Australian women and their finances.
Jane Macleod looks at key research findings.

In 2007, ANZ commissioned primary research to explore the needs and attitudes of Australian women, which involved speaking to over 2,000 women aged between 18-65 years from a range of lifestages and professions. The findings suggested that Australian women want to:

• Feel empowered and in control.
• Be confident when making decisions.
• Have a coach to guide and inspire them.
• Be financially independent.

Recent decades have seen dramatic change in women's lifestyles and financial needs – driven by wider social, demographic and economic trends. The nature of the traditional family has changed...

• Women are having fewer children, and at later ages.
• Children remain at home for longer - resulting in women caring for their children and aging parents at the same time.
• A rise in the number of people living alone - in fact, 40 per cent of women over 50 years are single, either through choice, divorce or death of a partner¹.

These social trends have had a significant impact on women's ability to balance work with other responsibilities².

Women continue to carry the greater responsibility for unpaid work, effectively placing them under increased time pressures. It is easy then to see that women tend to have interrupted work lives, which can have a dramatic impact on their lifetime earning potential. In fact, women work an average of 18 years full-time work compared to 38 years for men – and are paid less³.

It is not surprising therefore, that many women are conservative in their financial decisions - their responsibilities make them more cautious. These factors have a knock-on effect on superannuation levels. The average retirement payout for men is $130,000 compared to only $45,000 for women. Yet a woman's average life expectancy is 83 years, compared to just 77 for men⁴. Of the women surveyed, 60 per cent were worried that they won't have enough to retire on comfortably.

Yet it is not all doom and gloom. Trends in social attitudes have contributed to significant changes in women's employment over the past 25 years. Greater proportions of women now have higher education qualifications⁵. The gap between male and female salaries is closing⁶, and the number of women out-earning their husbands has tripled in the past five years⁷. The average age of new mothers in 2005 was 30.7 years, up from 27.3 years in 1985, facilitating a longer, uninterrupted career path⁸.

Trends like these provide women with more time to build financial wealth in their 20s and 30s. Once custodians of little more than the household budget, women are now responsible for more spending and more wealth than ever before.

However, while women's wealth and spending power is on the rise, only one in 10 of the women surveyed felt they had planned well enough for their future financially. Two-thirds claimed they did not feel financially secure¹⁰.

ANZ's research revealed that a major barrier for women securing a better financial future was low levels of financial knowledge, and consequently low confidence when making decisions and dealing with financial institutions. While women feel confident managing day-to-day finances, this confidence wanes when making decisions about investing – which many women perceive to be too complex. Only a quarter of women surveyed felt in control of their finances "all of the time", with one in four admitting they spent more than they earned. Fifty nine per cent of women surveyed wanted their bank to make them feel confident by supporting them to manage their finances.

The survey results indicated that women require education as the first step toward financial empowerment. In response to this, ANZ have created a website to provide financial and life information about the different stages of women's lives.

The website, bemoneyconfident.com, aims to provide women with knowledge and tools about important aspects of career and work, home and family, health and wellbeing, and planning for retirement.

This is just one way to address the financial issues and concerns of women, and reflects ANZ's long-term commitment to help improve financial literacy levels in Australia.

Jane Macleod is Segment Manager, Retail Marketing and Communications, at ANZ.

Source: 1. Melbourne Institute of Economics and Social Research, 2003.
2,3. ABS. 4. Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia. 5. ABS, Trends
in Women's Employment. 6. ABS census data. 7. Splash Consulting Group.
8. Births, Australia 2005. 9. Splash Consulting Group – The Psychology of
Selling to Women. 10. ANZ women's research conducted by TNS , 2006.

This article was written to provide you with an insight to the financial needs and attitudes of Australian women.

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