Femmes And Their Financial Cruises

Indian women are making headway as smart investors.

- Aparajita Gupta

Men are financial hotheads who like risk, and women are cautious and want security — that’s the standard cliché. Or to rephrase the title of a bestseller, “men buy shares from Mars and women have a savings account in Venus.”

However, this very idea is turned upside down in the 1996 Hollywood flick The Associate. The protagonist, essayed by Whoopi Goldberg, is a financial analyst at Wall Street who quickly climbs her way up. Though her upward journey is fraught with tribulations, the way she handles the stock markets and eventually ends up creating a business empire dealing in finances is captured remarkably.

Fast forward to 2019, with focus on the Indian scenario, many women, especially the younger generation is walking the path taken by Goldberg’s character. While they might not be creating empires like her, but they are definitely making a mark in the domain of financial investments. Though they continue to retain their traditional strengths such as meticulous planning and long-term vision in terms of financial investments, they have also started investing in riskier tools.

Needless to say, they are being successful in most of their fiscal endeavours. According to a Reserve Bank of India (RBI) report, the share of females in total credit and aggregate deposits of individuals increased further to 20.4 per cent and 32.8 per cent, respectively, in March 2018 from 19.3 per cent and 32.0 per cent a year ago.

Top metro cities, which had less than 20 per cent of branches, accounted for nearly 52 per cent of total deposits and 64 per cent of bank credit, stated the RBI report.