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On my IG profile I declare myself many things - a book lover, a [newbie] crocheter - but most importantly, for me - a financial feminist.
You've heard of the good old 'feminist' definition right? A person who believes in the equality of all genders. A financial feminist is obviously then, someone who believes in the financial equality of women.
I'm a major advocate of being smart with your money - especially as a youth - and most especially as a Pacific woman.
Why? Because Pacific women are not on a level playing field with our men when it comes to financial education or business savvy.
I spoke at length about this on another blog, about a pet peeve I have on the masculinisation of our money in Pacific societies. Have a read of it, if you haven't yet.
There, I lightly skirted the social/cultural norms and nuances of our Pacific cultures and expanded to a global scale of how our gender impacts our financial choices, and futures.
Unsure what this means when I say there is inequality when it comes to women and money?
Think the pink tax, the wage gap, the funding gap, the domestic work, the investing gap. Then there's the confidence gap between men and women.
If I counted just those impediments, that's already half a dozen ways society has intentionally or not, already set us up to fail.
Unsure what those impediments are, or how they affect our lives? Not sure what the Pink Tax is, for example. You could Google it, but I thought I'd give you an actual example of what its like.
This post by a page I follow, came up in my news feed yesterday.
The pink tax, as you would have read if you clicked on the embedded link above, is what happens when women are charged more on products that are sold to men. Sometimes thousands more - in the example above, that was (albeit unintentional, according to the producer) 186% more than what was charged for the boy's product.
These impediments are often hard to pick out, when seen and encountered on an almost daily basis. But they need to be culled.
All up though, the gender inequity in finances is one of the main reasons I started my blog.
I refuse to have my peers and those in the generations after us, struggle through the same cycles of insufficiency that we have been raised in - whether directly or indirectly.
So I call myself a financial feminist, because I want my peers to have access to resources that I did not have. If there aren't any, I want to make some available for them. To help them understand concepts that I had to struggle through. And to make choices with their money that I would have made too, IF I had been given the same knowledge when I was their age.
I think the most important start to that is creating tools and resources that can help a young, Pacific youth (and most importantly, a woman) make smart financial choices and I'm on a mission to create these and contextualise them to our context.
Watch this space...