Abstract Women tend to be underconfident about their financial knowledge. In this longitudinal study, we tested two interventions intended to raise financial confidence and engagement in positive financial management behaviors among young Canadian women ( N = 1119). One intervention included a brief educational task, teaching participants definitions of financial terms. Another intervention challenged social beliefs about financial competence by prompting participants to describe and browse other women’s stories about financial competence experiences on a website. Directly after the interventions, financial confidence ratings from women assigned to either or both of the intervention conditions were about 6% higher than ratings in a control condition. This effect persisted one week later, though a month later the size of the effect had dropped to non-significance. Confidence was linked to better financial management behaviors and more savings. Results also showed that participants in all conditions reported higher financial confidence and better financial management behaviors at later vs. earlier surveys. We conclude that simply reporting on financial attitudes and behaviors over time can increase women’s financial confidence and recommend fostering discourse about finances to close the gender gap in financial confidence.
Peetz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.