We women haven't received a lot of favorable money messages in our families or from our socialization over the years. I'm really hoping we can foster better communication by understanding these gender differences. It makes perfect sense to bring the whole discussion back to how the brain was created.
One of the ways this affects women is that they take longer to make a decision, trying to unite many goals. The woman does need time, and a man is often impatient with her need for detail but his impatience is ultimately not helpful.
So that's why a woman will keep talking about circumstantial evidence and the man will just cut to the chase, steering more towards the facts, and the bottom line. The woman will steer more towards integrating the feelings with the facts, come up with something that will make sense to her. The facts are enough for many men; they don't need the "superfluous" details.
Women are context thinkers, whereas Men are content thinkers. Men hone in on one aspect and seek to solve the problem women involve many aspects of the problem.
As a financial planner and wealth manager, I certainly do engage both parties in the conversation cause it's really important to have that input for a financial plan to work. In order for a couple to retire successfully, I need to hear and tease out the goals of both the male and the female. They'll communicate them differently, that's my job to hear that, but it's each of the males and females' job to speak very openly about what it is that they are looking to achieve.
On average, as I ask Baby Boomers where they want to be during retirement; i.e., what are their hopes and fears for the future, the preponderance of them plan to create a whole new life stage. They want to live younger longer, aspire to a whole new work-leisure balance and yet they feel very financially inept to do that. They're nervous that their finances aren't yet positioned so that that can really happen. If fear is present in a couple's relationship and they don't talk about it, we've got a sure fire recipe for disaster. Unless women are encouraged to speak very clearly about their wants, there will likely be a lot of friction in the marriage, which is exactly what I'm trying to circumvent, especially around money matters.
My therapist friends have taught me then to encourage the woman to speak from her start with the I word, I feel worried about this, and encourage the man then to listen, asking him if he's heard her concern, and then it goes back and forth, with what he's wanting her to understand, so it's training, and it's positive, and productive.
I like the confluence between the different ways males and females process then because it's often very valuable for a woman in a trusting relationship clearly to see the man's point of view, cause he might just cut right through some of the fluff to get to the focus point of the problem, so they can get to the next challenge. That can be very valuable, so long as there's adequate interplay between entertaining all the fears first, because you simply don't march through life, making decision after decision without having some miss-steps and needing to regroup. That's where BOTH parties can come together, analyze what was done, and why, and then pool both their opinions in formulating the corrective step.
And that's often what happens with investments, is that someone makes an investment that turns sour, or they deem it to turn sour, and then they blame the other or blame themselves, and get into a lot of guilt that really should be taken in stride, because one investment mistake is probably not going to derail the entire investment train.
What I've found though is that men will focus on what they deem important...return/price, etc., and women also expect to know that, but they also do want the extra communication to understand how everything fits together, again, indicative of some typical gender differences. Of course, we're speaking about stereotypical differences when we're speaking about gender differences. There are certainly exceptions, and we've both met them, but a man will generally want to be in control of a situation and a woman will want to be understood. And that carries over into the couple's communication styles.
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