Being Pinked

Editor's Note

Pink is my favorite color. This will not surprise you, of course. It may surprise you that my favorite color used to be blue. And then I chose pink.

I don't attribute anything to it except perhaps my increased comfort with being undeniably a woman in a world where that fact isn't always a benefit. Today I find pink wonderful, and I have chosen it as my own.

That last part is what this issue is about.

Pink comes loaded — femaleness, breast cancer, a certain kind of innuendo. Everyone has an experience or a view. But there is a difference between a color you choose and a color a marketing department assumes you like.

One is your choice. The other is the choice someone assumed you would make.

I know many women who do not, in fact, like pink.

Which brings me to what is being sold to us.

You have noticed it. Shelves filled with products in pink, aimed squarely at us. Services presented around the assumption that women need something different than men.

And sometimes they do. Sometimes the box holds something built for women in a way that matters, that is genuinely valuable to her. Sometimes a service recognizes something that was ignored for years and we are better off because of it.

But sometimes the box holds virtually the same thing everyone else is buying, at a markup, in a prettier container. And sometimes a service merely replaces the old assumption that women do not matter with a new collection of assumptions about what women are like.

Women over forty have been discovered, at least by some industries. For years we were dismissed, and then someone ran the numbers on the wealth about to change hands and noticed who was receiving it. Financial services began paying much closer attention. Menopause products followed. Hair loss, supplements, and a long line behind them.

Companies competing to serve us is progress, and attention is not an insult.

But attention is not the same thing as understanding. And being sought after and being loved are not the same thing. We have also discovered that the difference is not always immediately visible from the outside. We need to look carefully at what is inside to determine whether what we are looking at is worth it.

We decide which companies have earned our money, and we reward them by spending it. That makes the judgment worth getting right, which is difficult when we have no time and the shelves filled up overnight.

So this issue offers a test. Two tests, actually. Services and products fail in different ways, and the questions are not the same. One test would have been simpler, and simpler is usually what gets built for us.

This is not a list of villains — those change every season — but a way to look at what is being offered and know whether it's something you want.

I like almost every pink there is. For the next seven pieces, though, there is good pink and there is bad pink.

To choose pink is good. To be pinked is not.

I hope this issue lets you welcome what has genuinely improved and decline what hasn't.

In short, to know when you are being pinked.

Follow the Money

How women went from an overlooked customer to an explained one.

For decades, women were a neglected customer in financial services.

Not absent, exactly. Women had bank accounts. Women invested. Women inherited money. Women ran companies and households and accumulated substantial wealth of their own.

But wealth management was largely built around a male primary client. In a married couple, he was often the person the advisor called, the person whose questions drove the meeting, the person presumed to understand the portfolio. She was there. She simply was not always the client the relationship had been designed around.

The consequences became particularly obvious when the husband died.

As I wrote in the first issue of Il filo, women frequently leave the financial advisor they shared with their husbands after becoming widowed. The explanation is not especially mysterious. If you have spent twenty years being treated as the secondary participant in a financial relationship, inheriting control of the assets does not suddenly make that relationship feel like yours.

Then someone ran the numbers.

Women controlled approximately $18 trillion in U.S. investable assets in 2023, about a third of assets under management. McKinsey estimates that could reach roughly $34 trillion by 2030. Women are earning and accumulating more wealth themselves, but demographics matter too: women generally live longer than men and therefore frequently become the ultimate owners of family wealth as assets move first between spouses and then across generations.

McKinsey titled its 2025 report on the subject The New Face of Wealth.

The woman who had spent years sitting at the side of the conference table became one of the most valuable prospective clients in the room.

The industry noticed.

That recognition did not begin yesterday. In 2009, the Harvard Business Review was already describing women as a market opportunity larger than China and India combined. By the middle of the last decade, financial firms were putting more women into their advertising and building women-and-wealth programs. In 2016, Sallie Krawcheck launched Ellevest on the proposition that conventional financial planning had failed to account for important features of women's financial lives.

Today there are women-and-wealth practices, women's investment conferences, divorce planning for women, widowhood planning for women, financial-confidence programs, female-investor communities, women-specific educational programs and entire advisory businesses built around serving women.

This is progress.

For years women complained that financial services did not see them. It would be a strange response to object when the industry finally did.

But the speed with which the market moved from overlooking women to explaining women should give us pause.

Because recognizing that a group has historically been underserved is one thing.

Deciding that you therefore know what every member of that group needs is quite another.

Seventy Percent

A number everyone repeats, and nobody can source.

I have now written twice that women frequently leave their husband's financial advisor after becoming widowed. It is worth telling you where that comes from, because the answer turns out to be more interesting than the claim.

The number everyone cites is seventy percent. Seventy percent of widows leave their husband's advisor within a year. It appears in McKinsey's 2020 report on women in wealth management. It appears in trade publications, in advisor training, in the marketing material of firms building women's practices.

It does not appear to be true.

More recent work using household survey data puts the figure closer to fourteen percent. Other research finds roughly eighty-five percent of advised surviving spouses stay put. And when a trade publication went looking this year for where the seventy percent came from, the former head of the research group usually credited with it said he did not know.

Fourteen percent is still about three times the rate at which other households change advisors. The pattern is real. The number was not.

So how does a statistic with no traceable source survive fifteen years in an industry that prices risk for a living?

Because it was useful. It justified the practice, the team, the conference, the brochure. Nobody selling anything had a reason to check it.

I repeated it too. That is rather the point. A number does not need to be defended if everyone who might question it benefits from its being true.

Keep it in mind for the rest of this issue. Sometimes the thing being sold to us is a product. Sometimes it is a fact about us.

An Average Is Not a Woman

The idea that built a company, and the line that idea keeps crossing.

Ellevest is useful precisely because the story is more complicated than "financial services for women" being either good or bad.

When Sallie Krawcheck launched her investing platform in 2016, the underlying proposition was not that women needed simpler investments. It was that supposedly neutral financial planning could itself contain assumptions derived largely from the profile of a male's financial life.

Women live longer on average. Their average earnings trajectories differ. They are more likely to leave the workforce or reduce their hours for caregiving. If a retirement model assumes uninterrupted earnings until retirement, or a lifespan more typical of men, it can be wrong for a great many women.

Point taken.

Calling a model "gender neutral" does not make it so if the assumptions buried inside it are not.

But an average is not a woman.

A woman who has never left the workforce, earns more than most men in her profession, has no caregiving obligations and plans to work until seventy does not become statistically average because she checks the female box.

That is the nuance I find most important in the Ellevest idea.

The answer to a male default is not necessarily a female default.

The better answer is to identify the places where sex might matter and then use the actual facts of the woman sitting in front of you.

At its best, specialization should make the questions better.

It should not predetermine the answers.

A postscript, offered without much comment. Ellevest launched in 2016 to open investing to women at every income level. In 2025 it transferred its automated investing accounts to Betterment. It now serves clients investing $500,000 or more.

Newfound Wealth

A close reading of two words, and what they quietly do to a woman's property.

In August, MAI Capital published an article titled Financial Planning for Women: Divorce, Widowhood, Inheritance and More. It is a useful document, though not entirely for the reasons its authors intended.

The article gathers a remarkably broad collection of circumstances — divorce, widowhood, inheritance, settlement money, and career transitions including a promotion — and identifies what they have in common. Newfound wealth.

That phrase deserves attention. It is not a throwaway term. It has real meaning, and, like virtually all terms in the world of finance, does and should mean something quite precise.

An inheritance from a parent can quite literally be newly acquired wealth. Everything else on the list is doing something stranger.

Divorce. Dividing marital property does not create the property being divided. In an equitable-distribution state such as New York, property accumulated during a marriage may be marital property regardless of which spouse's name appears on the account or the title. Calling her share newfound recasts ownership as receipt of what is already hers.

Widowhood. Also not new, in most cases, and the mechanisms say so plainly. Property held jointly with right of survivorship was already hers — the death ends a co-interest rather than conveying one. In a community property state she owned half outright while he was living. Federal law will not permit a husband to name someone other than his wife as beneficiary of his 401(k) without her written consent. In New York she has an elective share against the estate whatever the will says.

Even the hardest case makes the point. A transfer-on-death account in his sole name looks new; she held no present interest in it while he was alive. But it was funded with marital earnings, and the designation was the two of them executing an intention they already shared. Had they divorced the day before, that account would have been on the table.

Settlement money. Compensation for an injury. Money paid because something was taken from her. At best she is made whole, but often not.

A promotion. That is not a wealth transfer at all. That is a raise.

What may change at a husband's death is control, liquidity and titling. Not ownership.

The phrase is accurate in one way only — from the other side of the desk. Those assets are newly available. Newly under her sole direction, newly capable of being moved. The industry is describing its own opportunity, or its potential loss. It is not describing what can reasonably be called newfound wealth.

A service that has confused what changed for the client with what changed for the provider.

The article goes on to recommend organizing money into buckets. A six-month rainy-day bucket. A travel bucket. A fun bucket. A family vacation bucket. It quotes an advisor on the psychological switch that goes on when a client sees fifty thousand dollars set aside for a once-in-a-lifetime trip.

Separately, later, it identifies a blind spot: women may overlook saving, thinking first about how to spend — paying off the mortgage — with retirement an afterthought.

There are women for whom both observations will be accurate.

There are also women whose response to an increase in wealth is to rebalance a portfolio, harvest tax losses, review concentrated positions, amend an estate plan and call the accountant.

The problem is not that one woman needs help.

It is that being a woman can too easily become shorthand for needing help.

And the article knows this. Its own section on advisor mistakes says the most common error is arriving with an agenda instead of letting the client set one. Offer options, it says, rather than answers.

That is exactly right. It is also the opposite of a framework that has decided in advance what women overlook.

The Value Should Be in the Advice, Not the Stereotype

What it costs when a firm decides what you know before you have said anything.

It would be comfortable to treat all of this as a question of tone. Unfortunate language, a brochure that grates, a photograph of a woman who appears remarkably happy to be discussing her retirement.

The evidence does not permit that reading.

A 2025 study in the American Economic Review examined roughly 27,000 actual meetings between financial advisors and clients at a large German bank. Women were more likely to be recommended expensive in-house funds. Men were more likely to receive rebates on sales fees. The researchers found evidence consistent with advisors using gender as a proxy for financial sophistication.

In a vignette study, professional advisors were given otherwise identical profiles of millionaire investors. The female millionaires were judged to have less investment knowledge and less control over their portfolios than comparable men, and were recommended lower-risk portfolios.

And in a 2024 Journal of Finance field experiment, trained mystery shoppers visited every local financial advisory firm in Hong Kong. At financial planning firms, female clients were more likely to receive suboptimal recommendations. Women who signaled high confidence or high risk tolerance were still treated differently from men displaying the same characteristics.

That is no longer unfortunate language.

That is inferior service.

There is a considerable difference between knowing more about your female client and assuming your female client knows less.

Who she is handed to

There is another response to women's growing financial power that deserves some scrutiny: the increasingly visible pairing of women clients with women advisors.

Again, there is a perfectly legitimate idea inside it.

Women should have access to female advisors. Financial institutions should employ and promote far more women in a profession that has historically been overwhelmingly male. And some female clients will simply prefer to work with another woman.

Choice is valuable.

Presumption is something else.

Morgan Stanley has promoted women-focused advisory teams. Goldman Sachs has reported that sixty-four percent of female advisors believe their gender gives them an advantage in serving female clients. Other firms have built women-and-wealth practices around networks of female professionals.

The German bank study offers something to the other side here, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The differential treatment it documented came more from male advisors than female ones.

That is an argument about whom to hire. It is not an argument about whom to hand a client to.

Because the evidence does not establish that women generally need female advisors in order to be well served. Some research finds a same-gender preference. Other research finds little or none. McKinsey has found that women often care more about personal fit than about the advisor's gender.

Some women will want a woman. Some will want a man. Most, I suspect, would rather have whoever is best at the particular job they need done.

A woman advisor does not automatically understand another woman's financial life any more than a male advisor automatically misunderstands it.

Shared sex is not a professional credential.

A firm should be able to offer a woman a female advisor if she wants one. It should not decide that she needs one because someone has concluded that women understand women.

What good looks like

Which brings me to the most encouraging thing I read while working on this issue. It came from a firm rather than a critic.

Vanguard published research this year on what women actually want from an advisor. The industry has spent a decade marketing empathy to us. Fourteen percent of the women surveyed ranked an empathetic communication style among their top two preferences — three points below the men. They preferred educational and collaborative. Thirty-six percent wanted clear, direct recommendations against fifteen percent who wanted emotional reassurance. The traits they valued most were trustworthiness and financial expertise, in that order.

A firm publishing data that contradicts its own category's sales pitch is doing the thing this issue is asking for. It is undoubtedly more expensive than a brochure. It is also considerably more useful.

Charles Schwab is another example of a firm that is approaching women's finances with the nuanced analysis they deserve. Its material acknowledges that women as a group can encounter different financial circumstances, but its research emphasizes that women investors are not a homogeneous category — eighty-nine percent report confidence in their investment strategy, sixty-one percent are comfortable taking risk — and its broader proposition remains individualized advice rather than a separate universe of female investments.

The value should be in the advice. Not the stereotype.

A Better Test for Services

Three questions for anything sold to you on the grounds that you are a woman.

Financial advice is only one example.

Services marketed to women require a different kind of scrutiny because what we are buying is often expertise, judgment and personalization. There may be no physical difference to inspect.

So the question becomes:

Does this provider understand where being a woman may matter — and then determine whether it matters to me?

Both parts are essential.

Ignoring sex can produce bad service. So can overusing it. Sex is one element of a complete analysis: it is not a proxy for it.

Medicine makes the point almost perfectly.

We now know that women have been harmed when medicine treated the male body as the default. Women were historically underrepresented in clinical research. Symptoms can present differently. Drug effects can differ. Pregnancy, menopause and hormones can matter enormously.

A physician who knows none of this is not being admirably gender neutral.

The physician is missing information.

Consider the heart.

Coronary disease kills more women than anything else, and for decades the model of it was built on men. That model is not merely incomplete. In places it is looking for the wrong thing.

Spontaneous coronary artery dissection is a tear in the wall of a coronary artery. It is not a blockage. It causes heart attacks in people with no cardiovascular risk factors at all, and in the major registries roughly nine in ten of those people are women, at an average age of forty-seven. In some series a quarter of cases occur around pregnancy.

The reflex for a heart attack is to open the artery with a stent. In a dissection that reflex is often the wrong one. Most of these patients are managed with medication and the artery heals on its own. Attempts to intervene fail or cause complications at rates that would be unacceptable in ordinary heart attack care.

So a physician who does not know about dissection can look at a woman in her forties, find no risk factors, and reach for the wrong instrument.

Then there is what the angiogram shows. Among patients sent for angiography with stable angina, roughly two-thirds of women and one-third of men have no significant blockage. Women having a heart attack are about twice as likely as men to have one with no obstructed artery at all. The disease is in vessels too small for the camera to see.

A clean angiogram in a woman with chest pain is not always good news. Sometimes it is an unanswered question.

That is what specialization actually looks like. Not a softer conversation. A different differential.

And now the other direction, which happens to run through the same disease.

You have heard that women's heart attacks present differently. Jaw pain, nausea, fatigue, rather than the crushing chest pain of the films. It is repeated everywhere, always by people trying to help.

It is largely wrong, though some controversy on this point remains. In the research, chest pain is the presenting symptom in roughly nine out of ten patients of both sexes. Women more often have additional symptoms alongside it. They do not have different symptoms instead of it.

The distinction is not academic. A woman told to watch for subtle signs may wait, on the grounds that what she is feeling is too obvious to be her heart. A clinician who has learned that women present atypically may discount the most typical symptom there is when a woman reports it. The researchers who examined this have asked that the guidelines be rewritten, because the atypical framing risks under-diagnosis in precisely the patients it was written to protect.

Stereotype can distort care in the other direction too.

A 2024 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined more than 21,000 emergency-department discharges across the United States and Israel. Women presenting with pain were less likely than men to receive pain medication — at every pain score, in every age group, from male and female physicians alike. Their pain scores were less likely to be recorded. They spent an additional half hour in the emergency department.

Knowing that women can experience disease differently is medicine.

Assuming a woman is exaggerating her pain is stereotype.

The good doctor therefore does not say, "Men and women are the same." But she also does not say, "You are a woman, therefore I already know what this is."

She knows which differences to investigate. That is genuine expertise.

The same problem can arise in a far more ordinary service.

In a field experiment, researchers had male and female callers request price quotes from more than two thousand automobile repair shops. When callers said they had no idea what the repair should cost, women were quoted higher prices than men. When callers named an expected price, the gender difference disappeared — even when the price they named was wrong.

The automobile did not require female-sensitive expertise. The service provider made an assumption about the person asking the question, and that assumption had a price.

That is why I think the test for any service marketed specifically to women can be reduced to three questions.

First: What does this provider know because it specializes in women that another competent provider might miss?

There should be an answer.

A physician specializing in women should know more about female physiology. A financial advisor concentrating on women should recognize planning issues that have historically been missed or that disproportionately affect women.

Expertise has content.

Second: Which of those considerations has the provider established actually applies to me?

This is where expertise separates itself from profiling. Specialization should cause the provider to ask more questions, not to answer them before meeting you.

In practice it looks like this.

An advisor should understand that women, on average, live longer. The advisor should not therefore assume that a particular woman is financially timid.

An advisor should understand the financial consequences divorce can create. The advisor should not describe marital property allocated to a woman upon divorce as wealth she has suddenly found.

An advisor should understand the statistical effect caregiving can have on lifetime earnings. The advisor should also notice when the woman across the table has spent thirty years running a company and never left the workforce.

And an advisory firm should employ excellent women. It should not assume that a woman walking through the door needs to be handed to one.

Third: Has anything actually improved?

Am I getting more sophisticated analysis? Better questions? A risk identified that another provider might have missed? More appropriate advice? Better execution?

Or am I receiving roughly the same service with softer language, a female advisor and a photograph of a woman who appears remarkably happy to be discussing her retirement?

There is nothing wrong with warmth. There is nothing wrong with representation. There is certainly nothing wrong with women professionals.

But those are not substitutes for a better service.

Women spent too long receiving services built around male assumptions. There is no particular victory in replacing them with services built around female ones.

The proof of specialization should be greater precision, not greater generalization, which leads to the simplest test of all:

A service genuinely designed for women should know more about women without presuming to know more about you.

What Is Actually in the Box

The pink tax is illegal in some places, almost nothing qualifies anywhere, and the question that matters was never a legal one.

You have heard of the pink tax.

It is the observation that products marketed to women cost more than comparable products marketed to men. The razors. The deodorant. The dry cleaning. It has been written about steadily for a decade, usually alongside a photograph of two nearly identical items in different colors.

Where I live, it is against the law.

New York banned gender-based pricing for substantially similar goods and services in September of 2020. California followed, effective January of 2023, with civil penalties up to ten thousand dollars for a first violation and enforcement authority in the Attorney General's office. New York City and Miami-Dade County have their own versions.

There is no federal law. The Pink Tax Repeal Act has been introduced in Congress repeatedly since 2016 and has never passed. So for most American women, in most states, the practice remains perfectly legal.

You might think that would be the end of the analysis. The conduct is either prohibited where you live or it is not.

It is not the end of the analysis, for a reason that has nothing to do with geography.

The statutes turn on the phrase substantially similar, and they define it. Under California's version, two goods are substantially similar only if they share the same brand or brands under common ownership, have a similar intended use, have similar functional design and features, and show no substantial difference in the materials used to make them.

Four conditions. All of them.

Consider what that means at a shelf. A women's razor with a lubricating strip is not substantially similar to a men's razor without one — different materials, different features. A body wash with shea butter is not substantially similar to a body wash without it. A shampoo with a different fragrance may not be either.

The statute prohibits charging more for the same thing. It has nothing to say about charging more for a slightly different thing, and slightly different is inexpensive to manufacture.

This is not a drafting failure. A legislature cannot rule on whether an ingredient is worth what it costs, and I would not want one to try. But the practical effect is that the cheapest route around the prohibition is to stop selling the same product.

Economists comparing goods by the same manufacturer with the same leading ingredients found that the price gap shrinks and, in a number of categories, reverses. Pooled across categories, the women's version came out one tenth of one percent higher. Their conclusion was that men's and women's products are rarely the same item in different packaging, and that price tracks formulation.

Which is true — but also doesn't answer the question that matters.

What it looks like when the law does catch something

The rare case where the comparison holds is worth seeing, because it shows what these statutes were built for.

Rogaine sells a five percent minoxidil foam for men and a five percent minoxidil foam for women. Same brand. Same active ingredient. Same concentration. Same intended use. There is no formulation difference to point at.

Researchers found the women's version priced roughly forty percent higher per ounce at major retailers. The manufacturer's response was that its own pricing is identical and that it cannot speak for individual stores. The markup is applied at the shelf.

It is still there. At one national retailer this week, the men's five percent foam works out to $7.89 an ounce. The women's, depending on which size you happen to pick up, runs $10.66 or $14.20.

That is what a pink tax looks like when it actually exists. It is rare. And it is not what most of the coverage is about.

The question that is left

For nearly everything else, the law is silent and the difference is real. Which puts the decision where this issue started. Choice.

Not: am I being cheated? But: is this difference worth what it costs me?

To me, not to someone else.

Shea butter

Shea butter is not a decoration. It is an emollient, it does what emollients do, and if your skin is dry in February you may really appreciate it. A body wash containing it is a genuinely different product from one that does not. It costs more to make. It is not substantially similar to anything, and no statute in this country prohibits the premium.

So the pink tax framework does not apply here.

What does apply is your judgment and your choice. And, ultimately, your dollars. Do you want shea butter in your body wash, and how much more will you pay to have it there?

If the answer is a dollar, that is your preference.

If the answer is eight dollars, it may still be a preference. It is also worth knowing what else eight dollars buys — including a jar of shea butter, marketed to nobody in particular, sitting two aisles over.

That is the question the coverage never gets to. Not whether the ingredient is real, but whether this is where you want to buy it.

The whole of it

There is a pink tax. It is illegal in a handful of places, legal in most of the country, and almost nothing qualifies anywhere, because it is cheap to make two products slightly different and expensive to prove that they are the same.

Which means the legal question, where it is available to you at all, will resolve very few of your purchases.

What is left is arithmetic and preference. What the difference actually does. What the premium actually is. And whether that trade is one you would make if someone stated it out loud, instead of putting it in a prettier bottle and pointing it at you.

A difference you evaluated and paid for is a preference.

A difference you paid for because it was assumed you would not check is the other thing.