Harness the Power of the Purse: Winning Women Investors. Andrea Turner Moffitt

Jacki Zehner, who is CEO of Women Moving Millions, a network of philanthropists dedicated to improving the lives of girls and women worldwide. “They want to provide for their family but also be in the service of others.”

      Women, much more so than men, we find, want to invest according to their values: in the US and UK, we uncovered significant discrepancies between men’s and women’s desire to improve gender equality, education, and the environment by funneling resources into impact-investing and philanthropy. Ultimately they wish to grow their money in such a way as to further, rather than undermine, their goals around promoting social good. As Zehner puts it, “Why would I give five percent to specific causes if the other ninety-five percent is creating the problems I’m trying to solve for? I’m not about to enable a power structure I fundamentally don’t believe in.”

      Women in Asia are even keener than American and European women to do good with their money. Stunning majorities of women in China (97%) and India (96%) want to invest in organizations that promote social good, as compared to 82% of women in the UK and 76% of women in the US. Even more notably, Asian men are as likely as Asian women to invest in fighting poverty, addressing gender inequality, improving education and social services, and improving the environment.

      Figure 3.3

      I want to invest in organizations that promote social well-being

      (Men vs women)

      This is why harnessing women’s investment power is so important: invested assets will not only grow advisor portfolios and wealth management firms, they will also accelerate progress in education, health, gender and racial equality, environmental protection, and a host of other worthy causes. When women fully leverage their wealth, everybody wins.

      Yet only a tiny portion of the purse’s power is being tapped. As we’ll see in Chapter 4, of the 31% of US women investors who want to invest in gender equality, for example, only eight percent actually do; of the 35% who are determined to make a positive difference in the environment, 21% succeed in investing in environmentally responsible assets; and of the 28% of women who want to invest in health, a mere nine percent do so. Advisors lose out, but so too does society at large.

      There’s an incredible opportunity here, then, for advisors who can furnish women with products that speak to values and strategies that achieve their life goals. “I think there’s a real desire to connect the values piece,” Jacki Zehner says. “More and more I think people want to align their personal and philanthropic values with investing but don’t know how to do that—and the marketplace hasn’t shown them how to do it.”

      DIVERSITY MATTERS

      One of the values that women across markets want their wealth to promote is greater workplace diversity, particularly in the top tiers of management. Fully 77% of women we surveyed in the global sample said they wanted to invest in companies whose leadership is diverse. This is a particularly important value for women in Asia, as 93% of Indian women, 94% of Chinese women, 88% of women in Singapore, and 83% of women in Hong Kong affirm. Interestingly, in those countries the percentages of men who put a premium on diversity are just as high.

      Figure 3.4

      Investors who want to invest in organizations with diversity in leadership

      (Men vs women)