How women's absence from financial history impacts us today

Recently, I embarked on a personal financial audit and life planning session that brought about a realisation. I was seeking advice from someone in my family, and it struck me that, while I was living what to me felt like a perfectly ordinary life, with a bank account in my name and the ability and expectation to be self-sufficient and earn my own money; this was totally extraordinary compared to the experiences of virtually all the matriarchs of my family.

This left me feeling lost with who to turn to for help when it comes to questions about money. And not because the male members of my life couldn’t answer that question practically, but because in some instances, they simply couldn’t relate.

Women today often have fewer examples from older generations of what it looks like to manage money independently throughout adult life. Without people to turn to who have lived that experience, women may also miss out on an important source of practical knowledge on the path to financial literacy.

Getting to grips with all the financial terms, literacy and know-how in the world can feel incredibly overwhelming; and it is. Women have a myriad of extra challenges (gender and pension gaps, the impacts of pregnancy on your career) to contend with. But another one we have to tackle is history. Or rather, women’s exclusion from history financially and why that’s creating challenges for them today.

Visit our women and investing hub

A short timeline of women’s financial history

In the UK, much of the progress for women having control of their own finances has happened in the past 50 years.

The 1970s was a breakthrough decade for the equality movement, with the Equal Pay Act of 1970 making it legally mandatory for employers to pay women the same wage as men for the same work in the UK. This didn’t actually come into effect until 1975 when the Sex Discrimination Act passed.

This was also the first time women were allowed to open bank accounts, obtain credit cards, secure loans, and apply for mortgages independently without needing a male guarantor, like a husband or father.

The same rights had only just been granted in the US the year prior, meaning for all the years beforehand banks required single, widowed or divorced women to bring a man along to cosign any credit application, regardless of their income. They would also discount the value of those wages when considering how much credit to grant, by as much as 50%. So even if you could get credit, it was meagre versus what a man would be given.

In Ireland, women were not allowed to own their own homes outright until 1976.

We’ve all seen the trope of various period dramas where a family of only daughters must pray for the kindness of a distant male relative who is to inherit their family home. That didn’t stop happening until 1922, when equal inheritance was brought in.

Women in England were still not allowed to spend their own money in pubs until 1982.

In an odd quirk, women were never legally prohibited from investing. While it was some years before they could open a bank account in their own name, women made up some 40% of shareholders in the British railways in the early 1900s, and were more likely than men to be sole investors. But this generally had to be done through the medium of male authority to some degree.

Women were still not allowed to be members of the London Stock Exchange until 1973, for example.

All of this compounds into decades where women were left out of the financial conversation not because they were incapable, but because it was, in a practical sense, seen as fruitless since they couldn’t do anything within it.

It still shows up in micro-hangovers today and has helped create a financial world that’s riddled with language and attitude biases. This only creates more barriers to entry to an industry which can be complex and off-putting for people regardless of their background or gender because either consciously or unconsciously, this makes it feel exclusive rather than inclusive.

What I took from this personal deep dive was that women should actually cut themselves a bit more slack when it comes to figuring out their money.

There is a wealth of shared knowledge today about how to secure your financial independence and there are fantastic role models to help give more personal guidance and help. But having been left out of the room for generations and suddenly being expect to be up to speed and as fluent as those who’ve been normalised to discussing money is a big ask.

Being the first one to do something is tough, as you may feel like you’ve got to figure it all out, so taking a breather to remember that it’s a process can be useful.