Maybe.

And I know this is totally contrary to the spirit of Ramit’s blog, but women’s more “protective” attitude towards money (and I am totally generalizing here) may end up resulting in fewer investment gains in the long run, but less family money squandered by idiot husbands/boyfriends on stupid, ill-conceived investment schemes. There’s your yin/yang moment of the day.

As for being talked down to – as a woman, I do tend to read women’s magazines and I would resent the tone of the occasional nugget of finance wisdom except that I’m an accounting grad who spent several years working in finance and I’d say that even stuff I read in the New York Times can sound dumb-ed down to me sometimes. It’s not people’s fault that most of them are clueless about finance. I couldn’t read a medical brief unless a doctor held my hand through the whole thing and kept me from passing out of boredom.

I could, however, do with a little less of Suzie O’s “hey Girfrieeeend” and “boyfrieeeend” references, and her book on women and money was the first book I ever owned that I would have happily set on fire. That was the single worst purchase I ever made (worse that the $300 Marc Jacobs dress I hated two hours after I bought it… at least I re-sold that on ebay!)

According to the data, women make more money in the stock market than men, make fewer investment errors and overall make gains of 1.5% to 3% over men in an investment portfolio. There is also really good research-based evidence that women serve their fiduciary duty better than men and negotiate better deals on behalf of clients/investors than men do for their clients/investors. This is so much the case that investing institutions have started to look at the number of women who run finances at a company as a major plus for profitability.

So our assumptions and behavior run counter to good allocation of ability and are quite biologically contrary. We have an irrational male hero-fetish and it manifests itself in stupid behavior. In a rational world, more women should manage money than men! At any rate, I would rather put my money with a so-called boring housewife than a big badass risk taker, like…Madoff? Who was that guy who ran Enron? Henry Paulson? Don’t get me started on men screwing up the government…

As for the “touchy feely” approach used by many to address female readers or viewers… To some extent I get why they do this. Women, in general, are more likely to express their money worries as “feelings”- it makes them anxious, nervous, scared (or if they’re not worried and doing well, they’re confident, happy, etc.). Men do tend to just want to know facts and seem less inclined to get into the emotions of an issue. It’s not that women don’t want the facts; it’s that they need to express and address their feelings about it before they can get to what to do and how to do it. (And no I’m not trying to be sexist. I’ve encountered this is many different areas other than finances. And for the record, I am 45 years old and in charge of my family’s finances. I tend to view finances and many other things more in the way men do- maybe because I had 5 older brothers and spent 8 years in the army reserves in a nearly all-male unit.) I think women have been conditioned this way and only now are we waking up to it and the implications of how it affects us.

If the tone of an article troubles you, write the publisher or author and tell them so. The only way changes will be made is if they know they’re not addressing what they’re readership wants.