Contributed by Armi Matienzo
Men have dominated the day trading profession for years, but even as the number of women traders has steadily increased, the gender inequality is still very apparent in today’s trading and investing world.
My colleague Lauren Snedeker and I are the only female members of TradeGuider Systems International, a computer software company that provides analysis tools and methodology education for day traders. Our goal is to see if we can quickly learn how to day trade and get more women motivated to begin day trading by documenting our own learning process and thoughts in our blog.
Our idea was provoked by the content in TradeGuider’s customer database – recently I wanted to get an understanding of the company’s client base. It turned out that 97% of them were men.
I wanted to get a feel for why women would be put off by day trading. Lots of money can be made in this profession and I didn’t understand why it is always portrayed as such a male dominated world. After doing a little research, I found that many studies have shown that due to women’s psychological structure, we are sometimes turned off by the known risk factor involved. But since we are more cautious, that, in fact, makes us better at trading.
On average, men are three times more likely than women to risk losing all of their savings when investing or trading, according to a survey from National Savings, the birthplace of E-mini trading.
Also, according to a study conducted by the University of California of 35,000 brokerage accounts, on average, women make 1.5% higher returns than men and single women make 2.2% more than their single male counterparts.
Willing to Take the Risk
Managing ChangeMen have dominated the day trading profession for years, but even as the number of women traders has steadily increased, the gender inequality is still very apparent in today’s trading and investing world.
My colleague Lauren Snedeker and I are the only female members of TradeGuider Systems International, a computer software company that provides analysis tools and methodology education for day traders. Our goal is to see if we can quickly learn how to day trade and get more women motivated to begin day trading by documenting our own learning process and thoughts in our blog.
Our idea was provoked by the content in TradeGuider’s customer database – recently I wanted to get an understanding of the company’s client base. It turned out that 97% of them were men.
I wanted to get a feel for why women would be put off by day trading. Lots of money can be made in this profession and I didn’t understand why it is always portrayed as such a male dominated world. After doing a little research, I found that many studies have shown that due to women’s psychological structure, we are sometimes turned off by the known risk factor involved. But since we are more cautious, that, in fact, makes us better at trading.
On average, men are three times more likely than women to risk losing all of their savings when investing or trading, according to a survey from National Savings, the birthplace of E-mini trading.
Also, according to a study conducted by the University of California of 35,000 brokerage accounts, on average, women make 1.5% higher returns than men and single women make 2.2% more than their single male counterparts.
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Negotiation November: Five Tips to Remember Next Time You Negotiate a Raise
Office PoliticsBy Robin Madell
Negotiating for higher compensation can be stressful even under the best of circumstances. But in times of economic uncertainty, broaching the subject of a raise from your employer can feel even more daunting. You may feel lucky to have a job at your level, or in your industry, at all.
But just because the economy is suffering financially doesn’t mean that you must do so too. With companies short-staffed and tightening their belts, each employee becomes even more valuable. The trick is in getting your employer to recognize your worth and reward you accordingly.
“Traditionally, women are better at negotiating for their companies than for themselves,” says attorney and mediator Cynthia Pasciuto of legal consulting firm True North Business Consulting. “They do not ask for as much money as they should.” To help you avoid that problem and improve your chances for a successful outcome, keep the following five tips in mind the next time you negotiate for a raise.
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Five Easy Ways to Build Your Confidence at Work
Office PoliticsEvery working woman faces challenges on the way to reaching her professional goals. And sometimes, the biggest obstacles are internal ones. In the pursuit of success, confidence is key—but it’s not always easy to stomp out the inner voices that preach self-doubt.
To gain some insight, we spoke with Patricia Werhane, director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics at DePaul University and a co-author of “Women in Business: The Changing Face of Leadership.” The book is based on interviews with 22 female professionals, all at the top of their fields.
What did these leaders have in common? “They’re utterly fearless,” said Werhane. “Many of them are in fields where it’s almost all men, and they pay no attention to that.” Powerful women like these can make success look easy, but insecurities nag at even the best of us. These five tips can help you put negative thoughts aside.
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Voice of Experience: Charlotte Crosswell, President of Nasdaq OMX Europe
Voices of Experience“You should hear some of the stories we share,” said Charlotte Crosswell, President of NASDAQ OMX Europe, about discussions she has with other senior level women.
“Like staying up until one in the morning making cupcakes with New York [executives] on speakerphone from my blackberry. You have to really want a career and children.”
It is a Tuesday morning and Crosswell is sitting across from me at a coffee table at the Hilton hotel in Chicago. She flew in from London that Sunday night, had plans to fly to New York the following day and then back to London on Thursday.
While being a mother is somewhat new to Crosswell (her daughter is three years old), the business travel is something she has been doing for most of her career. Crosswell has been all over the world from China to Israel developing business for two prominent Exchanges.
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Intrepid Woman: Leaning In – A New Graduate in the Real World
Intrepid Women SeriesThis past May, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, stood in front of me and told me to “lean in.” To jump in, make a change, think big, to “pick a field…and ride it all the way to the top.” It was Barnard College’s graduation ceremony, and all around me were 600 women who, just like me, had completed their education. We had, over the past four years been trained to believe in ourselves as women, as leaders, as intellectuals, as scientists, as writers, as human beings who could make a difference. And Sandberg stood in front of us and told us that yes, there were still inequalities in the work place, but we were poised to make changes.
Her speech was replayed across the country – it was a main photo of the New York Times, it was mentioned in the Huffington Post, Forbes said that she “crushed it.” It was described as a speech for the ages, the one that would be remembered, the most influential one of the graduation speeches that year. It was the speech that sent Barnard College’s class of 2011 off into the great world, and we were ready for it.
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Developing Your Personal Work-Life Balance
NewsIn her book The See-saw: 100 Ideas for Work-Life Balance, Julia Hobsbawn speaks from experience. As a working mother with five young children and a young business, Hobsbawn had spent had spent a long time working extremely hard on finding her priorities and her own work-life balance. “I realized that the metaphor I came back to in my mind was one of a see-saw, constantly having ups and downs,” she recalls. “And I couldn’t find a book which expressed in the words of women like me but also some men, what this time feels like, in which we have everything but are also so overloaded we often feel empty of power or opportunity,” she adds.
The result is a practical, upbeat book that addresses a critical issue in today’s society. While some people still refer to it as “work-life balance,” others have begun using phrases like “work-life effectiveness” and “work life fit.” New York University sociologist Dalton Conley has coined a further term called the “weisure” principle, which underlines the blurring of the line between work and leisure. According to Conley, the 24-7 life of “weisure” is the next step in the evolving work-life culture.
Regardless of the terminology, however, what remains true is that work-life issues are a challenge for many people, men and women alike. As Hobsbawn notes, “what matters in the end is not the language – it is the meaning of our actions.” She herself prefers words like “efficiency” and “fitness” because they describe a positive work-life balance. But how exactly do we achieve a successful work-life balance?
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Benchmarking Progress: The Gender Equality Project’s Next Phase
Industry Leaders, Leadership“We’ve been working on our own journey of promoting and measuring progress in gender equality,” explained Pamela Craig, CFO of Accenture. “We’ve always been interested in a global approach – and there are differences among countries. For example, in the Philippines we have a long history of women in leadership. But in other locations – like Japan – it’s more challenging.”
Craig continued, “That’s why it was interesting at this year’s World Economic Forum to hear from Nicole [Schwab], who very much has a global approach – to get to a global standard. It was inspiring to hear her vision and how it’s evolved.”
The Gender Equality Project (TGEP) was launched earlier this year at Davos, with the goal of helping global companies measure gender equality quantitatively and qualitatively across national borders and cultures.
“The approach to TGEP is extremely thoughtful, in terms of how it is intended to measure progress and understand what equivalency is. It is thought-provoking. For me, the light bulb just went on,” she explained.
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Op Ed: What If Being Authentic Was Your Ticket To The Top?
Expert AnswersThere’s no snappy research study to prove that “just being yourself” is every woman’s ticket to upper management, but I believe it’s true. I’m going to make a good argument for it in this article, and why – when your head hits the glass ceiling and “playing by the rules” isn’t working – tapping into your unique personal power is an awesome hammer.
There’s a lot of research coming out that paints a dismal picture of women’s chances of getting into top leadership posts. Here’s a small sampling:
This data, plus the ever present equal pay dilemma make it hard to find the silver lining in being a woman aspiring to leadership positions these days.
However, there is tons of evidence that women in leadership actually help companies perform better than those with fewer women up top.
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How to Manage Young Professional Women: 5 Tips for Female Supervisors
Managing ChangeIn the last few years, a significant portion of the 70 million Generation Y individuals has entered the workforce – and studies show that this new generation of employees is unique: Gen Y are both high-maintenance, but also high-performance.
Gen Y employees are known to be excellent team-players, multitaskers, and innovators. However, they are also known to be fickle, demanding, and selfish when unmotivated in a job. That is why the manager’s role in the workplace has ever increasing importance on the Millenials’ retention and performance. Here are five things you can do as a female manager to get your junior employee to perform at her best.
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10 Tips from Dual-Career Couples Who Are Making It Work
Work-LifeIn 1970, 30 percent of children under the age of six had both parents working outside of the home. According to Catalyst, the amount of dual-earner marriages is now closer to 80 percent and that number is only expected to increase as more families seek out greater economic security. We’ve had over half a century to get used to the idea that both partners in a family can be career-focused while also maintaining a happy, healthy home life.
But as Marie Wilson, Founder of the White House Project recently mentioned, each generation of women is told that they need to return to the home for the sake of the family. In the 1980s, she said it was the “new traditionalists,” who were featured in glossy magazines discussing how they’ve left their high-level jobs to tend to their homes and children. According to Wilson, “the pictures and magazine covers were alluring, inviting women to join the exodus.” Later on, the tactic was fear. How could anyone forget the 1986 Newsweek article about the poor marriage prospects of educated women over 40 that included the line, “Women over 40 are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than find a husband”?
And in the early 2000s we learned about the so-called Opt-Out Revolution, a term coined by Lisa Belkin in her now infamous New York Times piece. Today we see reports of radical homemakers and homesteaders of the green movement, which are urging women to make their homes the center of their lives by opting out of “consumer culture.”
In fact, we rarely see portraits of women as career-focused as their partners. That needs to change. Here are profiles of thriving dual-career couples – and ten tips for making it work.
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