The M-Word.

I tried to find answers to help out with issues raised from my last "Train of Thought" post on problems facing female entrepreneurs in Nigeria. I had it all worked out and had a nice little article of what to do, when to do it and how to do it to make all your financial woes a thing of the past. But then I realised that the fundamental issue was ....the way women deal with money.

It just struck me that giving pointers from different esteemed authors and picking the brains of Harvard MBA graduates will do little good if women keep thinking about money and financial matters in the same way. For example, research shows that figures give many women the creeps and I couldn’t agree more. Women would much rather leave all the calculations, postulations, pricing and debt collection to someone else, but in a small business, the calculator, postulator, pricing specialist and debt collector is most likely just ‘you’. Therein lays the problem.... For the most part, baking and running a bakery are two different things and if you are like me, all you would want to do is bake which was why you decided to open a bakery in the first place. That unfortunately is not the way the cookie crumbles. To top it off, the general view is that men are still given more benefit of the doubt when it comes to hard core business deals than women...I had to take out time to think why? (It’s a man’s world doesn’t count as an answer-that is so 80’s). It’s not that women aren’t intelligent or ambitious or capable, women are all these and more. So what exactly is the problem?

One thing that stands out in my mind’s eye though; I can’t remember anyone speaking to me as a child about money, saving or investing. I remember vividly that I was scolded once for ‘caressing’ some naira notes a little too lovingly. If I remember correctly it was something like ‘...no don’t count that money, you shouldn’t start liking money at this age...’ and I proceeded to hand over the ‘evil’ notes to my male relative to count...which by the way was alright with everyone, never mind that I felt he ‘caressed’ them a little longer than I did.

Men are taught as boys to think about money as a tool, women are taught to think of money as just currency. So boys start early to think of ways to make more money, save it, invest it and control it.  Girls are taught to manage it. As a girl you don’t ask where the money comes from, you’re just sent to the market and your job is to dispense as required. The most you do is to give an account of how you spent it. Maybe that’s why women haggle so furiously...to try and make amends for not having a say anywhere else. No one talks to girls about saving for the rainy day or investing for her future, but many conversations will lean to prepping yourself for a nice man to ‘take care’ of you. Women practically have to struggle to understand money and the way it works while in the meantime, the men would have had many more years of practice.

And so it begins. An exploration of the M word....

Image courtesy: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/view_photog.php?photogid=721