Profession needs to be better at talking to women about pensions

Speaking at the Equity Release Council Summit, Nokes said the financial services sector needs to be better at talking to women about their finances. 

“We need to make sure that, within the financial services sector, we are putting the right adviser in front of the right customer and talking to them in a language they are able to understand, appreciate, and warm to,” she said.

“It has to be in a language that is appropriate and not patronizing and it has to be in terms that are going to be relevant.”

If you think the gender pay gap offends me, the gender pension gap terrifies me.

As an example, Nokes pointed to divorce as one way in particular that can affect women’s pensions and finances, an experience that Nokes has gone through first hand.

“I remember vividly how hard I fought to keep a hold of my house,” she recounted.

“At the time, I thought I would have to sell the house, but someone told me that I should fight tooth and nail to keep it because I wanted security for my child and because I was never going to get my hands on an asset that size again.”

However, Nokes added that she is an exception in this area and that other women may not enjoy the same benefits that she did.

“Very few of them develop fangs like mine and work out how they’re going to protect their pensions from their ex-husbands, but the reality is it can be a nasty wakeup call that comes at a difficult time.”

To combat this, she suggested the industry should make extra effort to advise women in an effective way.

Nokes concluded by offering an insight into the scale of women’s pension problems, stating that, while the gender pay gap “offends” her, the gender pension gap “terrifies” her.

Confidence

Also speaking at the conference, Hargreaves Lansdown head of retirement analysis, Helen Morrissey, said a lack of confidence had a huge role to play in gender pension gap and when it comes to investing pension funds.

“We don’t talk about the lack of confidence that women have around their finances anywhere near enough and it is having an absolutely corrosive impact on women’s finances, on their pensions and more widely,” she said.

Morrissey explained this by pointing out that, according to research conducted by Hargreaves Lansdown, many women don’t feel like investing is for them.

Evidencing this point, she stated that “all you need to do is to go onto Google and look up ‘what does an investor look like’ and it is wall to wall men with very few pictures of women”.

“So you can see why women might be put off the idea of investing,” she added.

To address this, Morrissey suggested having more role models for female investors, describing this as a “really key” proposal.

Additionally, the research found that a lot of women found the language and the jargon involved in investing “quite off-putting”. 

“What really came out quite strongly was things like risk warnings and, obviously we need risk warnings to tell people their investments could go up as well as down, but we need to make sure we are communicating in the right way,” Morrissey explained.

“We don’t want to put the fear factor that stops them from investing at all.”

tom.dunstan@ft.com

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