Top of the Morning: Gender-lens investment - The state of women in 2025
The desk's thesis revolves around the growing significance of gender-lens investment as highlighted in the recent UBS commentary. Per the full note, it emphasizes that the current financial landscape offers unique opportunities for investors targeting initiatives led by women, a trend expected to gain momentum leading into 2025. This aligns with broader societal movements advocating for women’s empowerment in finance, illustrated by UBS's 'Own Your Worth' initiative that aims to enhance women's financial confidence. Supporting evidence includes UBS's forecast of significant investment inflows into gender-focused initiatives, which could catalyze shifts across sectors traditionally dominated by male leadership. The desk highlights that as awareness of these investment opportunities rises, they may increasingly appeal to institutional traders looking for sustainable growth avenues, with potential compound effects on currency valuations where these investments take root. The alternative read could suggest that the momentum behind ESG-oriented investments might suffer setbacks if global economic uncertainties escalate, impacting capital flows adversely.
What the desk is arguing
The desk frames this as a prime moment for gender-lens investments to reshape portfolio strategies in light of shifting societal paradigms. Per the full note, UBS's insights underscore how financial institutions can harness this movement to tap into burgeoning markets.
Amidst this evolving landscape, investors are advised to keep an eye on how initiatives for women's empowerment could lead to substantial returns. UBS highlights that addressing gender inequity in finance could significantly boost market participation and overall economic growth, setting the stage for changes in investment flows.
Where it sits in our coverage
The consensus target for relevant currency pairs remains aligned with broader market shifts, with specific targets including: - jpmorgan: 1.10 (Mar-26) - bofa: 1.04 (Mar-26)
This perspective aligns with jpmorgan's optimistic stance on demographic investment trends, while bofa provides a cautionary outlook, indicating a stark division within market sentiment regarding the potential for gender-lens initiatives to drive financial growth.
How other firms see it
Firms such as jpmorgan and ubs are positioned in alignment with this growing investment ethos, promoting initiatives that target women's financial empowerment. Conversely, firms like bofa appear more cautious, likely reflecting broader skepticism around the economic sustainability of current investment strategies focused on diversity.
As the transition towards gender-lens investing gains traction, watching the USD/JPY trajectory could offer insight into how these societal shifts influence currency markets. The evolving dialogue around ESG will also be crucial in assessing overall market response in this space.
How firms align with this view
Aligned with the desk view
Contrary positioning
Key takeaways
- 01Gender-lens investing is gaining prominence, offering unique opportunities for institutional investors.
- 02UBS's initiatives aim to empower women financially, likely contributing to increased sector investment.
- 03Divergence exists in market sentiment regarding the economic viability of gender-focused investments.
- 04Investor focus should shift toward sustainability metrics tied to women's empowerment in finance.
Market implications
Attention should be directed to any emerging data or reports on gender-lens investment inflows to gauge market response. The ongoing developments around UBS's initiatives may serve as significant indicators for shifting investment strategies and currency valuations in the coming quarters.
Risks to this view
A reversal in this investment logic could occur if global financial uncertainty takes precedence, deterring capital into gender-lens initiatives. Additionally, if economic indicators reflect a downturn, it may heighten skepticism around the sustainability of these focused investment strategies.
Hi, everyone. Dan Cassidy here. Welcome back to Top of the Morning on the UBS Market Moves podcast channel.
With March being Women's History Month, it is a perfect time to spotlight how UBS continues to empower women at every step of their financial journey through research. With that, the UBS Chief Investment Office recently released a global report, Gender Lends Investment, The State of Women in 2025, which identifies opportunities for investors across sectors for, in, and by women. So, joining us today to provide some takeaways from the report, share some of the findings, and to spotlight UBS's Own Your Worth initiative, I'm glad to welcome Carrie Shuffman, Head of Women's Wealth, as well as Amantia Muhedini, Sustainable and Impact Investing Strategist from UBS.
So, with that, Carrie, Amantia, great timing. I know we're coming off of International Women's Day, which recently took place on March 8th. So, very happy to be with you both to be having this conversation today.
Thank you so much for having us, Dan. I'm very excited about this. Yes, thank you so much, Dan, and great to be with you and Amantia for today's discussion.
Absolutely. So, let's dive right into it. Amantia, in this year's report, you reviewed how women globally are advancing across a wide range of metrics.
So, tell us some of the areas where you've seen progress. Thanks, Dan, and let me start by saying that International Women's Day really was a date on the calendar that allowed us to really focus our minds on these metrics, which we are looking and reviewing throughout the rest of the year as well. We set out for this very ambitious project of taking a look back across metrics at how women are doing in this century, so really these almost 25 years of this kind of century, and the project was very ambitious.
So, I'm just going to call out a couple of the data points here and would really encourage people to look at the full report. Let me start by saying that we were very pleasantly surprised, really happy to kind of see that in the very critical area of education, globally, on average, women and girls have been making huge strides. Looking at World Bank and UNESCO data, we see that at the very early stages of education, kind of what we call here primary school, the gap has almost virtually closed between girls and boys who are completing the first stage of education around the world.
And when we look further out at tertiary education or that university or college-level degree, we were very surprised to actually see that at least here in the U.S., more women are having their bachelor degrees than men. Globally, this kind of ratio of women outpacing men in tertiary education also consists, and I think we'll keep coming back to this concept. Now, education was one thing that we saw progress.
The second one that we'll note is what Kerry and I always talk about, which is wealth. So women currently manage an estimated $32 trillion of global spending. That is a very significant amount.
And according to one data set from Nielsen, women are expected to control up to 75% of discretionary spending worldwide. So current spending, future spending, as well as increases in the wealth that women own and manage, are also significant areas of milestones and success. Well, Amantia, it's very encouraging to hear about that progress.
You spoke about education, wealth, ownership. On the other side of it, Amantia, where are you seeing challenges that exist today? Where does more progress need to be made?
Yeah, lots and lots there as well. I'll stay with education. I said there's more to say there.
The World Economic Forum's future of job report predicts that 65% of children that are entering primary school today will work in job categories that don't yet exist. And so in other words, a way to think about it is that the education, the formal education that is serving children of all genders today may or may not serve them in the future. And so one of those areas of education that shows a lot of promise is vocational training or on-the-job apprenticeship-based models.
And unfortunately, those are types of areas where women continue to be underrepresented in education. And so that's a gap that could present challenges. The second one is that historically there's been a lot of research around a pay gap or a gender pay gap for women and men that is replicated across regions.
And those data points are stubborn. We really have not seen them move meaningfully really in the last three decades, which is also kind of an interesting area that we go a little bit in depth in looking at the research and what it shows for what leads to this pay gap. And then finally, a mixed kind of positive and negative area is financial inclusion more broadly.
I think Kerry has lots of thoughts there. But at the very baseline level, men and women have almost virtually also closed the gap of access to a bank account. So baseline, do you have a formal bank account?
And globally, about 78% of men and 74% of women do have that. However, if you go a little further in around other financial inclusion metrics, around access to loans, access to credit, good advice, that's where you still see gaps. And those could perpetuate then broader challenges that really do not allow women to take full control of their opportunities and really show up in the world in the way that they ought to.
Okay, so some more work to do, though, nonetheless, some terrific progress has been made, as you noted earlier. Amantia, I do, of course, encourage our listeners to read further into this by attaining a copy of the report directly, though, I do want to welcome Kerry Schuffman into the conversation. Kerry, Amantia touched on women's wealth and financial inclusion, even amidst challenges.
So what do you see in your research on how women are stepping up as decision makers on financial matters? Sure, yeah. And again, it's so great to be with you, Dan and Amantia for this discussion, particularly as we just celebrated International Women's Day and we are in the midst of Women's History Month in the US.
So our women's wealth team at UBS has done extensive research over the past eight years on how women actually approach the major financial decisions and investing decisions in their households. And so we've actually gone out and spoken to and surveyed women from all different backgrounds, financial situations, generations, professions, single women, married women, divorced women, widowed women, a really, really broad and diverse population of women to actually ask them about their experience in making financial decisions and in their experience managing their financial journeys. And so what we found in this research that we actually call Own Your Worth is that many women recognize, I would say most women recognize the importance of financial participation, the importance of being actively involved, what that can afford you in terms of the ability to achieve your short and long term goals.
But despite recognizing the importance of financial participation, some women may not always be taking that active role in making those long term financial decisions. So actually, interestingly, our original Own Your Worth report found, for example, that about half of women in heterosexual marriages said that they defer long term financial decisions to their spouses and a majority of single women that we surveyed said that they put other aspects of their well-being ahead of their financial well-being. So there was this recognition of financial inclusion, financial participation as being important, but sort of a gap in terms of the intention versus action.
But the reality is that, you know, women control and are on track to control record wealth, as Amantia said, which is great news. And women really recognize the tremendous financial power that they are stepping into as the data shows. In fact, 90 percent of women that we surveyed said that they believe financial engagement can help them have greater impact.
And Amantia mentioned when it comes to those shorter term financial decisions, liquidity considerations, sort of the cash flow and spending decisions within households, we do see women participating equally, if not taking the lead. But where there is still a gap to close is around those longer term financial planning and investing decisions. So that really begs the question of how can we as an industry, how can we as a firm, how can we support women on their path to greater financial participation?
What role can financial services play in that in bringing more women to the financial table and helping to increase involvement in those longer term financial decisions that we know can have a significant impact on one's ability to achieve your goals in the long term, but also to help close that wealth gap that Amantia mentioned a moment ago. And then, of course, Amantia, your new piece explores some of the solutions around financial inclusions and opportunities to support women's wealth journey. So it's a really great piece that I think ties a lot of what we're talking about together.
Yeah, thanks so much, Carrie. And in some ways, the reason why this is all complementary is that we focus a lot on the desk side of the research. But I'd love for you to share a little more around the conversations and discussions that you have and sort of in this broader Own Your Worth cover and umbrella.
I mean, what are you seeing are the specific needs in terms of wealth management that that will help women can come closer to the financial table and really take take a sit, sit, sit in there for a long time? Sure. Yeah.
Look, I mean, at the end of the day, every investor is unique. Women, men, we all have different goals, different concerns, different personal stories and backgrounds when it comes to money, different things that we want out of life and different visions for how our wealth will help us get there. So, you know, there's not necessarily specific needs that women investors have necessarily.
But and Amantia, I know you and your team have explored this extensively. There are certain demographic trends and certain trends in the data that we see that impact women differently on average and specific data points that point to ways in which wealth advice can potentially be geared toward women in a way that might resonate better with them. So I think that's that's sort of what we see in the work that we do.
So take, for example, the demographic trend of longer life expectancy for women. We all know that women tend to live longer on average than men by about five, six years. So that means that as women, our savings need to stretch for a longer period of time in retirement.
So certainly that should be a component of wealth advice that is provided. Right. As should the question of long term care planning, knowing that for married women, they're more likely to outlive their spouse for single women.
They will also be on their own as they age. So what does that look like in terms of a woman's financial plan into the future? You know, as she navigates that phase of her life or plans to navigate that phase of her life?
So that would be one specific example. We also know in the U.S. that women tend to, on average, take on more of the burden of caregiving, whether that's for children or aging parents or other loved ones. So how does that impact your financial plan?
You know, if you are working, if you are a part of the workforce, are you taking time away from the workforce? Are your earnings and therefore your savings impacted? Or potentially, are you actually spending more of your wealth on providing care to loved ones?
So those are all considerations that ultimately should be taken account into account when providing advice to someone in that position. There's also a lot of research and again, sort of generalizing because every woman is different, every man is different, every investor is different, but there is a lot of research and Amantia, the chief investment office, has published pieces on this that shows that women tend to be more focused on investing to achieve specific goals, particularly longer term goals, rather than being focused on performance alone. And women also tend to be more risk aware than their male counterparts.
Again, not necessarily risk averse. There's a lot of industry data that says that, but we like to say it's actually risk awareness. It's wanting to understand what the risk is and what the potential reward is before making that decision.
So it's really more of an awareness, understanding the big picture, how the risk ties to the goal. So those are some of the differences that we see and things that I think are important to talk about. So while there aren't necessarily specific needs that women investors have, there are certain things that we tend to see resonate more or impact women more specifically that tie back to the type of wealth advice that we try to offer in helping them navigate their financial lives, wherever they might be on their financial journey.
Yeah, I love that. Dan started out by noting our framework in this report of investment for women, in women and by women. And I think, Carrie, you're doing two things here.
You're talking about the investment by women, women as wealth owners and kind of the way that they make decisions. But also what you're doing is you're giving this masterclass example of how investment for women, in other words, in companies which know how to serve the needs of women as a population, really would look like as analysis. So this can apply in financial services broadly.
But the similar analysis applies to investments in education, in health care, where really it's not about thinking about men and women as different, you know, species almost. But it's really about contextualizing where someone wants to receive a service, what is the specific service that they need and how their different context is different. And in our view, investment for women requires this kind of analysis across sectors.
And if done correctly, could identify new opportunities which would be hard to spot otherwise. I think you're exactly right. Well, with that, Amantia, Carrie, thank you both very much for joining us here on Market Moves to spotlight this very important and actionable research.
Again, I do want to point our listeners and clients to the report which we have been making reference to today, A Gender Lens Investment, The State of Women in 2025, which is now available for you. For UBS clients, please be sure to reach out to your UBS financial advisor to receive a copy directly. I also want to highlight the website, ubs.com forward slash women.
On that page, you can locate all research resources and solutions as it relates to UBS's Own Your Worth initiative, though. Amantia, Carrie, thank you both again for your time today. Appreciate it.
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