“This is going to sound harsh, but you literally cannot afford not investing.”
—Tori Dunlap
When I started planning this blog back in 2021, Tori Dunlap’s “Financial Feminist” podcast was the first resource I found that was speaking directly to me. Through her company Her First $100K, Dunlap has made it her mission to educate women on investing and empower them to take control of their finances. As someone with the privilege to grow up with parents who taught her about money (and had enough money to constructively talk about), Dunlap made it her prerogative to take up space as a woman in an industry dominated by men, providing information catered to women. It’s not just a title; by definition, she is a financial feminist.
These days, I tend to consume podcasts more for entertainment, so having access to Dunlap’s brain in the form of the book “Financial Feminist” was exactly what this overstimulated millennial needed. The book covers the emotions of money, spending, making a financial game plan, debt, investing, earning and living a financial feminist lifestyle. I found the chapters on the emotions of money and investing to be the most fruitful, but if you are just starting to get your finances together, this book has everything you need.
In the first chapter, Dunlap discusses how women learning about money is a direct threat to the patriarchy: “The patriarchy realizes that when a woman gains the knowledge to build wealth, soon it will have no control over her life or decisions. Her financial independence is a threat to the status quo. So, the patriarchy demands we tax ourselves. It weaponizes our altruism. Recent research suggests that women are expected to behave altruistically and, given that they disproportionately occupy societal roles involving caregiving and subservience, are punished for deviating from that norm to a much greater extent than men are. Thus, women may internalize altruism as their instinctive response, even at their own expense.”
Even if a woman doesn’t identify as a caregiver, the roles that have been established in the body politic dictate that if she doesn’t pour her life and money into helping people, she is selfish. Meanwhile, there is no expectation for men to fill this role. They are taught to get a good, high-paying job and let the rest fall into place. I wonder if this is partly where my passion for donating came from, this inherent need to … just care about other people? Wow, revolutionary!
Dunlap continues that women “need to challenge men’s gender roles in the process, or we’ll be left with a society of individualistic assholes where no one cares about anyone. Financial feminism isn’t just about a woman’s right to decide what she does with her money, without the current socialized pressure to exist in service of others. It’s also about each of us demanding that the people who have access to the most money (i.e., men) actually start thinking about their existence in service of others.”
Men have taken advantage of women’s physical and emotional labor for centuries. Ever since women joined the workforce during World War II and were given access to “the world of men,” they have been shifting their role in society. No longer are women forced to be caregivers, secretaries or teachers in service of others. Now women can, quite literally, do anything they want for work (while still getting paid less than men). However, men haven’t had any reason to change their societal roles along with us; some men still expect their women coworkers to serve as their secretaries, believing that all women have this need to serve, even if that is not in their job description. Instead of having women “lean in” and act more like men in the workplace, Dunlap believes this should be flipped, and men should level the playing field by doing the emotional labor that women do every day. Now that’s feminism, baby!
In the words of Bobbie Barrett from Mad Men:
When it comes to spending, women are more often shamed for spending money. I’ve seen countless videos of women hiding their spending habits from their husbands, getting rid of the evidence before he comes home, thinking this is peak humor. Instead, it makes me physically ill! Dunlap says, “The real kicker here is that the spending power of women drives the majority of the economy. We’ve been marketed to since we were young girls, a constant narrative to get us to spend money … Women are the most marketed to but then are shamed for spending!”
Not only are women trained from a young age to consume, told that spending money on ourselves will improve our lives, we are stimulating the economy as I write this. Somewhere, right now, a woman is getting her nails done, and I’m sure they look incredible! By doing so, she is contributing to someone else’s living wage. Another woman is buying something overpriced at Anthropologie just to feel something. Me? I’m just trying to finish this blog post, but I’ll probably buy some collagen gummies I don’t actually need at Target later (they taste really good 😆).
But seriously, if it weren’t for women spending money to be respected by society, there would be no $580 billion beauty industry, and there would be no stocks for companies like Target, Ulta or Sally Beauty. These are stocks that I’ve read news about in some of AAII’s model portfolios—men spend money in the beauty industry in their own way, knowing that it’s a lucrative investment, and then women are shamed for carrying the economy on their backs. What’s the difference? Both are investments: Men are making money on that money, while women are investing the money in themselves first, and investing in another person or establishment for those beauty services.
Dunlap does a great job of cutting through the patriarchal, financial jargon in this book to simplify how we think about investing. She says, “When it comes down to it, investing is simply putting money into financial products … with the expectation that they’ll make us more money.” She also squashes anyone’s fear about losing money in their investments, “Investing for the long term—twenty or more years—raises your prospects of seeing a return on your investment to 100 percent … In fact, during every single twenty-year period (yes, even during the Great Recession), investors made money. Long-term investing—steady, patient, consistent—does not lose. It never has.” It was great to see such an important and frank discussion of long-term investing after hearing about it for years at AAII (just a tinge of confirmation bias here!).
So far, I was loving this book, but to my dismay, there wasn’t much airtime given to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing. Having a sustainable investing strategy, to me, is the most financially feminist thing you can do with your money. Not only did it make investing so much easier for me when I was starting out by narrowing the field of investments I could consider, it also cut through a lot of the patriarchal bullshit I knew I would have to deal with as a woman starting to invest. It gave me the ability to say, “No, I’m not going to invest like every man has told me to. I’m not going to just throw all of my money into an index fund that’s filled to the brim with companies that couldn’t care less about me, my community, the earth and our well-being. I’m going to do things my way.”
As Dunlap says, “We work to increase our income and get paid fairly: for our mental health, our financial goals, and our own stability, and to make society better.” Being financially independent isn’t about making the most money in the world (millionaires and billionaires are gross, and they should definitely pay dividends). Ultimately, investing is about making your money work for you so that you can live your life without worrying about your next paycheck. A girl can dream!
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