought up, some findings showed that women chose to manage money with a tight and wary fist, forgoing lucrative opportunities to avoid risks and losses.

Training the next generation of women in how to handle their finances is now powerful theme among Canadians. And, role models are extremely important in financial literacy, according to Campbell.

“Women learned about money by observing the people around them,” she says. “Their dad, their grandparents, would pass along these messages. And those messages, if they’re strong can stick with you for the rest of your life.”

Drew Penner
		About the author:
		Drew Penner is a thinker, a cyclist, a Journalism graduate, and ladies man. He is perfectly peculiar, but charming nonetheless.  Born in Taiwan, he is partial to drum & bass, unconventional humour, and very deep breathing. He likes music, art, culture and fashion, but swears to high heavens that he aint no hipster. Like a menstrual cycle, he only pops into the office about once a month, and the rest of the time you can find him out and about, wandering, wondering, writing for the masses. He contributes to WOMAN.ca, thinkCONTRA, and maintains an online stream of consciousness called www.urbandynamix.com.
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