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The problem with women and financial advice is rarely what is said outright. It is what quietly happens in the room: who gets the eye contact, who gets the technical explanation, who is treated as the real client. That may sound like a matter of tone. Increasingly, it looks like something more serious — and something women pay for.

The meeting starts well enough. A woman sits down with her partner opposite a neatly turned-out adviser in a glass meeting room. There is coffee and a reassuring mention of “long-term goals”. The adviser is perfectly pleasant. He says “we” a lot.

Then the conversation settles into its real shape. When he explains how the portfolio is positioned, he turns slightly towards the man. When he talks about tax wrappers, withdrawals or asset allocation, the technical language becomes denser and the eye contact stays in the same place. She is asked how she feels. He is asked what he thinks. She gets the softer questions. He gets the decisive ones.

No one would call it sexist. That is what makes it hard to challenge. There is no crude remark, no raised eyebrow, no suggestion that the technical bits are beyond her. There is a steady drift in attention, language and assumption until one person is treated as the lead client and the other as an interested guest. Sometimes the follow-up email tells the story better than the meeting did. It goes to him first, copied to her. The action points are framed for his reply.

That may be more than an awkward social habit. It may be the visible edge of something deeper.

What the German evidence shows

The anchor study is Bucher-Koenen et al. (2025), published in the American Economic Review. The researchers examined around 27,000 advisory meetings at a large German bank. Even after controlling for clients’ stated risk tolerance, women were less likely to be recommended pure equity funds and more likely to be steered towards the bank’s own balanced funds — a more profitable retail product. They were also less likely to receive rebates on upfront sales charges.

The rebate finding matters most. If women were merely ending up in different products, an adviser could plausibly claim some difference in objectives or risk appetite. But here the gap appeared on the same fund, within the same bank. The product was identical. The fee was not.

The authors’ explanation is “statistical discrimination”. The phrase is academic, but the idea is simple: advisers use gender as a shortcut for financial sophistication. If they assume women are less likely to detect poor-value advice, push back on fees or challenge a recommendation, they have an incentive to offer advice that is more self-serving. Tellingly, the study found that female advisers discriminated less than male ones — but they were not immune.

The British version of the problem

Britain is not Germany. After the Retail Distribution Review, the UK largely moved away from adviser commission on advised retail investment products, so the German pattern of fee rebates does not map neatly across. But the bias does not disappear. It works through different mechanisms.

Baeckström, Marsh and Silvester (2021) isolate one of them: the judgement problem. In studies of UK advisers handling affluent-client scenarios, equivalent female clients were judged less knowledgeable and less in control than male clients, and were more likely to be steered towards lower-risk portfolios. In a separate study of wealthy UK investors, the adviser mix mattered too: women with male advisers reported lower confidence and lower perceived knowledge, and invested about 11 percentage points less than women with female advisers, holding more in cash instead. What gets written off as female caution, in other words, may sometimes be shaped by the advisory setting itself.

The invisible client

In the UK, women are often sidelined inside the meeting rather than shut out of it: present, included, copied into the email, but not treated as the centre of the relationship. Schroders and Ad Lucem found that 45 per cent of advisers said the male partner was their primary contact, and two-thirds admitted they found it difficult to engage both partners properly.

This arrangement can stay hidden for years. As long as a couple is stable, one partner can handle the calls and the paperwork while the other seems included without ever really owning the advice. The reviews happen. The portfolio rolls on. The imbalance looks harmless.

Then life changes. Widowhood, divorce, inheritance and the late-life handover of responsibility are when the cost becomes visible. The woman treated as the secondary client is suddenly expected to lead a relationship she never fully built. She may inherit a portfolio she did not shape, a fee structure she did not negotiate and an adviser she was never encouraged to challenge.

The UK evidence suggests this is exactly where the cracks open — and where firms are most deluded about their own grip. Schroders and Ad Lucem found that only 34 per cent of women said they would stay with the family adviser after the death of a spouse or on divorce. Advisers thought 62 per cent would remain. Many firms believe they have built a relationship with both partners when, in reality, they have mainly built one with him.

Where bias meets bad value

Bias sits inside a wealth-management market that often struggles to justify its cost. Y TREE’s Plugged Into Wealth Management 2026 report analysed more than 550 portfolios across 110 providers, measured against an objective, risk-matched benchmark, net of fees. It found that 84 per cent underperformed. Across the three years to 2025, the average shortfall was 4.9 per cent a year.

Most clients never see the gap. In a poll commissioned for the report, 96 per cent of high-net-worth investors said they were confident their portfolio had performed well, and nearly half did not know what they were paying. As Stuart Cash of Y TREE puts it: “Underperformance compounds in silence. Nobody sends you a letter telling you what you’ve lost. The wealth manager who delivered it is still being paid, the client is still being told things are going well, and the gap quietly widens year after year.”

Bias and poor value reinforce each other. A woman positioned as the less technical partner is less likely to be brought properly into the conversations where costs, benchmarks and implementation choices are tested. She is, in other words, the client most exposed to the underperformance — and the one the process has quietly kept out of the conversations where it could be caught.

The cost is measured in time

Here is what the courteous meeting never gets to. The most important variable in that woman’s financial life is not the fund she holds. It is how long the money has to last — and underperformance, left alone, does its real damage over time.

A 4.9 per cent annual shortfall sounds survivable in any given year. Compounded across a lifetime it is not. On a £1 million portfolio held from age 65, against a risk-equivalent benchmark returning a moderate 6.5 per cent, that drag costs roughly £2.4 million in foregone wealth over a woman’s remaining life expectancy. The same benchmark, the same shortfall, simply allowed to run.

And women run it for longer. ONS figures for 2022 to 2024 put life expectancy at 65 at 21.2 years for women against 18.7 for men. Those extra two and a half years are not a rounding error; they are two and a half more years of the same underperformance compounding. Hold everything else equal — same portfolio, same drag, same starting age — and the longer horizon alone costs a woman around £500,000 more than a man. Half the starting portfolio, lost to nothing but living longer with advice that was never built for the distance.

This is not an abstraction. Of the wealth expected to pass between spouses in the coming decades, more than 95 per cent in the US is projected to end up with women, who live longer and tend to marry men older still. The discretionary portfolio a woman inherits at 65 may have been sized for a younger version of her late husband’s risk tolerance and built around his time horizon. Divorce produces the same mismatch by another route: a portfolio shaped by two risk tolerances and a shared set of liabilities carries on serving neither, because unpicking it is the last thing anyone wants to do after a divorce. The drag keeps running. Nobody writes a cheque for it. Somebody pays.

What good advice should look like

The obvious industry response is more pink-washed marketing: softer language, a confidence seminar, a page on the website about women and money. That may change the atmosphere. It does not fix the advice.

The practical response is less glamorous: fewer assumptions, clearer engagement with both partners, pricing clients can actually understand, and independent measurement of outcomes against a proper benchmark. Structured process does not eliminate bias on its own, but it gives advisers fewer opportunities to fall back on instinct or stereotype. It also helps to move advice away from product distribution. The moment an adviser is paid to sell, package or retain assets, the client is no longer the only interest in the room.

But the deeper fix is to change the question advice is built around. The conventional question is which products to hold and which index to beat. The better one is what the money actually has to do: fund a retirement that will outlast the average man’s, absorb a transition she did not choose, pass wealth to the next generation.

That is what asset-liability management is for. Borrowed from the institutional world that runs pension funds and insurers, ALM does not start with a peer group or an index. It starts with the obligations the portfolio has to meet, and builds against them. Three things follow. Advice is separated from the products it recommends, so the adviser’s incentives line up with the client’s. Performance is measured against an investible, risk-equivalent benchmark, so the question “how am I really doing?” can finally be answered. And the portfolio is sized to her liabilities, not to someone else’s risk tolerance inherited by accident.

Built this way, advice is gender-blind precisely where it matters. It does not assume what wealthy women want, because it does not need to guess. As Stuart Cash says: “We don’t have a women’s proposition at Y TREE. We have a proposition. The reason it serves women well is that it’s built around what the client actually needs, not around what the industry has historically been comfortable selling.”

What women need is not “financial advice for women”. They need advice that is objective, measurable and rooted in evidence rather than industry hunches.

Back to the meeting room

The adviser was courteous and the coffee was decent. Yet one person was treated as the owner of the plan and the other as a supporting character in it. At the start, that might have looked like a small social slight. In value terms it is not small now.

The drift in eye contact, the technical shorthand aimed at him, the softer questions aimed at her, the follow-up built around the wrong person — these are sometimes the visible signs of a lower standard of advice, delivered to the person who will live with it the longest.

In a good meeting, the conversation would not have settled around the man. It would have been built around the reality that both people matter, both need to understand the trade-offs, and both must leave able to decide on equal terms. And it would have started with the only question that really counts: how long does this money have to last, and what life does it have to pay for?

A note on the figures

The lifetime cost figures model the report’s trailing three-year average shortfall (4.9% a year) projected across a full horizon, against a risk-equivalent benchmark assumed to return 6.5% a year — the same rate that reproduces the published examples in Plugged Into Wealth Management 2026. Horizons use ONS period life expectancy at age 65 (21.2 years for women, 18.7 for men). The £500,000 figure isolates the longevity component only: identical £1m portfolio, identical drag, identical starting age, differing solely by horizon.

Sources

Baeckström, Y., Marsh, I. W., & Silvester, J. (2021). Financial advice and gender: Wealthy individual investors in the UK. Journal of Corporate Finance, 71, Article 101882.
Baeckström, Y., Marsh, I. W., & Silvester, J. (2021). Variations in investment advice provision: A study of financial advisors of millionaire investors. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 188, 716–735.
Bucher-Koenen, T., Hackethal, A., Koenen, J., & Laudenbach, C. (2025). Gender differences in financial advice. American Economic Review, 115(12), 4218–4252.
Cerulli Associates. (2025). U.S. high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth markets.
Office for National Statistics. (2025). National life tables: Life expectancy in the UK, 2022 to 2024.
Schroders & Ad Lucem. (2024, March). Women and financial advice: Adviser perspectives. Schroders.
Scottish Widows & Boring Money. (2025). Women and wealth: Building better advice relationships. Scottish Widows.
Y TREE. (2026). Plugged into wealth management 2026. Y TREE.

About the author

Robin Powell

Journalist, author and financial consumer advocate

Robin is an award-winning journalist and and financial consumer advocate. He spent most of his career in mainstream broadcast journalism, working as a news reporter and documentary maker for ITV News and ITV Sport, and later for Sky News and the BBC.