3 lies women are taught to believe about money 

The socialization women receive around money produces a set of money beliefs that hold women back on a un/subconscious level. Spotlighting these “money lies” helps us see how we are thinking about money in ways that serve the powers that be, but don’t serve us.



Lie 1: Money is men’s business



Women have full financial equality as a matter of legal rights in much of the Western world today, but we do not have full financial equality socially or economically. And women are still taught that creating wealth —and the influence that comes with it—is something best left to the boys.



Unfortunately, this programming starts very early in life. One survey of a thousand parents found that parents were more likely to teach girls about saving money, whereas they were more likely to teach boys about building wealth . Our financial institutions promote this sexist messaging as well. A 2018 study from Starling Bank looked at three hundred finance articles from various countries and found that 65 percent of the articles aimed at women characterized them as “splurgers.” Nearly 90 percent of female-targeted financial articles advised women to “cut back” on their spending. You can see connections to diet culture here, with women constantly being told that they naturally tend toward excess and that they need to restrict and restrain themselves in order to “stay small” and be good.



The study also found that the language used to address women about financial matters differed from the language used to address men. Articles written for women portrayed financial planning as overwhelming, stressful, or scary, painting us as emotional victims to money. On the other hand, articles aimed at men talked more about actual financial terms and concepts, such as portfolios and calculated risk-taking, and conjured images of strength or power.



It comes as no surprise then that men report feeling more comfort and confidence making financial decisions, and that more than half of women in heterosexual marriages report leaving investing decisions to their husbands. This bias is so deeply ingrained in us that one study showed priming college-age women with the concepts of “money” and “femininity” lowered their cognitive scores on tests. In other words, it activated beliefs about not being smart enough, which made them do worse on a test than women who hadn’t been primed with those concepts.



This leads to us feeling like we are dependent on other people (especially men) for our financial health. Women are taught to think we should be conservative and careful with whatever money someone else might decide to give us or pay us, and to judge ourselves for spending “too” much, even though studies show men and women “overspend” at similar rates (put in quotation marks since it’s such a subjective concept in the first place). We are not taught to believe in financial abundance, that we can create wealth by taking calculated risks and making investments, or that we can create social and economic capital and power through financial literacy and taking responsibility for our own financial lives.



It’s no wonder then that so many women are like my client Jenni. As an entrepreneur, she could be in charge of her own financial life. But instead of taking that freedom, she built herself a mental money jail.



“I was basically people-pleasing left, right, and center, thinking that this was how to get ahead in my business and make money,” she told me. “Instead, it was draining me. I would have breakdowns about money, catastrophizing and crying face down in bed. I was allowing male authority figures to take charge of my decision-making because I was afraid that I couldn’t make the ‘right’ decisions. I felt disempowered in my own business.”



None of these thoughts were true, of course. Studies show that women are actually better stewards of money than men are, overall. For example, when women control more household income, either through their wages or through cash transfers, they spend more on food and education for their children than when men are in charge of the family income. And it’s not just in the domestic sphere. Women have been shown to be better investors than men, with better financial outcomes.



Bottom line: Our beliefs about ourselves and money aren’t true. They are propaganda that serve the existing power structures, not us.



Lie 2: Caring about or wanting money makes you ungrateful, selfish, or bad



I came to entrepreneurship from the social justice world. In nonprofit legal jobs, it’s almost a badge of honor to make as little money as possible. In a place like Manhattan, this just means that functionally, many of the people who were working at nonprofits long-term had family money or a partner financially supporting them. To care about how much money you made was seen as disloyal to the cause. You had to pretend you didn’t care about money, and judge anyone who seemed like they did.



It’s not a coincidence that the nonprofit world is mostly made up of women. Because women in particular are socialized to believe that caring about making money means something bad about them, because they are supposed to care only about helping other people. Women tend to disproportionately enter the “caregiving” professions, both because of structural barriers to other industries and because being socialized from birth to believe it’s your destiny to care for others tends to bleed over into your professional life. In those professions, there is often an ethos that to care about how much money you make, or to want to make more than the bare minimum, is a sign that you are greedy or have the wrong motivations. There has to be some financial exchange for our services, but we are then told that we should be doing it for the love of the cause, not for the money. (As if anyone can operate or live without money in a capitalist society.)



Plenty of women don’t work in the helping professions, of course, but this socialization impacts us just the same. Women are 25 percent less likely than men to ask for a specific amount when negotiating a pay raise, partly because women tend to believe that if they just work hard, their work will be rewarded without the need for negotiation. This is completely in line with the “good girl” socialization we receive. Women also often have the thought pattern that we should be grateful for being hired or being employed, and that to attempt to negotiate a higher salary, a better title, or better benefits would make us appear greedy and ungrateful. Because we are socialized to believe that our worth and value depends on what other people think of us, we will leave money on the table and reduce our potential earnings to avoid the anxiety of worrying about what someone else thinks if we ask for more.



Our thoughts are not the only barrier here. Even if and when we do advocate for ourselves, we may be met with resistance or judgment. We need policy changes around salary transparency, parental leave, and nondiscrimination to truly level the playing field. But if we sit around waiting for all of that, we may be waiting for a while. We need to create self-confidence and resilience to navigate challenges and make creative and strategic decisions to achieve our goals (more on that later in this chapter). We need to be upgrading our mindsets in the meantime.



And in order to do that, we need to see money clearly. Our black-and-white thinking can make us believe that our current economic inequalities, worsened by the way that ultra-wealthy billionaires exploit the tax and political systems, means that all capitalism and all wealth-building is bad. And listen, I get it. I was a leftist legal academic. I used to have a structural Marxist analysis of the world. But now, having had more varied life and professional experiences, I see that there is more nuance in reality.



Money is like any other resource: it can create amazing good or do a lot of harm, depending on how it is used. Fire can cook food and warm a hearth, or it can burn a house down. The way we use the money we create determines the impact of that creation.



My friend Trudi Lebrón, an anti-racist business coach, makes an important distinction between what she calls “toxic capitalism” and “just commerce.” Toxic capitalism, she teaches, is the set of rules and policies that allow people to exploit labor and abuse power to avoid paying their share of the costs of running a society that allows everyone access to a minimum acceptable standard of living. Just commerce, on the other hand, is equity-centered. It includes other metrics and standards in evaluating success beyond just a profit and loss statement. In other words, it’s not money specifically that is evil—and it’s not even business that is inherently problematic. There are ways of creating a more just and abundant economic world for all of us. But if we want to be part of creating that world, we have to actually get involved in it. We have to decide whether we’re going to opt out or lean in, both to create the lives we want for ourselves and to be able to have more of an impact changing the rules of the game for everyone’s benefit.



Lie 3: There’s no way to win so you may as well not try



A worry I often hear from my students about how to ask for more money is the fear of being seen as too “aggressive.” This is a valid question. Studies show that women who are more assertive in the workplace are less well-liked, which can result in professional consequences for transgressing gender roles.



I have two thoughts about this. First, if you try to be assertive without changing your anxiety about negotiation, your resentment about sexism, or your stress about what your boss thinks of you, you are not going to show up in a truly confident way. Sometimes when I think I am being assertive by “standing up for myself,” I’m coming from a place of anger or fear I haven’t processed, and/or from an unmanaged mind. From that place I show up hotheaded, impulsive, and hostile. Shockingly, I don’t usually get a great result. When I’ve done the work on my thoughts and feelings around something I want to negotiate, I usually show up in a much more grounded, confident, and self-possessed way.



That being said, we can’t control how other people will react to us, no matter how much we manage our minds. But if you’ve done your own work to show up the way you want to, and your manager responds poorly, that’s important information about your workplace that should factor into whether you want to stay there. Because one of the other insidious ways that socialization impacts women’s thought patterns is by convincing us that we should always be grateful for whatever job we can get, and that we should settle for any workplace, no matter how sexist.



This is bullshit. There are amazing companies out there with fantastic opportunities for people of all genders and identities, and if your workplace cannot be responsive when you show up as your full self, then it’s time to find somewhere else to work. When we accept the premise that we have to settle because we can’t do any better—in love or in jobs or anywhere else—we’re doing oppression’s work for it. When we are willing to walk away to find the right fit, we help increase the overall cultural expectations and make it harder for companies to operate in discriminatory ways.







Excerpted with permission from Take Back Your Brain by Kara Loewentheil, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Kara Loewentheil. 



Kara Loewentheil is a graduate of Yale College and Harvard Law School and the founder of The School of New Feminist Thought. Her New York Times-recommended podcast, UnF*ck Your Brain, has been downloaded more than 50 million times; Take Back Your Brain is her first book.