There needs to be tighter collaboration between financial advisers and family lawyers to better support female clients, according to Susan Hope, IFA workplace senior manager at Scottish Widows.
Speaking to FT Adviser, Hope discussed financial moments that matter for women and how advisers and providers can better support them.
Hope believed female clients needed to have preventative conversations about how pensions are affected in divorce.
She said: “In a recent Scottish Widows report we found that 60 per cent of the women surveyed did not discuss pension assets in their divorce, which potentially led to them being £77,000 worse off, because when you're in the midst of divorce that is the last thing you think about.
“Divorce causes a heightened state of emotion and all you care about is protecting your children and maintaining stability in the family home, so having a preventative conversation when emotions aren’t running high would be very useful.”
To better support female clients and to have conversations about the financial effects of divorce, Hope said family lawyers and advisers needed to work together.
“I presented to a group of lawyers with an adviser about the effects of divorce and the level of collaboration was brilliant and we need more of it. At the end of the presentation the adviser offered the lawyers a checklist of things to consider when speaking to female clients.
“It's all about communication and equipping people with the right information at the right time and tighter collaboration between the two professions is something we want to take forward with our 'Beat the Gender Pension Gap' working group,” she added.
Hope felt advisers needed to take a different approach when interacting with female clients compared to male clients.
She said: “It is absolutely key for every woman in the UK to understand her pension provision and the impact of career breaks on her NI contributions. A man doesn’t need to consider that as much but a woman absolutely does.”
Transformative change needed
Hope said in order for the gender pension gap to begin narrowing there needed to be real “transformative change”.
“I want my mission by the time I retire to be that every single woman in the UK understands her pension provision and the steps she can take to improve it and I am not going to stop talking about this.
“If I can close my daughter's gender pension gap it will help us to not go around the same mountain that we've been going around for the last 20 years” she added.
Hope believed everyone needed to be thinking of closing their daughters’ or the young women in their lives’ pension gaps and there needed to be more education around pensions.
She said: “Parents have the biggest influence on their child's financial habits so it has got to start at home.”
Hope also emphasised providers had an important role to play to help educate people about their pensions and to provide employers with the tools they need to better support their employees.
“We create content based on the questions employers have asked us and from that we create short videos that offer small chunks of information. Providers have a huge part to play in empowering their members to then affect positive change for the next generation,” she added.
Hope said sometimes the pension gap can feel like a “female problem” but in fact it was a problem everyone needed to tackle together.
“We can’t have a solution unless we all work together and understand how this issue impacts everyone.
“We need to start talking about pensions to our children really early. And we very much need to have collaboration at the top in terms of industry, government but also men and women working together because we need lots of male allies as well,” she added.
alina.khan@ft.com
