Sallie Krawcheck’s biggest piece of advice for women investors is simple: Invest some money. Any amount of money.
“Just do it,” she tells CNBC Make It. “Put in $10, or $100, or $1,000, but get in the game.”
When it comes to investing, Krawcheck’s track record speaks for itself. She began her career on Wall Street as a research analyst and climbed the ranks to become one of the male-dominated industry’s first female CEOs, in 2001.
After Wall Street CEO and CFO jobs at places like Citibank and Smith Barney, Krawcheck co-founded Ellevest, a digital investment and wealth management platform, in 2014. It’s similar to competitors like Robinhood, but specifically for women investors.
“My advice to women investors is find a place — I hope it’s Ellevest — where you trust them, and just get in the water,” Krawcheck says. Investing particularly matters if you’re keeping all your money in a savings account, because it can make you more money in the long run, even if it comes with more risk, she added.
Krawcheck’s inspiration for starting Ellevest was the country’s massive gender investing gap, she says: Women are almost half as likely to invest their money as men, an Ellevest study found last year.
If women invested at the same rates as men, there would be an additional $3.2 trillion in assets under management, according to a 2021 report from BNY Mellon Investment Management.
It’s “a huge problem” that doesn’t get enough attention, Krawcheck says. “If we don’t fix this, it’s the women who end up in poverty at the end of their lives [and] who don’t live the lives they want to.”
On average, U.S. women are paid less than 84 cents on the dollar compared to men, according to Department of Labor data. There’s another reason why men are more likely to invest than women, too: confidence.
One in 10 women say they don’t fully understand investing, and only about 28% feel confident investing, the BNY Mellon report noted. “There’s a pressure for perfection with women,” says Krawcheck. “Women will not invest if they don’t understand, [but] men will invest anyway.”
The good news for women is that times are changing. Nearly three-fourths of millennial women in the U.S. are investing in more than just their retirement accounts, according to a 2021 Fidelity study, suggesting that younger women are gaining investing confidence.
Fidelity’s female customers earned 0.4% more than male customers annually, on average, the same report found. One theory to explain it: Male investors’ overconfidence could actually lead them to make riskier investments that are are less likely to pan out.
That trend is good news for a platform like Ellevest, which has raised $144 million in funding since launching and manages more than $1.5 billion in assets from women investors.
And it could help level the financial playing field. Men have only been “better off because they were in the game,” Krawcheck says.
