Young women are increasingly investing their money in ETFs.
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Frankfurt As free of emotions as possible and with a focus on maximizing utility – this is what science wants investors to do. But how someone actually invests money depends on various factors. An important criterion is gender, according to a representative study by the market research company Puls on behalf of Quirin Privatbank.
“Compared to men, women save less often and less, they are afraid of losses and find investment issues stressful,” says Carolin Nawroth from Quirin Bank. 54 percent of the women surveyed are currently not investing any money. Among men, the proportion of “non-investors” is 37 percent.
According to the study, the fact that women invest less often is due not only to the lower average income but also to their financial literacy. Although the level of financial education nationwide is the same regardless of gender, says Puls Managing Director Konrad Wessner.
However, men and women rate their financial education differently: “A man reads a specialist article about investing and thinks he knows everything. A woman reads five books on investing and still feels undereducated.”
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The consequences of this self-assessment can be seen, for example, in the fact that 37 percent of men invest in individual stocks and almost one in five men surveyed stated that they also had cryptocurrencies in their portfolio. Only 17 percent of women have individual titles in their portfolios and only five percent rely on bitcoins or other cryptos.
Young women tend to invest more in the capital markets
On the other hand, women and men agree on money market and time deposit accounts. They are the most popular investment products for both: 44 percent of women and 45 percent of men use them. But already in second place of the most popular investments, the picture is divided. Here, women are more likely to rely on funds (42 percent) and men on individual stocks (just over 37 percent). In third place are savings accounts for women (35 percent) and funds for men (37 percent).
However, a trend reversal is apparently in the offing for the most popular investments. Young women are more concerned with investments and tend to save more on the capital markets. Almost a third of the women surveyed in the 16 to 25 and 26 to 41 age groups invest their money in ETFs and tend to ignore “classic” products such as insurance, which currently bring little returns.
However, there were also differences among the women surveyed when it came to investing. Broken down according to income and level of education, the results were to be expected, according to Carolin Nawroth: educated women with higher incomes are more likely to invest than women with lower educational qualifications and lower incomes.
Political leanings also play a role when investing. Broken down according to party preference, it shows that voters from the Left Party and AfD rarely invest. 70 percent of AfD sympathizers hold back when investing. More than half of the women who vote for the FDP, the Union or the Greens each invest.
More: KfW study: Almost only male-led start-ups receive venture capital