Knowledge. Shared Blog

January 2020

How to Help Female Clients Advocate for Themselves Financially

Women tend to have different negotiating styles compared with men, particularly when it comes to financial issues like salary requirements. Lindsay Troxell, Director, Knowledge Labs® Professional Development, explains why it’s important for financial professionals – and the financial industry as a whole – to understand these differences to help female clients advocate for themselves financially.

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Lindsay Troxell: Women and negotiations is such an important topic, especially in the world of financial services. It’s important to advisors, both men and women, to understand how negotiating with women specifically, let’s say that you’re trying to bring a new female into your business, how women do negotiate differently. We have a responsibility to understand that and not continue to stack the deck against women in a way that holds us back.

So, the wage gap, being that we are paid 80 cents on the dollar to our male counterparts, is a pretty significant one. What we find is that economically, men are much better at negotiating in terms of profit to their bottom lines, whereas women are leaving so much money on the table.

When we’re negotiating, when we’re sitting at the table especially for pay and initial employment, we’re not necessarily feeling as though we have the ability to negotiate all forms of that employment agreement. So, we think of, traditionally, the salary as being what we can negotiate. But we don’t always necessarily know, what are the parameters for that? What I think is really interesting is that women, once they are fully educated, once they have all of the facts, they’re better positioned to negotiate on their own behalf.

The other thing that’s really interesting is that, as women, we tend to be better at negotiating for others. So if we go into that negotiation both thinking that, you know, “I’m negotiating not necessarily just on my own behalf, but maybe on the behalf of my family and what we need as a family unit,” or, “I’m negotiating in order to put myself maybe into a new role and how that would benefit the organization as a whole,” we end up doing better in that negotiation.

So, I see that our industry is changing in such a significant way, specifically, clients are no longer looking just for you to manage a portfolio of their assets; they’re looking for you to help educate them on behavioral finance. This is one of those areas that you can have a huge impact so quickly if you help women to understand, “Here’s how we negotiate differently, and here are some of the things that you can do in order to better your circumstance.”

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