Mind the Gaps: The Gender Wealth Gap and Investing Gap ft. Females for Finance

Kriti: [00:00:00] Hey guys, welcome to WhyFI Matters. I'm so excited to introduce you all to another financial literacy platform created by two girls in college, Anisha Arcot in Grace Baghdadi and it's called Females For Finance .What's so special about their organization is that they aim to bridge the inequalities in the financial industries, through financial education, empowering girls with skills that they need to invest and start careers in the financial industry and transform this industry from within Anisha and Grace are also very great role models for us teenagers. And both of them are currently pursuing financial related internships at Citi Bank and Morgan Stanley respectively during the summer. And they're also student athletes at Yale University, which is super cool. I'm so excited to learn more about their lives and their organization, as we talk about the female to male gap in financial education. Why careers in the financial industry are important and the consequences of the gender wealth gap and investing gap I hope you enjoyed the interview.

Hi, Grace. Hi Anisha. Thank you so much for coming on, WhyFI matters today. I'm super excited to have you here. You guys are an inspiration for many girls like me out there, and I love how you're specifically focusing on females and finance, and I think it's really important what you're doing. So thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Anisha: [00:01:42] Thank you for it, having us. We're really excited to be here. This is a great opportunity for us to get to know you as well. And we're definitely inspired by your podcast.

Kriti: [00:01:50] Thank you. Thank you so much. So I think first of all, you guys are in college. A lot of the audience are teenagers in high school. So tell us, tell the listeners a little bit about your life as a high schooler, but also what you're doing now in college.

Grace: [00:02:05] Okay, I'll start. So, hi, I'm great. I am one of the co-founders of females for finance along with a Anisha over here. I'm a junior at Yale, but I'm originally from a city in France, which is just outside of Paris. And so I don't think I'll have a high school experience similar to most of you guys. I had a bilingual education. Half of my classes were in French. Half of my classes were in English. So I had both the American diploma and the French diploma back in high school. I was. One of those annoying overachieving kids. Well, that's a good thing. But it was ultimately worth it. So. Yes, please do work hard in high school. I was not at all interested in finance back then, mainly because I knew nothing about finance and it had just not been presented as an option. I was mainly involved with model UN international relations things and. I guess I'm continuing that now because I'm a double major in global affairs and economics. And my main activity in high school was really expensing and tennis and model UN.

Kriti: [00:03:16] I play tennis too. I tried model UN for like a couple of weeks and my school's model UN is very rigorous. And it conflicted with like, Some of my tennis stuff, but I think it's really cool. International relations and economics, so yeah.

Grace: [00:03:31] Yeah. Model UN can be super intense.

And I know U-Chicago Lab's is there.

Anisha: [00:03:36] Awesome. Well, I can introduce myself too. I'm Anisha also one of the co-founders and Grace and I are actually remarkably similar in many ways. I'm also a junior at Yale, but it doesn't stop there. We also have the same major. So I'm also a global affairs. Econ major and a student athlete on campus. So I'm on the sailing team. Yeah, in high school similar to grace, I was not really interested in the finance realm and it wasn't because of a specific disinterest. It was more so because I really wasn't exposed to finance at all. So I was much more interested in actually kind of the more law and. You know, justice system related topics. So my biggest extracurricular was mock trial. I was such a mock trial nerd. I totally threw myself into it. But I wouldn't change it for the world. It was awesome. It was so much fun. And you know, it was rigorous, but I also learned a lot about public speaking and how to be, articulate and you know, argue well and have a good debate. So that was awesome. I also sailed in high school, which was fun, but it was definitely not as serious as college athletics. So it was just like a little bit of a side thing, I guess, not something super crazy. And then aside from that, I was really into language learning. So, I was learning Chinese and Russian at the time and I'm still taking Russian at Yale. So that's a little bit about high school. Yeah. Thank you. It was, I think I was very, you know, all over the place, but it made sense to me and I was only doing things that I really loved and I would definitely recommend throwing yourself into the things you love in high school.

Kriti: [00:05:05] I think that's great advice for the teens listening up there. So what exactly got you interested in finances and when you were little, would your families openly and transparently talk about them at all?

Grace: [00:05:20] Yeah. So I feel like I was fortunate in that my parents definitely did involve me in financial conversations growing up. Like I understood what it meant to have a budget and. Paying for bills and how all of that stuff works. So I think in terms of my financial literacy, I was fortunate, but neither of my parents worked in finance or really talk to me about any stock investment they were doing. And so I was definitely kept in the dark about that. I think there's this very strong perception that girls are just not interested in finance and to be fair, that's what the media portrays it. As we just think of the Wolf of Wall Street suits and golf and all these boring images, they don't talk to you about the cool opportunities, like how capital can create opportunities and help small businesses. And that's definitely the side of finance that really caught my attention, but it was only once I. Got to college really and I started taking economics classes and they're talking about, well, how capital flows through the economy. And that's when I was like, Oh wow, this is actually a really great opportunity. And so from there we started attending different info sessions about the different paths you can take in finance and yeah, that really. Started my interests and passions.

Anisha: [00:06:44] I think grace and I are a little bit different on this front. I was also really fortunate to be, you know, exposed to , budgeting related topics and have my parents be really transparent and open-minded, but my dad did work in finance. He still works in finance and my brother who's four years older than me pursued a business degree at NYU. So it was kind of. Always hearing the jargon and talk about, you know, the stock market and investments and so forth, but not to say that my brother and my dad excluded me that certainly wasn't the case, but I think there was an assumption that I wasn't interested. So I was never engaged with those types of conversations. And I wasn't really, you know, Having anything explained to me in depth about the finance world beyond like basic financial, personal financial literacy. So , when I got my first real job, when I was 16, my parents taught me about how much I should save and investing my money. But aside from that, I was never really , the door wasn't really flung open for me to pursue a career in finance. It also wasn't bolted shut, but I certainly think a push would have been great. Fortunately, when I got to Yale, there is such a. Huge cohort of students who gravitate towards the finance industry and, you know, just by word of mouth and taking econ classes. I decided to kind of explore it a little bit more. I wouldn't say that I explored it late, for sure. Compared to my peers who had known that they wanted to do finance from the moment they step foot into college or before. But fortunately , with a go-getter attitude, nothing's impossible, even if you're a little late to the game.

Kriti: [00:08:14] Right. I love that advice. And I think what you say, it's kind of interesting because like finances in general, it can seem a little boring to like anyone. Right. And that's one thing that I'm trying to bridge with the podcasts and things like that. But for girls, especially people kind of combine the fact that they're girls and the fact that it's boring. And everything you're doing at females for finance is clearly showing you why that's an issue because this industry is really important learning that investing is super important. So I think this is a great transition into your organization. So can you tell us why you started females for finance?

Anisha: [00:08:59] Yeah, definitely. This was kind of on a whim over the summer, but I decided to take a gap year. Well, the gap year, wasn't a whim. I decided to take a gap year over the summer because of the situation relating to COVID. And I knew that I wanted to work on something at least part, part of my gap year that wasn't just for myself. But I, I kind of realized over the summer that it would be nice to do something for other people since I've been focused on myself for so long. And I thought there was no one better to do it within Grace, because, well, we were friends before this obviously, and we take a lot of classes together and I knew that Grace and I. We're like-minded and would want to contribute to helping other young women. So the exigence was kind of, I had just gotten a, a job in finance for the next summer, and I knew I was going to have a little bit more time on my hands. And I had been through this process where I felt like I could have been so much better prepared if I had been encouraged from a young age and given much better resources. So I kind of reached out to Grace knowing she would be the best partner ever. And the ball started rolling at lightning speed. After that.

Grace: [00:10:01] Just to add to that, we, we had both had very similar experiences recruiting. We got into the process pretty late. It was mainly because of the lockdown in March that we were like, Oh, okay. It's time to start recruiting and networking. And, uh, we have to do all of these things at the same time and it was super overwhelming, but. Luckily, we did manage to recruit and we got our respective internships. So that really just made it seem that okay, it's actually super possible to start recruiting finance and do this whole thing within two weeks. You just need a good attitude. You just need to believe in yourself and you just need this set of social skills and confidence. And that really made us. Have this passion to make sure that other girls were equipped with that because finance is not as hard as it seems. You just need a little push. And so we think that females for finance is that push to give girls the confidence and empower them to actually just. Dive in. You don't need to be the most prepared ever. You'll never be as prepared as you want to be, but if you just have that confidence, you will be able to do great. And I think that guys just. Culturally have more of that. go-getter attitude because that's what society has been telling them. Like you can do any and we just want to make sure we're telling the girls. Yes, you can do everything you can pursue finance.

Kriti: [00:11:29] I like how on your website it says like a girls club for finance and can you tell us a little bit about what exactly you're trying to solve?

Grace: [00:11:40] So we all know that the female male wealth inequality is terrible at the moment and between the pay gap, but the wealth gap is all just very disparaging. And for example, there's this statistic that among millennials women, only 26% of women are investing compared to 43% of men at the same age. And even in, in the finance industry, these are even worse. So at the entry level, I think it's roughly 50 50 in terms of men and women. But once we get to the executive position, it's very skewed towards men. Only 15% of all executive positions are taken by women at these financial institutions. And I think that this really affects every level of society, because if you don't have women in these leadership positions at financial institutions, they don't know. These men who are in these positions don't necessarily understand what it means to be a woman running a small business. They won't necessarily give them that capital and the right tools and opportunities for them to get out of poverty and also develop wealth. And so we just think that it's so important to bridge this inequality and that's what females for finance aims to do. So we hope to expose girls from a young age about. One like finance as a career option so that they have the tools to pursue it if they want. But two, we just think that. This financial literacy is a life skill that every girl should have, and everyone should know how to invest because investment really is the key to growing your wealth.

Kriti: [00:13:22] Can you talk a little bit more about the wealth gap and what exactly it means to accumulate wealth and why wealth is important? Versus say, like having a high income, but may be not that much. wealth

Anisha: [00:13:38] This is kind of gets to the issue of how, if you don't start to invest your money, it doesn't snowball and it can snowball in the wrong direction where your assets. Don't grow. They might not grow at the rate of inflation even, which would be terrible. You would be losing money, but basically, you know, grace mentioned some of these disparities, how women are paid less than men and how women invest less. But what is really important to consider is the consequences of those disparities in the longterm. So, you know, if, if a man is investing 60% of his income year over year, right? That's going to compound so much more quickly than a woman who is investing maybe 10%. And there are a lot of reasons why women are much less likely to invest their income. For example, women tend to just be more risk averse, which means they're not as tolerant to putting a ton of their money on the stock market because women sometimes feel like. A little bit more cognizant of the fact that investing your money on the stock market is going to put it at more risk. So there's that aspect, but there's also the aspect that women are often not empowered by , you know, societally women are often not empowered to go out there and put their money in various investment instruments. And so those two factors kind of cause it. Because the disparity between women investing their assets less than men, but in the longterm that can really exacerbate the wealth gap because not only will men be earning, you know, a dollar to the seventies, 2 cents of a woman, but they're investing much more of their, each of their dollars and it's going to grow even more so on the surface level. Yes, the wealth gap, the pay gap is, you know, 70 ish cents to a dollar. But when you look deeper, it's so much worse because women are not investing their assets.

Kriti: [00:15:21] No, I think that's a really, really important point that you made because I feel like sometimes people, they forget that there's a big difference between income and like pay and wages and wealth. And like, wealth is what's going to help you. During this pandemic, when COVID-19 has hit some, a lot of people have lost their jobs. And I think this is a great transition into the she session. And the fact that COVID 19 is greatly impacted the amount of job losses. Like I think women have counted for most of the job losses. Right. So can you talk a little bit about how this is impacting the pay gap, which I'm. Concluding has greatly impacted the wealth gap.

Grace: Yeah, as you said women definitely disproportionately suffered more during this pandemic, just because of the types of jobs that women tend to occupy. It's more, they're more focused in the service industry and the service industry definitely got hit the hardest during this past year. Hmm. And so if we look at the unemployment statistics, which I don't have right now, but these women who lost their jobs, because they didn't have the same level of investment and the corresponding savings, they're just much more vulnerable to poverty. And once you get into the poverty trap, that's a whole. Other thing, and it's really terrible and very hard to get out of it because let's say you start defaulting on payments that affects your credit score. From there, you can't get a new job. You can't apply for new loans. You have to forfeit your house, your car. And that is really just a terrible circumstance. And this issue disproportionately affects minority women, especially. It's very important that women now more than ever kind of protect themselves from these future circumstances, by investing a sizeable proportion of their income into these more stable investments so that they will have this safety net in the case of a pandemic or anything.

Anisha: [00:17:32] Yeah. And these types of things are really, you know, the tip of the iceberg, the statistics, there are so many like societal and cultural norms that are hard to quantify that affect women all the time. Like in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all know that, you know, in general, Childcare responsibilities are generally defaulted onto the shoulders of women. So I'm sure there have been, I don't know a statistic on this, but just thinking about the number of children that are now doing school from home, that is certainly a burden on parents who have to take care of their children for an extra eight hours a day. And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that that burden has fallen disproportionately on women and affected women's. Many women's ability to earn an income or do as good of a job. And I'm sure they're, you know, suffering a brunt of that compared to men.

Kriti: [00:18:19] I read a statistic, a couple of like a couple of years ago. I think it's still valid now. Women, like there's more women who single handedly, like they're the head of the house. Like they're just a woman and her children, and now she is working. She has to look after her children and like, Do all of this stuff and it just, it's just crazy difficult. So yeah. Thank you so much for bringing up the intersection between race and gender when it comes to this, because there's so many intersections and it just intensifies all of the like barriers that these people are facing kind of. So why do, why do women kind of have this less exposure to finance from a young age and. Do you think that any of these investing apps, which like am to kind of democratize investing like stockpile I know Robin has kind of like right now, a lot of people are like Robin hood, but they are like democratizing investing. And why is it that women are not really like part of this conversation yet?

Grace: [00:19:28] Yeah, I think it's a combination of factors. As I mentioned earlier, the media and just popular culture has definitely played an important role in giving us this male boys club image of finance. You look at all these finance movies, which we all watched, like growing up. It's very, very male centered and it doesn't seem appealing to women. And I think the second thing is just these cultural norms in the family. They think, okay, the boys are going to pursue engineering and finance and medicine and these like hard core subjects. And the girls will pursue English, literature and art history. And obviously this norm is changing, but I think that for a significant proportion of women, especially in more developed countries, this idea still persists and. This extends to teachers. Teachers are not encouraging their female students to pursue math as much. And even in college, there's still be ingrained norms. And I think with everything in life, you just need a bit of encouragement and a bit of a push because nothing is going to come to you easily. But if you're not hearing this positive reinforcement that yes, you should pursue finance. Yes, you should do this. Then you just probably won't. And the fact that the industry is so male dominated, just kind of perpetuates that because even when we were attending these info sessions, I swear in some bank. Everyone who was there, all of the employees from the bank, they were all male, except for maybe one woman. That's not very inviting to me as a woman who wants to enter this field. And even the conversations they have just feel very. They just tend to exclude women. Maybe there'll be talking about the football game, and I'm not saying that women are not interested in football, but I'm personally not. So I wasn't able to vibe with these people at the banks as much, and it just didn't seem very appealing to me to partake in these activities. But on the other hand at other banks, there were. Senior women in these positions. And that really encouraged me and made me think, okay, wow, it is possible to pursue a career in finance and there's this female role model. So I just really want to highlight the importance of having women who paved the way and help you and you pay it forward. And I think that we're having an increase in that in recent years. And as that trend continues, we will definitely see a lot more women pursuing finance.

Kriti: [00:22:03] For sure. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about the

programs that you have to offer it females for finance

Anisha: [00:22:09] . We would love to you know, we did get started back in July of 2020s. So I would say that we are a relatively young organization, especially given the fact that we hope to be around for a long time, but thus far we do have some programs in place. So we offered our first program back in fall of 2020, which was like a beginner level, one program for people who had, you know, zero to very little exposure to any finance related topics open to all high school. Aged young woman. And it was a five week online program with twice a week lectures once a week, small group discussions, quizzes, you know, group projects and mentorship. So that was our first program and we are starting our next program actually tomorrow. And it will be another. Five and a half six week program hosted primarily through zoom for beginner, high school women who are hoping to get a little bit of financial literacy education or, you know, their foot in the door in the finance industry. But in the future, we're going to be hosting more, you know, advanced level. Online programs, perhaps that would be a better fit for listeners of your podcast, who I'm sure already have some basic financial literacy knowledge and we'll be hosting those advanced programs starting probably late March. So coming up pretty soon.

We also have asynchronous online learning that we are kind of rolling out right now. And that is for students who maybe don't have the, you know, five week intense commitment. They're not ready to make that commitment, but want to do some self paced learning in the long-term we hope to host , conferences where all the young women can get together. But that post pandemic stuff is obviously still a little bit in the works, right?

Kriti: [00:23:48] No, I think a conference of like women in finance, like. That'd be really fun. Like to invite some like people, cause like grace was saying, there are women who are in these leadership positions and just to hear from them as role models would be really great steps.

So yeah.

Anisha: [00:24:04] Absolutely. I think a big component of our program. Isn't just the financial literacy education, but is a lot about exposure. Like one of my favorite events from our program in the fall was we had a woman who worked at Goldman Sachs, come talk to our participants and they had so many insightful questions for her. And. It's such an interesting and engaging dialogue, but the biggest takeaway was kind of about empowerment and how our participants can achieve whatever they want and they can break into any industry that they want to. And I think that is sometimes even more important than , knowing about compound interest or the difference between stocks and bonds, even though that's important too.

Kriti: [00:24:43] No, I think you bring up a really great point. And I think we were talking a little bit about this, but you at your organization, you're definitely trying to bridge the female to male gap in the financial industry specifically. And why is it that this industry, like, what are the benefits for this? Cause there's so many clubs that I've been aware of like women and STEM or things like that, or like women and. Math and like, there's not many like women in finance, so, but why is this field? Why is this industry so important?

Grace: [00:25:16] Yeah. So I can answer this on two fronts. The first one is when you have women in senior leadership positions at these banks and on these boards, They actually, the companies actually yield better results. It's statistically proven that when you have diversity, whether it's gender or racial diversity on these boards, you have better conversations. You make better decisions and you get better results. And so it's even in the interest of these organizations to hire more women, hire more people of color because it works better for the company as a whole. And also these women especially understand what the women who, who who come and get loans from these banks are going through. And that's a unique perspective that these men could never understand. But on the second front, we know that finance more than any industry really perpetuates these inequalities, but it can also break them. So let's think about venture capital. When the venture capital is early stage investing in these companies before they go public, they're very new companies with very innovative ideas. And with VCs, there's this huge unlimited potential for financial gain, both on the side of the people who are investing in these companies like the VCs, but also in the side of this new startup that's being invested in. And we see that VCs more than any field of finance is disproportionately white male. And because of that, we see that the people they invest in are disproportionately white males. And there's this crazy statistic, but only 0.6, 4% of all total venture capital investment in 2018 and 2019 went to women of color, which is crazy. It's not even 1%. And we know that. This money that goes into these startups, really tripled and quadrupled. That's actually, you get a hundred times the return. And if these VCs are not investing in these minority women, female owned businesses, these people are just kind of left out of that financial gain. And it's all a matter of getting women and women of color to work at these VCs, because then they will help invest in more. Female owned businesses. And from there, there's just this huge unlimited potential for wealth generation. With these startups, for example,

Kriti: [00:27:50] that's really interesting. I was listening to another podcast. It's pretty famous, like how I built this. And a lot of the guests on his podcast, some of them are women. Some of them are women of color and you can add men. He has men on the podcast and you can kind of see the difference in they're sort of. Story and their journey towards creating multi-million dollar companies and how some, for some people, it was really easy to get venture capital funding. And then for others, they had to do like a bunch of different things so I think that's really interesting what you said. So I think what you're doing is really cool. And I want to talk a little bit about your, your path towards even. Creating this organization. So would you, would you consider yourself as entrepreneurs and if you do, would you say that this background in financial knowledge and this that you did have, you know, open conversations when you were little, do you think it allowed you to be better entrepreneurs or do you think it was the other way, other way around,

Grace: [00:28:56] When you're starting a nonprofit organization, you kind of, there's this idea that it's not really like starting a business, but I think that that is definitely false because it is, you need to be just as organized. You still need to fundraise. You need to have your plan. You need to recruit members. And not that we were, when we started this, we were thinking, Oh, this is just going to be very easy. No, we were aware of the challenges, but we kind of just. Dived in and really went full steam ahead. And kind of after the first few months, we took some time to pause and think more about big picture things. And I think that's when we really put on the hat of an entrepreneur, I really started thinking more concretely about how we want to make our venture sustainable, how we want to grow and what impact we want to have more precisely. We participated in, uh, the Yale type city fall accelerator program. And that definitely helped us kind of scale it back, think, okay, how are we doing this? How do we want to grow? And. From there since then, we have expanded to have a board of other women at Yale, and we're quickly expanding to other top universities across the country and across the world. And since then we have been working with other entrepreneurship initiatives, both at Oxford and at Yale, and really expanding the number of mentors who. Help us grow females for finance.

Anisha: [00:30:26] You know, I think Grace and I both recognize that we don't perfectly fit the traditional meaning of the word entrepreneur, because we have a, technically started a business, but like Grace mentioned, this venture has required every aspect of the entrepreneurial spirit. And I think Grace and I have felt, you know, empowered by our financial literacy education to embody the. And true entrepreneurial spirit. And I think not just our, you know, econ majors, but also , being exposed to budgeting and making smart financial decisions from a younger age, certainly helped that.

Grace: [00:30:59] I think that having a background in finance in general is extremely useful. If you want to think about starting a business one, just because of the skills, it teaches you how to do handle all the financial modeling, how to figure out if the business is sustainable, but also because of the connections you make in the industry, the finance industry is so. So you need to have these connections with the people who are at the VCs in order to be invested in, if you want to have a shot of becoming a successful startup. And so by working in the industry, you just make all these connections. You have a huge network and you have a much higher chance of success. So I think that even at a high school age, so for everyone listening here, if you just think about finance and. Try to educate yourself as much as possible. You're already setting yourself up for a great potential business. It's really important to have these entrepreneurial ideals, these ideas in finance before starting anything. I think it's a super crucial.

Kriti: [00:32:02] So can you tell us about your like individual plans for the future and will you be pursuing a career in finance when you're older?

Grace: [00:32:10] Yeah. So I am going to be working at Morgan Stanley in New York city. This summer, I'm doing investment banking and I plan on pursuing a career in finance, at least in, for the next five years. I think I would love to work in private equity or in the venture capital space. After doing the stint in investment banking.

Kriti: [00:32:34] That's cool

Anisha: [00:32:36] yet again, grace and I are pretty similar on this front. I'll be working in New York city in the summer as well. I'll be doing trading at JP Morgan. So, I thought grease and I will hang out a lot in the summer too, hopefully in person. In the short term, I also want to pursue a career in finance at least for a few years after my undergrad education. But I think in the longterm, I would love to pivot a little bit too. The public sector and maybe do something that is at the intersection of government work and finance or government work and intelligence, but that's definitely a much more long-term goal. And I think working in finance initially will give me skills. That will be invaluable, no matter which way I decide to pivot, you know, 10 years down the road or you know, so forth, whatever venture I decided to take on. I think a few years in finance at least will help me be very well equipped for whatever I take on.

Kriti: [00:33:29] Well, I'm excited to see where you guys go in the future. I think whatever you're going to do, you're already really successful. So I'm excited to see where you guys go and what would be your advice for girls like me who are interested in finance, but also economics, entrepreneurship and all of that stuff.

Grace: [00:33:46] Hm, this is a lot of pressure. You have to come up with. Good advice. Wait.

Anisha: [00:33:53] I can, I can start, I think while you're in school, it's so important to pursue all of your academic and extracurricular interests to the fullest extent possible. Like, I think depth is more important than breath in high school. Grace and I both didn't really do a ton of finance related stuff in high school. We just did what we loved and it worked out okay. That being said, I would have loved to do some deep dives into finance related topics in high school. And it seems like you're doing that. So that seems great. But while you're doing all these deep dives and, you know, working really hard on the things that you're interested in, I think it's still important to remember to have fun. I had a lot of fun in high school and I think it made me a happy person and made me more happy to work hard if I also had a great time hanging out with friends before after. So, you know, remember to enjoy your high school. Because the grind only keeps going afterwards. So you should enjoy every minute while you can, you know,

Grace: [00:34:48] So I have two pieces of advice I could not choose what the most important thing is, but I think that when you're in high school, it can kind of seem kind of boring or daunting to look or to read the wall street journal the financial times. And yes, I, at your age, I wasn't doing that, but I think it's really important to start to get a sense of the finance industry, just for yourself, just understanding how markets work. What has the stock market is affected by the news and these big events. And I think that there are some ways to make it accessible and exciting. So obviously one of the ways is listening to this podcast and similar podcasts that talk about it . Your understanding will be so much better than anyone else at your age. If you hope to pursue a career, just make sure you stay educated on these things now will really help you in the long run.

Kriti: [00:35:38] We had a guest speaker come to our school like that last week. She's like the CFO of Lime, which is, I don't know if you've heard of this company, but they're like scooter scooters. Yeah. And she was like, every morning when I was in high school, I'd watch CNBC before school. And I thought that was kind of. Cool and relates to what you just said, your advice.

Grace: [00:35:58] So, yeah, it really just. If you think about all these successful entrepreneurs, then one day you could be that person too. So it's, it's good to just have that mindset, even when you're working out, like listening to the podcast, like walking to school or whatever. And then the second thing is to really rely. On your older peers. I think mentorship is so important and whether maybe it's a senior while you're a sophomore, or if you have friends who graduated, I think it's really important to form these strong bonds with either older peers or maybe a professor you really liked or. Something like that, just because these people really will look out for you and they've gone through all these experiences before, and there's a lot of wisdom that you can glean from that. And. Especially if you know that you want to pursue a similar field, I think it is just so, so important. And they can really talk to you candidly, about how to navigate the space. And that's why mentorship is such an important role in females for finding it. And we try to provide that and we want to foster those strong mentorship connections, because sometimes it's not super easy to find someone who wants to pursue the exact same thing as you want to do. But , having these. Older people really give you this advice is just super valuable.

Kriti: [00:37:20] For me, I, I feel like I'm sometimes a little shy to talk to them but I really know that it's like super important. And that's why some of the stuff you do, like teams. Can really help you like joining some teams or clubs at your school I know can really help, but yeah. Thank you guys so much for coming on. WhyFI matters today. I hope you guys had fun and I really, really appreciate what you're doing at females for finance. And I know some of my friends. They've joined your workshops and things like that . Thank you guys so much for coming.

Anisha: [00:37:53] Thank you for having us. This has been awesome. Chatting with you and getting to know more about what you're doing as well. It's been great.

Kriti: [00:37:59] So that's the end of the interview and it was so fun to learn about Grace and Anisha and their lives and what prompted them to start females for finance. And I also learned about two different gaps today, and it was the gender wealth gap and the investing gap. And that was a gap.

The investing gap is a gap that I, I didn't really know much about. Like I always knew it was there, but I didn't realize what big of an impact it has and why we need to educate teen girls, especially to bridge the gaps in this will definitely help us create diverse financial industries, which will impact so many women across the world.

Also, if you're a teen in high school and you want to start your own females for finance club at your school, you can do this by taking their workshops and then starting a sort of chapter in your high school. I know some of my friends are doing this and you can get more information on their website, which is linked in the episode description.

https://www.femalesforfinance.com/

Also make sure to share this episode with a friend or two. Thanks for listening. And I can't wait to talk to you next time.

https://www.whyfimatters.com/listen/episode/49f6bcd5/mind-the-gaps-the-gender-wealth-gap-and-investing-gap-ft-females-for-finance