FinEdge Women Investor Study 2024

On this study’s basis, the share of new FinEdge clients who were women rose from 25.68% in 2020 to 46.15% in 2024 — with the gender gap in new clients narrowing from 65.50% men in 2021 to 53.85% in 2024. Within the total base studied, women were still a minority — 4,505 of 19,140 investors — because the base includes clients onboarded over many earlier years.

On the two goals that dominate long-horizon investing, the average future value women were planning to fund was higher than for men — noticeably so for Retirement. The same pattern held, more narrowly, in the current value of investments already held. Goal values are targets recorded inside a goal-based investing plan; they describe the size of the commitment, not a projection of what will be achieved.

67% of women investors had stayed invested for three years or more, and 55.45% for five years or more. Long tenures are testing: they include periods when markets fall and continuing feels wrong. Staying invested through them is a behavioural outcome of a goal being clear, not of a market view being right — the point of the investment strategies FinEdge builds plans around.

39.30% of women clients started investing in their 20s and a further 40.70% in their 30s. With most goal tenures in the 15–20 year range, starting a decade earlier changes how much of the goal has to be funded out of contributions rather than time — one of the plainest advantages available in investing best practices.

Splitting the base by age, Retirement was the top goal priority for women in every band, and the average amount planned for was largest among women aged 21–30, who have the longest runway and therefore the largest future value to fund. Women in each band planned for a larger average Retirement goal than men in the same band.

Read together, the 2023 and 2024 studies point the same way. When investing is organised around named goals, reviewed regularly and supported through difficult markets, women investors plan for large, long-dated objectives and stay with them. What differs is not capability. It is whether anyone put a structure around the decision in the first place.