Pandemic unemployment is cutting into stock market returns for women, here’s why. 

Mellody Hobson on the financial impact of the she-cession

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Mellody Hobson on the financial impact of the she-cession


we've always had challenges as women. Uh we, you know, the pandemic has just accelerated our situation. And then for those women who did stand the in the in their job as Melody mentioned stress is really high. And so um those those who are still in the workforce, they're worried about, you know, their current situation, well, they still have a job, will they, will their income go down? Um and financial stress leads to lack of productivity, mental health, physical health. So that's something for all of us to think about as employers. But there was a bright spot. And that is what we saw from this survey is that there was a surge of new investors, both black and white men and women in the stock market. So now there's the same percentage of black women and black men, white women investing and that, you know, that's the beginning of financial security is really starting to participate in the market. Now. Of course we've got to make sure that they, you know, properly invest for the future, right? Yeah. You mentioned the survey, that's the area. While black investors survey, um, that really has some interesting data and I'm wondering, Melody maybe maybe if we can go to some of that data and just talk sort of broadly about at this moment in time when, you know, we're seeing these job losses are also seeing this incredible performance by the stock market. And so can you just give us a picture melody of at this moment in time, you know, who's investing, Who's not and as Carrie mentioned somewhere, those trends are going sure. The one trend that Kerry mentioned, which is so important. We it is called the aerial swab black investor survey, but we were able to keep them cut the data by gender until we could look at what white women were doing versus the overall population, what black women were doing versus the overall population. And that gave us more nuanced to what's going on when it comes to women investing in this country, particularly during the pandemic. The overall trend that Kerry mentioned. That was the most exciting, exciting piece of data that we had was that a lot of new first time investors are younger and they're participating at the same rate regardless of race. However, when you look at the total pool and you look over long periods of time at the big numbers, the numbers are much less uh, encouraging because just women participating in the stock market, white women just over two thirds, it's about 68%. Black women just have. That is a gay thing different over time and much less than white men, which were somewhere in the neighborhood of 78%. So when you put those numbers and you lay those numbers down, you can see there's a lot of catch up that needs to happen when it comes to both black certainly as well as white women and over time you say, what's the magnitude of this? It's the compounding. When you compound money over years, even little amounts make a makes a huge, huge difference. And so when we met on that 15 months out of the workforce, or not participating in the stock market, it has significant implications for our long term financial security.