Putting money into the hands of women
Simran Kaur is an authority when it comes to empowering women financially and she’s coming to Queenstown in June for the Westpac Queenstown Women in Business Conference. She wrote Girls that Invest and now runs the business of the same name with Sonya Gupthan. The pair produce a podcast and offer an investing course that provides tailored investing education to tackle the wealth gap women are facing.
The Girls that Invest website (girlsthatinvest.com) reports that men worldwide typically hold 50% more wealth than women, and only 15-25% of women are investing – Simran recognised the discrepancies and wanted to help. The business was a Covid baby, born in 2020 after the stock market drop in March when Simran noticed that many people around her weren’t as financially educated as she had thought.
“The conversations around it were very fear related – there was a lot of fear-mongering, there was a lot of ‘Oh, I should pull out my KiwiSaver and move it from a growth fund to a conservative fund because I’ve lost $2,000’. When you have financial literacy, I think you can make less fear-based decisions and realise these are the steps, this is quite normal – the markets usually drop,” says Kaur.
“Girls that Invest just came from a place of; okay, what can I do to help make this more accessible? I think the main issue was not that people aren’t smart enough – that’s not the concern whatsoever – it’s more that the information has never felt like it is for the everyday person, or didn’t feel like it was for specifically women or minorities. I just wanted to create some kind of community or resource where people feel like; this is for me, I can learn this information and it’s actually not that hard.”
Girls that Invest has seen the Kiwi entrepreneur talk at TEDx US and the UK House of Parliament. The podcast has amassed over 2.5m downloads, becoming the world’s #1 investing podcast for women. Simran says the feedback has been amazing – she hears from people wishing they had access to this years ago and saying they’re feeling empowered to make their own financial decisions.
“I think when you feel like you know something or when you have access to that language that maybe professionals use, you just have a sense that you’re on this journey with your advisor or with a professional, as opposed to feeling they’re just telling me what to do and I have to blindly trust them.”
Recently the podcast has introduced a new segment – Girls that Business. Once a week, Simran and Sonya de-jargon how to start a business and how they’ve gone about it. “Only 2% of women of colour run businesses that reach the seven-figure mark – because we’ve been able to do it, we believe there’s a duty in sharing how and making it less uncommon.”
Simran is excited to return to Queenstown and to present at the conference. It’s where she came to write her best-selling book, so the town holds a special place in her heart.
“Westpac have always done a lot of good work, like the awards that they do, to encourage female entrepreneurship. I really believe that you cannot become what you don’t see and if we don’t get access to seeing how other people that look like us or sound like us achieve things, then you almost just think, well, it’s not in the cards for me,” says Kaur.
You can catch Simran at the Women in Business Conference on Friday 16 June.
