When I began writing about personal finance, it was to reach other women like me: college-educated young professionals, working their first Real Person jobs, and befuddled by how their biweekly paychecks disappeared from their checking accounts every month like water evaporating in the sun—effortlessly.

Every once in a while, I’d get a message like this: “Do you have any advice for people who don’t make very much?” 

The reasons the senders offered for their financial strain varied: One woman had just gotten divorced and her husband had controlled the money; another worked in a low-wage, dead-end job; someone else was a single mother struggling to afford daycare, while a fourth had tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills from an unexpected diagnosis. Similar themes emerged over time.

My 50/30/20 budgeting models and corporate ladder-climbing strategies were useless to these women, and each one left a tiny, indelible crack in my understanding of “financial literacy” as the key to equality for women.

There were plenty of readers who were ready to take the bull by the horns, make informed choices, and get rich, baby! But there was an equally large contingent for whom the advice to stop going out to eat in order to invest more didn’t make any sense, because they hadn’t been inside a restaurant in months.

The data indicates this latter group might actually be larger than the former, as women are overrepresented in low-wage labor: Women make up less than half of the total workforce, but represent nearly 60% of all low-wage workers, earning under $11 per hour on average. 

And on the whole, we know a woman’s income tends to deteriorate as she ages: The gender wage gap is largest from ages 45 to 54; in that age group, the median US male pulls down $72,228 each year while the median US female earns $57,096.

So I started asking myself: Is an individual woman’s accumulation of wealth an innately “feminist” act?

For our purposes today, I’m defining “feminism” as work that advances the equality of the sexes.

It’s something I’ve been chewing on a lot in recent months as I work on my upcoming book, Rise of the Rich Girls, and, more broadly, exist in this tricky online space where there’s a temptation to recast every financial decision a woman makes as “feminist,” so long as it beefs up her bottom line. 

I say this is “tricky” because, historically speaking, promoting financial equality for women is a pretty progressive thing (it hasn’t even been 50 years since Congress ruled it was illegal for creditors to discriminate based on sex or marital status!). 

But the question opens a few different cans of prickly worms (ew, what an image), because if a woman—any woman!—getting her bag immediately qualifies as an act of feminist empowerment, then is anything she had to do to get that money automatically grandfathered in? (See also: erstwhile Girlboss Elizabeth Holmes.) Is Margot Robbie making $50 million off the Barbie movie this summer a win for the pink team, or is it…just a win for Margot Robbie? 

For the record, this approach has a near-100% success rate on me. Rebrand something as a feminist issue, and this is me:

We ride at dawn, girlies! 

The problem is, it’s remarkably easy to wander down the well-worn path of positioning solutions that might improve your personal situation as somehow intrinsically radical on behalf of Women Everywhere™, and my mixed feelings about this misapplication of the transitive property (as someone who creates personal finance content for women) have only grown more mystifying as my platform has grown.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with focusing on individual solutions—after all, taking matters into your own capable hands is often necessary to make any progress at all. And as culture critic Jessica DeFino wryly noted in our episode a few weeks ago, “Yes, systems are to blame, but…we’re individuals that exist within those systems, and you know, paradox…”

Still, ennobling personal advancement (the “limitlessly seductive sales pitch that feminism means, first and foremost, the public demonstration of getting yours,” as Jia Tolentino wrote in Trick Mirror) is a bossbabe magic trick that’s always struck me as a little too convenient. You’re telling me that making myself fabulously rich is also good for women everywhere? Incredible! My duty to the sisterhood has been fulfilled.

Why is this transubstantiation of individual wealth accumulation into high-minded political resistance so appealing? (Again, Tolentino might have our answer: “A politics around getting and spending money is sexier than a politics built around politics.”) 

And why can’t we just let effective individual tactics that work for some women be imperfect solutions in an imperfect world? Is it because we believe, on some level, that if enough individual ships rise up, the tide will rise beneath it? (I think we all probably know enough about that metaphor to realize that’s not how it works.)

This feels especially relevant amidst the magenta gingham press coverage of “Barbie Girl Summer” and countless headlines about how Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Barbie are “singlehandedly saving the economy” or how “women own this summer.” But which women? We should specify: These women (and the people who work for them). 

Henah and I both saw Barbie. I scream-cried through the Eras Tour; Henah worshiped at the altar of Queen Bey. Still, I can’t forget: I likely have a lot more in common with the average man than I do with Taylor Swift. Socioeconomic status is, in some ways, a more meaningful stratification tool than gender when you’re talking about a woman with billions of dollars, and it’s been interesting to observe the way the media has quickly applied the economic uber-dominance of three powerful women (Swift, Knowles, and Robbie) like a sparkly weighted blanket over the economic circumstances of “women” as a whole.

Calling this out explicitly feels true but annoying; I wish I could earnestly, uncomplicatedly celebrate the fact that the three biggest entertainers in the world right now are women as though it’s a big, feminist victory—but it mostly just feels like a big capitalist victory (which is fun, because pink!, but it’s a “win for women” in a game that most women aren’t playing).

The danger of reverse causality

Still, the danger of consistently reinforcing the tenuous connection between the specific tactics often framed as ways to “fight back” (salary negotiation techniques, financial literacy, selling out a 50-stop stadium tour, etc.) and the larger issues they purport to meaningfully improve or fix (a persistent disparity in income and wealth by gender, women trapped in the low-wage cycle, etc.) is that it suggests a causal relationship where one probably doesn’t exist, and cuts the conversation off at the knees right as it’s starting to go somewhere. 

It’s this phenomenon that morphs giving women advice about, say, how to negotiate more persuasively, into the implicit, perhaps inadvertent suggestion that women not negotiating hard enough is the reason the gender pay gap exists in the first place.

While undoubtedly useful and important for an individual woman, the solution offered—i.e., negotiation advice—isn’t reflective of why she’s statistically likely to earn less over her career, nor is it likely to directly impact the sociocultural norms that thrust women into the false “career vs. family” dichotomy that men don’t face. 

(I remember listening to a panel in college where an audience member directed a question about “work-life balance as a mother” to the only female executive speaking. The exec rejected the premise of the question and instead asked, in not so many words, “why the male executives on the panel weren’t being asked how they balanced their careers with fatherhood.” It was metal as hell. My world tilted ever so slightly on its axis that day, my ears attuned to the high-pitched frequency of sexist dog whistles.)

Contrast that example with a broader discussion of something like universal child care and the impact it would likely have on the gender wage gap for all mothers; the data is clear that statistically, even women who work full-time (including the breadwinning ones!) bear the brunt of unpaid and underpaid caretaking work. While it’s unlikely that universal childcare is a silver bullet (and we’ll explore why in this week’s upcoming episode), we know that industrialized countries that offer this benefit (or even attempt to) tend to have smaller gender wage gaps. 

The advice to negotiate is clean: a series of steps to follow, phrases to memorize, and the immediate gratification of a pay bump. 

Conversely, reckoning with the structure of family and work is nebulous, and makes no such promises of speedy personal enrichment. Whether or not the US ever gets universal childcare is, for most of us, a reality that’s so far outside the realm of our control so as to feel irrelevant. 

It’s no wonder we tend to prefer the individual tactics—the “negotiation advice” of it all—in the personal finance world (and with good reason; my telling you to fight for universal childcare isn’t going to make your take-home pay stretch to cover your current childcare bills any more easily in the meantime!). The tactics matter.

But a lack of financial literacy isn’t the root cause of these issues, which means more of it won’t be the solution

I keep circling this core truth: Financial literacy might help you overcome some of these obstacles in your own life, but a lack of financial literacy is not the reason you’re statistically most likely, as a woman, to experience those wage and wealth gaps in the first place.

And that probably shouldn’t surprise us! A recent study shows that 55% of women and 60% of men feel confident in their financial decision-making; the idea that women lack confidence at high rates or are substantially less informed than their male counterparts is, at best, a false narrative that’s more powerful than the data used to back it up, and at worst, not significant enough to explain the chasm in outcomes.

This is particularly true when one considers the subtext of most of this individual advice, mine included: It mostly applies to women in the narrow stratum of the American workforce considered highly educated, white-collar workers—the subset I was originally trying to reach without realizing it. And make no mistake: It’s incredibly valuable to those women—but there’s something that feels dishonest and self-serving about positioning such advice anywhere in the proximity of activism. 

It’s a worthy challenge to avoid the temptation of conflating personal finance best practices with the hard political work of improving life for all women in our country, particularly those that have long been invisible in this industry: the low-wage workforce, women of color, the working poor, widows, single mothers…the list goes on. 

This, of course, isn’t a revelatory finding, but it’s a phenomenon that seems to persist despite the criticism. How do we accurately calibrate our celebration of individual advancement without pretending as though it’s enough on its own to help all ships rise, not just a select few? 

Where I’ve landed, I think, is that a woman getting rich is not an inherently progressive pursuit—but that doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that it can’t make your life better! And if we want to turn individual wealth acquisition into feminist action, we can support progress for all women by using the power, money, and influence we accrue for ourselves: 

This could look like advocating for gender pay parity with your employer once you’re in a position of power, or fighting for all the women (and men!) employed by your company—not just the corporate ones—to receive the same health and retirement benefits that the salaried people do. 

It could look like using your lucrative law degree to work on legislation that’s good for women (Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said she’d stop fighting for feminism when there was an all-female Supreme Court, since it had historically been nine men and no one batted an eye). 

It could even look like accumulating enough personal wealth to send your daughters to college, despite the fact that you didn’t get a higher education because you were told growing up your duty was to become a wife and mother, and only your brother got to go.

I’d argue the accrual itself is probably not an intrinsically feminist act—but you can’t empower others without first empowering yourself, which makes it a strong step in the right direction. 

On that note, can I interest you in some negotiation advice?