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Helping Women Overcome Society’s Outdated Messages on Money

Lessons about money take root at an early age, said Sallie Krawcheck, co-founder and chief executive of Ellevest.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

To explain why women make 80 cents for every dollar men make, why men are vastly overrepresented in executive positions and why female-led start-ups often struggle to secure funding, Sallie Krawcheck had one answer: society.

“We receive these messages that we’re flibbertigibbets when it comes to money,” said Ms. Krawcheck, the chief executive of Ellevest, a digital investment and planning platform for women.

The lessons take root at an early age, Ms. Krawcheck said in a conversation with the Times business reporter Sapna Maheshwari and Stephanie Cohen, chief strategy officer at Goldman Sachs.

Stephanie Cohen of Goldman Sachs and Sallie Krawcheck of Ellevest in conversation with Sapna Maheshwari of The New York Times.Credit...CreditVideo by The New York Times Conferences

Men, Ms. Krawcheck said, are conditioned early on to be more aggressive investors, often receiving financial advice geared toward beating the markets and generating immense wealth on Wall Street.

On the other hand, women are usually taught as girls to budget and to be careful with money. The lessons persist as they mature, enter the work force and earn.

The expectations are so different: “It’s like, ‘What financial type are you? Are you a Carrie or a Miranda?’” Ms. Krawcheck said, referring to characters from “Sex and the City.”

(For what it’s worth: Carrie, the character at the center of the show, was a terrible financial role model, according to Ms. Krawcheck.)

The disparity in messaging is one factor contributing to the deep gender bias on Wall Street, where women are underrepresented in boardrooms and the pay for female employees lags behind that of their male counterparts.

This year, for example, Citigroup said its female employees earned 29 percent less than men in similar positions.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Ms. Cohen said of both Wall Street as a whole and of her employer, Goldman Sachs. “And we know we’re not going fast enough.”

To create change, longstanding diversity and mentoring programs do not go far enough, Ms. Krawcheck said. Closing the gender gap will require change from the top.

But both Ms. Krawcheck and Ms. Cohen encouraged women to speak more openly about their financial goals and ambitions.

Ms. Cohen encouraged women not to be afraid to talk about money with their supervisors. Employees who talk more often about compensation when discussing performance and setting their goals are more likely to get raises, she said.

In Ms. Krawcheck’s Wall Street days, those groups often split along gender fault lines.

“All the guys would come and tell me how much more money they wanted to make all the time,” she said. “And all the women didn’t, because they were afraid to. So it was easy to fall into ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease.’”

As important as it is to change the conversation around money, it is equally important to control the money. In Silicon Valley, where female start-up founders received only about 2 percent of venture-capital money last year, Goldman Sachs is working with women to help them make appeals to rooms that are generally dominated by men, Ms. Cohen said.

“When women pitch their business, they tend to talk about what they have achieved,” she said. “And men tend to talk about the vision.”

Ms. Krawcheck added that male investors also tended to ask women questions about a business’s risks, while male founders were asked more often about its potential. Women have to fight to avoid getting pulled into “the downside rathole.”

When in doubt, Ms. Krawcheck said, women should fall back on the data. Research has shown that female start-up executives often get better returns than men.

“While men tend to have more of the home runs, they tend to go bankrupt more often,” she said. “But women hit more singles and doubles.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section F, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Overcoming Outdated Messages on Money. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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