How to Boost Your Financial Savvy

Money Smart Women

- By Janet Bodnar

Annamaria Lusardi is a professor of economics and accountancy at George Washington University and academic director of the university’s Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center. She has done extensive research on the topic of women and financial literacy. Her most recent paper is “Fearless Woman: Financial Literacy and Stock Market Participation.”

Based on your research, what is the current state of financial literacy among women? In 2017, we created the TIAA InstituteGFLEC Personal Finance Index to examine financial literacy among U.S. adults across eight areas of personal finance. Women know less in almost each of them compared to men—and when there isn’t a difference, men also know very little. The areas with the biggest gap are investing; insuring, which includes both insurance products and things like emergency savings; and understanding risk—for example, the risk of investing in a single asset.