“Women Need Confidence” Is Financial Advice’s Eat-Less-Move-More
I'm sorry to tell you, but my industry didn't discover women. It discovered their money.
Look. We've known the math on the Great Wealth Transfer for over a decade. The demographics were never some secret—an aging population, longer female life expectancy, a very predictable handoff of assets. And for most of that decade, my industry had almost nothing to say to the women on the receiving end of it.
And it's not just money moving from one generation to the next. Women are out-earning their own mothers by margins that didn't exist a generation ago—negotiating comp packages, building equity, running P&Ls, becoming the primary or co-primary earner in more households every year. That's not inheritance. That's money she built herself. My industry has been just as slow to notice that as it's been to notice the transfer.
Now that the wealth-transfer number has a comma in the trillions and a big bunch of headlines attached, suddenly there are summits. Panels. Webinars titled “Empowering Her Financial Future.” Collateral coming out of the big broker-dealers. Training programs. It's almost comical. Funny how the outreach arrived exactly when the cash register started ringing—on both sides of the ledger, the money she's inheriting and the money she's earning.
Call me cynical. This is not true concern. I think that's an industry finally doing the math it should have done years ago—and honestly, it's a little insulting, as a woman, that it took this long, on either count.
And when the industry did show up, it brought its favorite explanation with it: women aren't engaged because they lack confidence. So give her data. Tell her to lean in. Ask her to try harder. Hand her a brochure explaining how she can do her money better if she just did XYZ.
That explanation is a trope, and I'm here to dismantle it. In years of working with women managing real complexity—running companies, raising families, carrying households, negotiating their own compensation—I have never once met one who was incapable of understanding her own money. I've met plenty who were never given the chance to practice it, whether the money came from a career or an inheritance.
There's an uncomfortable parallel that's been happening in medicine for decades. Clinical research defaulted to the male body—trials, dosing, entire studies built around men—and women were excluded by policy until 1993, then underrepresented well past that. The lesson isn't that women's health is more complicated. It's that a whole apparatus, built by rooms mainly populated by men, was designed around a default that was not attuned to women—and nobody corrected it until the harm got too obvious, or the dollars on the table got too big to ignore.
Something similar is happening with money advice right now, and there's a cultural moment that makes the pattern easy to see: GLP-1s. For years, the standard line on weight loss was eat less, move more. A willpower story. Put your shoulder into it. If it didn't work, you weren't trying hard enough. Then a drug came along that worked by addressing an actual mechanism in the body, and it turned out “try harder” was never the right diagnosis for a lot of people. It was just the pat answer—the cheapest one to hand out.
“Build more confidence” is the eat-less-move-more of financial advice. It's not that unsureness isn't real. It's that unsureness was never the mechanism.
Here's what the mechanism actually looks like from where I sit. It breaks down into three pieces, and it plays out the same way whether a woman is inheriting the money or she's the one who made it.
- She was rarely present with the financial advisor when real decisions got made. Not asked onto the call. Not looped into the estate conversation. Handed the passwords only on the day she needed all of them at once. And this happens even to women who are the higher earner in the relationship—the financial planning conversation defaults to whoever's always had it, not to whoever's actually generating the income.
- Even when they could have looked closer, a lot of women made a different, entirely rational trade. Not looking meant one less front to manage, in a life already running on too many fronts, with a full load of invisible household labor already built in—on top of a demanding career, for the women earning it themselves. That wasn't passivity. That was the deal a lot of us make—keep the machine of life running, keep relationships steady, keep the plate from getting any fuller. And it works. Until it doesn't.
- By the time a crisis arrives—a death, a divorce, a diagnosis, or just the day she finally sits down to look hard at what’s happening with her money—what's missing isn't information. It's practice. Nobody omits you from real financial decisions to make under low stakes for twenty years, and then gets to act surprised when the first one, made under grief or pressure or loss, doesn't go smoothly. And nobody should blame a woman for walking away from an advisor who worked with her husband for thirty years, either. She never actually knew that advisor. That relationship was never hers.
None of this is a character flaw. And none of it needed a decade-old wealth transfer number, or a bigger paycheck, to become urgent. It was always urgent. My industry just wasn't looking until it was profitable to.
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