What is the role of women as wealth creators in India? What’s the next stage after that?
At The Rizing Equality Summit 2024, Shivani Bhasin Sachdeva – Founder & CEO at India Alternatives, gave a witty and, somewhat, snarky talk, while also richly providing smart statistics, facts and research to explore it all.
Bhasin remarked that in India, women control 60% to 80% of all consumption decisions, making them the largest addressable market of India. In India, the number of women startups in the top 3 D2C sectors was said to have seen a growth of more than 2700% from 2017 to 2023. Furthermore, women seem to be going through a shift in their cultural mindset, where they’re prioritizing themselves in the family hierarchy and spending money on themselves. And women even seem to be accumulating wealth faster than men and by 2030, it’s said that more than 50% of the world’s wealth would be owned by women and half of all new business ventures launched worldwide would be by women.
But, while this may be a reason to cheer, Bhasin outlines that while women may be becoming the biggest wealth creators, she wonders whether they would be actively managing and controlling their wealth and whether the future has women creating wealth but someone else managing it for them. Currently, when it comes to women’s participation in the labour force, there are some areas, like law and chartered accountancy, where there’s hope, but women’s participation in fund management is said to be abysmally low.
Bhasin stated that the challenges may lie due to the false narrative that investing is for men, yet gender-balanced funds were said to have realized an excess net IRR of 1.7% greater than an all-male team. It’s said that men tend to be overconfident and take risks investing in companies they don’t understand, while women think they don’t know as much and are not as confident; women may think this means that they’re bad at investing, but it’s a good thing, because fund management is seeing all the various risks in a potential investment and being able to price it. It’s, also, said that women do a lot more research and rely less on gut feeling and may have less of an ego when it comes to investments, while men may suffer from confirmation bias.
According to Bhasin, the Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett invests like a girl with a calm temperament and a long-term outlook. She, also, says that women may be wonderful at allocating capital, but may not take the primary role in allocating finances for one’s family. Bhasin also debunks the myth that women are spendthrifts by outlining statistics that women save more and says that a mother of three would make a better leader than a carefree bachelor, because the former would be more concerned about social harmony and long-term implications.
There’s, also, a myth that women are bad with money. But, Bhasin emphasizes that money is power and when someone says that a woman is not good with money, it may be because they don’t want that woman to be comfortable with the ordinary exchange of power in capitalism. They may not want women to trust their instincts in accessing one’s true roots to personal freedom, i.e. finances. Another study that debunks the idea that women are not good with money is one that outlines that women investors have generated better returns than men and during the COVID-19 pandemic, women did much better in that field. So, for women to get to the next level, they ought to fill the gaps, focus on skill-building, surround oneself with people who are better at certain things, have self-confidence, build a network of mentors and peers and more.
Watch the whole session here:
What are you going to do to manage the wealth you are sure to create?
