Keep in mind this generation has been raised as consumers. The economy today proves this. So as adults let’s teach our children, boys and girls, about finances and economy now so we can change these statistics.

While many women can, and do, run day-to-day household finances, they’re likely to be bored by wonk-type material.

I would suggest that if those surveyed were given more time to reflect on the question and think through the concepts involved I’m sure you would see the difference narrow and possibly become insignificant.

Simon Baron Cohen.

http://eqsq.com/eq-sq-theory/

A spectrum of brain types from systemising to empathising. Men tend to be the former, women the latter (probabilities only, saying nothing about any individual\’s place on the spectrum).

Can education or training shift you about? Certainly (this is indeed B-C\’s thing with autism, what he calls an \”extreme systemising\” brain type, training can indeed make things better) but it won\’t change the predisposition, just compensate for it.

Today more women are interested in the sciences. Years ago, they were steered to homemaking and steered away from careers.

That thinking led women to ‘leave it to the man of the house.’ And that ‘it’ included keeping the books and making decisions.

Those days are over, but it takes time for the older women who never bothered to learn to be replaced by the younger generation.

the lack of interest / “i’ll leave it up to my husband” philosophy is definitely in play in this instance.

Women are perfectly capable of understanding inflation, savings rates and the like, but I think most American woman would rather focus on something more exciting. This needs to be a top-down mandate. I think we need more sex education in schools and financial education in school. Otherwise, people will continue using plastic like they are in a game of Monopoly.

However, in the strict sense of the OCEAN test it is pretty well established that women are on average much more neurotic than men. This implies that they worry more about things that could go wrong.

From what I have seen this hurts women in financial decisions because there are so many ways that a financial decision can go wrong and the consequences can be big. As the pressure rises and people feel more worry they are likely to turn to rules of thumb or emotional choices that help limit the worry but may or may not produce good results.

A corollary to this, however, should be that women suffer far less from gambling and gross risk taking type errors than men.

Even if we accept this argument though, I am of the opinion that finance would greatly benefit from employing and empowering more women. A crucial ability of right-brain people is to see through complex problems with a holistic approach that makes it harder for them to fall in the blind faith on mathematical models that left-brained people fall so easily for, and that probably was a major cause of the current financial crisis. And this ability is certainly more difficult to acquire through training than financial calculus.

I elaborate on this ideas in a recent blog post:

http://alanfurth.com/a-whole-new-mind-fo r-finance