Men, Women, and Money: Why Every Client's Financial Story Is Their Own

Behavioral Intelligence Brief
Written by Marla Sofer

Most wealth firms segment their audiences by what is easy to see: age, assets, life stage, and often gender. The thinking behind it is reasonable. If people of different genders tend, on average, to experience money differently, then messaging, content, and advisor conversations should reflect that.

The research supports part of that thinking and complicates the rest. There are measurable differences in the averages, and there is also a great deal of overlap, which means a segment built on gender describes a group better than it describes the person across the table. For a firm that wants to understand its prospects and clients well, that distinction matters.

What the Research Shows on Average

Several well-known studies point to differences in how men and women, on average, approach money.

In a study of more than 35,000 brokerage households from 1991 to 1997, economists Brad Barber and Terrance Odean found that men traded 45% more than women, and that trading reduced net returns for both groups, by 2.65 percentage points a year for men and 1.72 for women. Experiments show a related pattern. Gary Charness and Uri Gneezy pooled studies that used one simple investment game and found that women invested less than men on average.

Surveys on feelings about money also show gaps:

  • In the 2018 National Financial Capability Study, covering 27,091 U.S. adults aged 21 to 62, 65% of women and 56% of men reported financial anxiety. For financial stress, the figures were 54% and 44% (GFLEC and FINRA Foundation, 2021).

  • In Northwestern Mutual's 2023 Planning & Progress Study of 2,740 adults, 59% of men and 43% of women said they feel financially secure. 61% of men and 44% of women expected to be financially prepared for retirement.

  • In a January 2026 NerdWallet survey conducted by The Harris Poll, 65% of men and 46% of women said they could financially cope with an income loss in 2026. The article does not report the sample size.

  • In Fidelity's 2024 Women & Investing Study of 3,012 adults, 18% of men and 32% of women described their investing knowledge as "non-existent."

These are the kinds of numbers a segmentation model would pick up. They are also where it would stop.

Behind the Averages Are Individuals

Every one of those findings describes an average, and every one leaves a large share of people on the other side of it.

Look at the anxiety data again. 65% of women reported financial anxiety, and so did 56% of men. Most people in both groups feel the same way. In the Northwestern Mutual data, 43% of women feel financially secure, and 41% of men do not. In the Fidelity study, roughly two thirds of women did not describe their knowledge as non-existent, and 71% of the women surveyed own stock market investments.

Economist Julie Nelson, writing in the Journal of Economic Methodology in 2014, went further. She reviewed 18 published economics studies on gender and risk aversion and reported that only 4 found differences above a Cohen's d of 0.50, and only 1 exceeded 1.0. The overlap between men's and women's results, she wrote, is considerable, with similarity indexes mostly between 0.80 and 0.96. She argued that stereotyping and confirmation bias can lead researchers, and readers, to overstate what the data shows.

That view is contested. Charness and Gneezy describe their findings as very consistent. But their own data shows that the size of the gap varies widely: in one dataset in their working paper, men averaged about 60.6 versus 40.3 for women. In others, the gap was about 3 to 6 points. In a study of villagers in Tanzania and India, the averages were essentially equal.

Context matters too. Rachel Croson and Uri Gneezy, reviewing economic experiments, describe gender differences in risk preferences as relatively consistent. They also report that the differences are smaller among managers and professionals than in the general population, "and often nonexistent," and that the gap is significantly attenuated when financial knowledge is taken into account. Wealth firms mostly work with people who are not an average sample of the general population.

Feelings Often Reflect Circumstances

It would be a mistake to read these survey gaps as differences in temperament. Several of the sources point toward circumstances.

Bucher-Koenen and her coauthors note that women live longer on average and are more likely to spend time in widowhood, which is part of why financial preparation matters so much for them. The NerdWallet article lists wage gaps among the factors that may explain why women report less confidence about weathering a setback. In other words, a person who feels less financially secure may be responding accurately to their situation.

The studies describe gaps. They do not establish causes, and no single explanation fits everyone. That is another reason to treat each person's feelings as information to ask about, not a conclusion to assume.

Confidence and Knowledge Are Different Things, in Everyone

Another useful finding concerns confidence and knowledge.

Economists Tabea Bucher-Koenen, Rob Alessie, Annamaria Lusardi, and Maarten van Rooij found that women choose "do not know" on financial knowledge questions more often than men do. In a survey experiment, when that option was removed, many women chose the correct answer. The authors estimate that about one third of the measured gender gap in financial literacy is explained by differences in confidence. A gap in measured knowledge remains, and these studies do not establish why.

The broader lesson applies to everyone. Confidence can run low, and a person may know more than they say. It can also run high, and a person may know less than they feel. Barber and Odean's title, "Boys Will Be Boys: Gender, Overconfidence, and Common Stock Investment," makes the point from the other side: strong confidence can lead to costly decisions. In both cases, how someone feels about their knowledge is a different thing from what they know, and neither is fixed by gender.

What This Means for Marketing and Advisor Conversations

Taken together, the research suggests a few things worth reviewing in how a firm currently works.

Personas built on gender may describe an average that few prospects match. A campaign designed around what one gender wants will speak accurately to many people, miss others, and risk feeling off to prospects who do not recognize themselves in it.

Messaging can invite people to say how they feel. Financial anxiety is common among both men and women. A first touch that lets a person describe their own concerns and goals gives a firm information that a demographic segment cannot.

Discovery can separate confidence from knowledge. An advisor who learns early how confident a prospect feels, and separately what they know, can adjust the conversation without guessing.

The first meeting can start from the person. Prospects tend to choose on trust and on feeling understood, as other research suggests. A meeting that begins from an assumption about what someone like them wants gives that up.

These are reasonable steps, not proven ones. No study here measures whether moving away from gender-based assumptions improves conversion or retention.

What the Research Cannot Tell Us

It is worth being clear about the limits.

Why differences exist. The studies describe gaps, not causes. Income, life circumstances, and how people learn about money are often proposed as explanations, but these surveys cannot separate them.

How people feel versus what they do. Much of the data is self-reported. How a person describes their confidence may not match how they behave.

Age and timing. The Barber and Odean data ends in 1997, and the NFCS figures come from 2018. Attitudes change.

Who is included. These studies compare men and women. They say little about people who do not fit that framing, or about how culture, income, or family background shape attitudes.

Source type. Some findings come from companies with their own interests, such as Fidelity, Northwestern Mutual and NerdWallet. Large samples help, but these are surveys, not controlled studies.

Where Knomee Fits

If gender is a limited guide to how an individual feels, the alternative is to ask each person directly, in a way that is comfortable and consistent. That is what Knomee is built for.

Knomee is a behavioral discovery platform. It gives prospects and clients a guided, psychology-based way to put their goals, values, and confidence into words. Advisors and marketing teams get that context, so conversations can start from what the person has said instead of from an assumption about what someone like them might feel.

Knomee does not resolve the research debates, and it does not predict how any individual will behave. What it is built to do is give a firm a direct, consent-based view of how each prospect and client thinks about money, before the first conversation and as the relationship develops.

On average, people may differ. Individually, they differ far more. The firms that recognize that early will spend less time guessing and more time listening.

Sources

Marla Sofer https://knomee.com
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