It is depressing but perhaps unsurprising that the vast majority of books on the subject of gender and money revolve around patronisingly instructing women on how to get better at making, keeping and investing it. As if the gender pay gap can be explained away by our silly, financially inept feminine brains, or fixed by providing us with a pink-jacketed instruction manual that boils down to: “Stop spending all your money on shoes.”
In Pound Foolish, the American journalist Helaine Olen flips that narrative on its head, uncovering the smokescreens of the personal finance industry and busting the myth that women, who are often specifically targeted by such scams, are any less knowledgeable or adept at managing their finances than men.
The most recent statistics reveal a widening of inequality in public sector pay, and Harvard professor Iris Bohnet’s What Works: Gender Equality by Design is a good antidote to that: a refreshingly clear, meticulously researched manual for eliminating gender inequality in the workplace.
In Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, Katrin Marçal traces the problem even further back, revealing the hopelessly sexist assumptions about money, women and unpaid labour that have formed the shaky foundations of much modern economic theory, creating models and systems that overlook women’s invisible contributions to our society and thus fail to serve us effectively.
Tireless activist Helen Pankhurst, meanwhile, takes the reader on a journey from the struggles of the suffragettes to the present day in Deeds Not Words. A major section of the book is devoted to money, with Pankhurst bringing to life issues such as tax and job segregation through real women’s testimonies.
Some of the public scepticism about the gender pay gap comes from a position of ignorance about the reality of women’s daily lives. That can be remedied thanks to Opening Belle, a novel about the realities of being a working mother with a resentful husband in the cut-throat, hyper-misogynistic world of Wall Street. Author Maureen Sherry’s insights were gleaned first-hand: she spent more than a decade working at global investment bank Bear Stearns.
For those still unconvinced by a fictionalised tale, the ugly reality is laid bare in actor Taraji P Henson’s memoir, Around the Way Girl, which details the Empire star’s battle against financial inequality in a Hollywood that privileges white male stars above all others.
Henson describes shocking experiences, from being dropped from a role originally written for her in favour of a white actor seen as a safer financial bet, to being paid a tiny fraction of her male co-star’s fee for a film for which she earned an Oscar nomination. “The math really is pretty simple: there are way more talented black actresses than there are intelligent, meaningful roles for them, and we’re consistently charged with diving for the crumbs of the scraps, lest we starve … I knew the stakes: no matter how talented, no matter how many accolades my prior work had received, if I pushed for more money, I’d be replaced and no one would so much as blink.”
• Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project.
