Closing The Gender Gap

A mighty effort is being expended in the world of mutual funds these days to talk to women about investing.

You can pick up the message at in-person seminars or World Wide Web sites, on radio and television - even from old-fashioned ink-on-paper books and brochures: Women as a group need to get better at the business of managing money, and mutual funds provide one way to help them achieve that purpose.

Some of this isn’t much more than promotional hype. But behind the drum-beating lies a serious and important story, say some top fund industry officials - women themselves - who have put in considerable time studying the subject.

“Women tend to be less knowledgeable, less confident and less active than men than they need to be,” says Bridget Macaskill, chief executive at the New York firm of OppenheimerFunds Inc., where she has run a broad national program of seminars and other educational efforts directed at women since the early 1990s.

“They tend to say, ‘I don’t want to deal with it,”’ she added during at an interview at the annual convention of the fund industry’s biggest trade group, the Investment Company Institute.

“Women need a fire lit under them big-time,” said Michelle Smith, managing director of the Mutual Fund Education Alliance, a Kansas City-based association of funds marketed directly to investors, in a separate interview.

Since the May 1 launch of a program for women at the alliance’s site on the World Wide Web (www.mfea.com), Smith said the site has had about 1,200 visitors a day, compared to about 700 beforehand.

She said that testifies, along with much other recent evidence, that a keen appetite exists for efforts of this type.

For any skeptic who questions whether women need to be addressed separately from men on a subject that seems so gender-neutral, both Macaskill and Smith have ready answers.

“I do not believe at all in singling out women for special treatment,” Macaskill says.

Or in Smith’s words, “I don’t think women need a different message, tied up in a pink bow. If you try to do that sort of thing, women take offense, and justifiably so.”