Money is never just about the money.
As we all know, money is the currency of modern life. It is the energy that fuels an economy. It pays for our survival. And with capitalism marching even more boldly into the deepest structures of our world, money has taken on an increasingly important role in the distribution of power, freedom and the very ability to determine one’s life.
Unfortunately, that power is often cloaked in fear. Financial power is the practical architecture of a life, but also the emotional reservoir of everything we have been taught about our worth, dependence, ambition, security, gender roles, love, and belonging. No wonder it is so tough to talk about! Even among thoughtful, capable, highly educated people, conversations about money can trigger shame, defensiveness, confusion, and conflict. The unfortunate repercussion to these confusing emotions is that we may revert to silence to hide away from dealing with these painful emotions.
For women, this silence has been especially persistent.
Obviously, it is not because we are less intelligent, less capable, or less interested in financial matters. Quite the opposite. Women make financial decisions every day with intelligence and competence. They build successful businesses, manage households, support parents, lead organizations, balance competing demands, and often hold together the emotional and economic fabric of family life. And yet many women have been conditioned to believe that money is somehow outside the boundaries of what they are supposed to discuss with confidence and authority.
That contradiction is not accidental. It has a long history.
For generations, women were expected to be responsible without being powerful, prudent without being visible, self-sacrificing without being self-determining. They were expected to stretch money, worry about money, and make do with money, while often being excluded from the more important conversations about earning it, investing it, negotiating it, directing it, and using it as a tool of influence. Even as formal barriers have fallen, many of the psychological and cultural echoes remain.
This is one reason money talk can still feel charged. It is not simply a technical discussion about tax, cash flow, debt, investing, or estate planning. It is often a conversation about permission. Permission to want more. Permission to hold authority. Permission to ask questions. Permission to say, “I don’t understand this yet.” Permission to negotiate. Permission to protect oneself. Permission to lead. Permission to take one’s own future seriously.
When women hesitate to speak openly about money, the issue is rarely a lack of desire to communicate. More often, it is the accumulated weight of social messages absorbed over time. Be nice. Do not make people uncomfortable. Do not appear greedy. Do not outshine. Do not talk too directly about what things cost. Do not admit uncertainty. Do not create conflict in your marriage. Do not ask what your colleague earns. Do not question the advisor. Do not expose that you feel behind. Do not reveal that you want more.
It is difficult to have healthy conversations in an atmosphere shaped by all of those directives.
And yet the cumulative cost of silence is potentially catastrophic.
Silence in the workplace can mean under-earning, under-negotiating, or being overlooked. Silence in relationships can mean misunderstanding, resentment, power imbalance, or insecurity even displacement if a relationship changes. Silence in investing can mean missed opportunities, lower returns, deferred decision-making, or years spent in avoidable uncertainty. Silence in families can leave the next generation financially uninformed and vulnerable. Silence after divorce, widowhood, illness, job loss, or caregiving can leave women carrying immense responsibility without enough support, information, or strategy.
Power is often misunderstood. It is not domination. It is not hardness. It is not the absence of vulnerability. True power is the capacity to see clearly, decide wisely, and act intentionally. It is the ability to stay present in conversations that matter. It is the courage to face facts without collapsing into fear. It is the willingness to align resources with values. It is the discipline to build a financial life that reflects both reality and possibility.
Money, in this sense, is one of the instruments through which power becomes tangible.
Not because wealth determines human worth. It doesn’t. But because money affects choice. It affects where we live, how we recover from crisis, whether we can leave harmful situations, whether we can care for those we love, whether we can rest, whether we can take risks, whether we can support causes we believe in, whether we can create beauty, stability, learning, opportunity, and impact. To pretend that money is morally trivial is to ignore how deeply it shapes lived experience.
Women know this. Often viscerally.
The statistics inform us that many women have lived close to financial precarity at some point in their lives, whether personally or through what they witnessed with their mothers, grandmothers, clients, or friends. Many have seen how poverty, dependence, or lack of financial knowledge can narrow a life. These experiences can create motivation or conversely, inertia. They teach us that money can be used as a tool to over-power us. To strip us of security.
That is why financial education matters so much. It is the first, most accessible path to self-determination. The issue that arises repeatedly and has so throughout my advisory career however is that knowledge is not enough. It will almost always provoke more questions. It will typically necessitate a conversation
Financial planning executed well is not about selling products or dazzling people with jargon. It is about helping individuals understand the terrain of their own lives. It is about what matters to you. What do you value? What responsibilities do you carry? What fears are shaping your decisions? What strengths have you already built? What future are you trying to protect, create, or reclaim?
This is one of the most important shifts women can make in relation to money: from seeing finance as an abstract system controlled by others to seeing it as a language that can be learned and used in service of one’s own life. And those we care about.
That shift is deeply empowering.
It is also relational. The old school story says that financial power is solitary, competitive, and private. But another model is possible. Women often gain confidence not only through information, but through conversation, reflection, mentorship, and community. The Sophia tradition has long recognized that education works best when it honours the whole person and when it happens in an environment of dignity, generosity, and mutual support. A feminist perspective on portfolio and financial management emphasizes autonomy, self-determination, education, and the power generated when we all support one another rather than remain isolated in private worry.
This matters because the silence around money is not only individual; it is social. Many of us assume we are the only ones who feel uncertain, intimidated, behind, or conflicted. This is blatantly untrue. In fact, research from the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada found that simply encouraging young women to reflect on and discuss their finances can improve financial confidence and support better financial behaviours. That is a striking finding, though perhaps not a surprising one. When people can speak honestly, ask questions without embarrassment, and think out loud in a supportive setting, confidence grows.
Conversation itself can be part of the intervention.
Still, it would be naive to reduce this entirely to mindset. Women’s difficulty talking about money is not just personal discomfort. It is also shaped by real inequality. In Canada, women continue to earn less on average than men, with Statistics Canada reporting that in February 2026 women earned about $0.88 for every dollar earned by men on average. Add to that the economic effects of caregiving, career interruptions, longer life expectancy, relationship breakdown, and uneven access to financial advice, and it becomes clear that women are not imagining the stakes. They are navigating a landscape that still requires vigilance.
So, what is needed now is not simply more encouragement. It is a deeper cultural change in how we understand gender equality, power, and money.
We need to normalize financial literacy as a life skill, not a niche specialty. We need to teach girls and women that asking questions is not weakness but wisdom. We need partnerships in which both participants understand the financial picture. We need advisors, employers, educators, and institutions to communicate with more transparency and less condescension. We need conversations about compensation, inheritance, caregiving, investing, debt, and long-term planning to become less taboo and more human.
Most of all, we need women to recognize that financial engagement is not a departure from who they are. It is an expression of who they are becoming.
A woman does not betray her generosity by learning how to negotiate. She does not lose her relational nature by understanding investments. She does not become cold by setting boundaries, asking hard questions, or insisting on clarity. She does not become selfish by planning well. She becomes more capable of contributing, protecting, choosing, and leading.
There is wisdom in that. There is also responsibility.
Because when a woman becomes more confident with money, the effect rarely stops with her. It touches her children, her partner, her parents, her business, her clients, her employees, her community, and often her sense of purpose. Financial confidence changes how people occupy space. It changes the decisions they believe they are allowed to make. It changes the degree to which they can act from vision rather than panic. It changes the texture of a life. Held with confidence and over time, it can reshape our world.
This is why women, power, and money belong in the same sentence.
Not because money is the whole story. But in our society, it is a large part of it. And silence has never served us well. Dependence may sometimes be unavoidable, but helplessness doesn’t have to be. Accruing wisdom requires truth telling. And overcoming our fear of speaking up. Equality in finance is not only about access to knowledge or participation in markets. It is about speaking up. Amplifying our individual voice into a collective voice. It is about confidence. It is about agency. It is about the right to understand and shape the material conditions of one’s own life.
Money may always carry emotion. It may always expose our hopes for a different future as well as our history. It does not need to remain shrouded in secrecy or apology.
The conversation can be different now. It can be more honest, more informed, more compassionate, and more courageous. It can make room for uncertainty without collapsing into silence. It can honour complexity without abandoning clarity. It can recognize structural barriers while still calling women into their own authority.
It can begin, simply, with one truthful, courageous question:
“Would you be willing to have a conversation about money (our investments, our retirement plan, our cash flow etc.) with me?”
Then the magic begins.
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Join us for a day of courageous and confident conversations!
Sophia Wealth Academy 2026 - Communicate with Courage, Clarity and Confidence
Saturday, May 23, 2026
9am - 5pm
UBC Golf Club