If you’ve ever felt like everyone else understands investing except you, it might help to know that isn’t remotely true, it’s just that a lot of people are quietly bluffing. Survey after survey finds the same striking pattern in the UK: women are considerably less likely than men to describe themselves as confident investors, not because they’re less capable, but because almost nobody ever showed them how the whole thing actually works.
This is the last in a short series we’ve written about the gap between how men and women invest in this country. The first looked at the gender pension gap, the second at why women hold more in cash than in the stock market. This one asks the question underneath both of those: why does the confidence gap exist in the first place, and what actually closes it.
What the confidence gap actually looks like
The numbers are genuinely stark. Research from Aviva has found only around a third of women describe themselves as confident investors, compared with well over half of men. HSBC’s own research found a similar split, with roughly two in three women saying they simply don’t know how to begin investing, against under half of men saying the same. Boring Money, which tracks the wider gender investment gap every year, has found the value gap between what men and women hold in investments and pensions now runs into the hundreds of billions of pounds, a gap that has widened rather than closed over the past few years.
What’s striking about this data isn’t the size of the gap. It’s how little of it seems to come down to actual ability or opportunity. Wealthify’s research into people who have money to invest but haven’t started found the overwhelming majority of hesitant women simply didn’t know where to begin, not that they’d looked into it and decided against it. That’s a solvable problem, and solvable problems are the ones worth writing about.
Where the confidence gap comes from
None of this happens in a vacuum, and understanding where it comes from makes it considerably easier to ignore.
The industry hasn’t helped. For decades, investment products, platforms and even the language used to describe them were built around a customer profile that assumed prior knowledge, comfort with risk and, more often than not, a man. If every explainer you come across assumes you already understand what a fund is, it’s no wonder the whole subject feels closed off rather than open.
The cultural script runs differently for men and women. Boys are more often encouraged to “have a go,” take a punt, learn by doing. Girls are more often steered toward caution and certainty. Neither instinct is wrong in isolation, but only one of them produces confident investors by the time real financial decisions start to matter.
Nobody teaches this at school, for anyone, but the gap in what happens afterward is telling. One in three women in Wealthify’s research pointed directly to a lack of financial education as the reason they don’t feel confident, and without a foundation, the natural response to an unfamiliar and jargon-heavy subject is to leave it alone rather than dive in.
Mythbusting: the five things that hold people back
Most of the hesitation comes down to a handful of beliefs that sound reasonable but don’t hold up once you look at them properly.
“You need to be an expert to start.” You genuinely don’t. A diversified, low cost index fund does the actual work of spreading your money across hundreds or thousands of companies for you, no stock picking required. Our guide to what an index fund actually is covers this properly, but the short version is that simple investing was never meant to require an economics degree.
“You need a lot of money to get started.” Also not true. Regular monthly contributions, even modest ones, compound meaningfully over decades, and most platforms will let you start with far less than people assume. The habit matters more than the starting sum.
“It’s basically gambling.” This is the one worth taking seriously, because the confusion is understandable. Gambling involves outcomes with no underlying value driving them. Investing in a diversified fund means owning a small slice of thousands of real, profit-generating businesses, whose combined value has, over long periods, reliably grown. The two are not the same thing, however similar the nerves might feel in the moment.
“I’ll lose everything in a crash.” Markets do fall, sometimes sharply, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But a fall isn’t the same as a loss, not unless you sell during it. Our piece on what to do when the stock market falls goes into this properly, but the short version is that staying invested through the wobble is usually what separates people who lose money from people who don’t.
“I don’t have time to learn it properly.” You don’t need to. Simple investing, built around a diversified fund and a regular contribution, isn’t a subject that requires ongoing study once it’s set up. It requires roughly an hour to understand properly and then, mostly, being left alone.
What confidence actually requires
Here’s the reframe worth sitting with: confidence isn’t a prerequisite for investing. It’s a byproduct of it.
Almost nobody feels fully confident before they start. What actually builds confidence is living through a first year, including the inevitable wobble where the number goes down before it goes back up, and discovering that the world didn’t end. That single experience does more for someone’s investing confidence than any amount of reading ever could. Waiting to feel ready before starting usually means waiting a very long time, because the feeling of readiness tends to arrive after the first year, not before it.
Practical first steps
If you’re starting from nothing, here’s a sequence that doesn’t require expertise at any stage.
Open a stocks and shares ISA. This gets your money into a tax efficient wrapper from day one, and our guide to the different types of ISA explains how it compares to the cash version most people default to.
Choose one diversified fund rather than trying to pick individual shares. A broad global index fund spreads your risk across thousands of companies and multiple countries automatically, which removes the single hardest and most stressful part of investing, choosing which specific companies will do well.
Set up a regular contribution you genuinely won’t miss. Whether that’s £25 or £250 a month, consistency matters far more than the size of the amount, particularly in the early years. Our piece on pound cost averaging versus a lump sum explains why investing steadily over time tends to feel considerably less daunting than committing everything at once.
Then, genuinely, leave it alone. Checking a portfolio daily is one of the most reliable ways to talk yourself out of staying invested. Simple investing works precisely because it doesn’t require constant attention, just patience and the occasional check-in.
Where this leaves you
The confidence gap isn’t a reflection of anything women lack. It’s a reflection of an industry, and in many cases an entire upbringing, that didn’t build the on-ramp properly. The fix isn’t more willpower or more courage. It’s simply starting, in a small and unintimidating way, and letting the confidence follow the action rather than waiting for it to arrive first.
That’s really the thread running through all three pieces in this series: the pension gap, the cash versus investing gap, and this one. None of them come down to ability. All three come down to getting started sooner rather than later. If you want the fuller version of that argument, with a proper step by step plan built around a real working life rather than a textbook one, that’s exactly what we’ve set out in our book, Simple Investing for Women.
A note on what this is and isn’t. This article is general information, not personalised financial advice. Investments can fall as well as rise in value, and past performance is never a guarantee of future returns. If you’re unsure where to start, it’s worth speaking to a regulated financial adviser or using free guidance services such as MoneyHelper.