Disgraceful’s Ahuzar explores the notions of financial literacy, upbringing and confidence from the perspective of a Middle Eastern girl.

Imagine your routine morning, where you wake up and immediately reach for your phone. You go on Instagram and scroll through the countless make-up tutorials, celebrity edits and the restaurant reviews and simply refuse to think a sensible thought until you wake up fully. And perhaps, the algorithm feels particularly generous and offers to your ravenous eyes a couple posts of hustle porn and people with confident voices and lots of hand gestures letting you in on a few investment and stocks tricks. Maybe you click, maybe you don’t – either way you have gained no practical advice that you will even consider giving a go.

Then you have your breakfast, and if you are one of the superior species of humans, you next go to the gym as a part of your daily routine. And perhaps, for a tinge of the trait of the average girl, you probably listen to music or watch videos at one point throughout the day on the basic version of YouTube. Just as Raye finishes narrating her break-up and the instrumental kicks out, all of a sudden you hear this middle-aged man who bought a house in Scotland and wants to help you get into real estate. He looks genuine and is apparently prepared to share his evident wisdom (he bought a house in Scotland!) so you can get a house within the next few years. Your mood drops a bit, because you really did not want to transition from Raye to Ms Banks with an abrupt marketing sketch, but, oh well. It’s the price you must pay for giving the middle finger to the YouTube upgrade. Except, it happens again, this time a lady telling you, very enthusiastically, while zooming in on some receipts from Amazon, that you can be getting $1200 per month by selling e-books. At that point, you take your leave from the app –  Ms Banks can wait, the mood is gone now.

The rest of your day, if you are like me, can involve looking for a full-time job, with not much expectation on a good salary but with the hopes to find a role that would not drain the lights out your eyes with its mere thought. But Linked-In is a tough crowd for such naive thoughts.There are countless roles with ‘competitive salary’ written in its specifications, or consultancy roles that are hiring en masse – ‘but you must be ambitious and money-driven!’, which essentially translates to ‘be prepared to work overtime despite what your contract says’. Then you log off, even more depressed, and go meet your friends or colleagues at work. You talk of wages and buying a car, and your manager maybe gives you a whole talk on starting savings accounts, and investing in stocks and insuring your assets and meanwhile you are thinking to yourself… ‘I have the majority of my current “savings” in an envelope in the depths of my drawer…’ And so you nod along and zone out and try to get to the end of your day without having one more identity crisis.

Did I lose you at some point along that long, presumptuous and self-inspired narration of your imagined day? Perhaps, you did not relate to most things I have written so far and started to really pity me by the end of the last paragraph (I’m doing fine, no worries), or maybe you have been chuckling to yourself, muttering ‘that’s me’ along most of the writing. Either way, there seems to be a pattern emerging in my days.

Why is the topic of money and finance such a distasteful notion to myself and some of the female friends and family I have? The thought occurred to me many times over the years as I have been dragging myself through taking a few steps that most other people my age had done years ago and appear to have had no issues with. I wanted to consider some factors that may lead to this reflexive feeling of discomfort. Which led me to the closest friend I’ve had during my university years: Google Scholar.

Are you ignorant or just insecure?

After a short scroll down the results for ‘financial literacy and women’ in Google Scholar, you should come across an article titled Women, Confidence, and Financial Literacy (2016). I’ll save you the detailed account of the premise of the experiment – to sum up, it involves two surveys being distributed to households for people aged 18 and above. The first survey involves a few simple questions regarding financial terms like inflation and interest, and the answer options involve an ‘I don’t know’ option. In the second survey, this option is taken out and instead, people are asked to rank how confident they are in their answers on a scale from one to seven (very confident). The study concludes that there is indeed a robust gender gap trend in regards to financial literacy across different surveys and countries. The more interesting point however, is that when the ‘I don’t know’ option is taken out in the second round of surveys; there is an increase in the correct answers given by women – and a decline in the gender gap.

Although the researchers have attributed only half of the gender gap in financial literacy to confidence and other variables such as income and education, it still speaks to the lack of confidence most women have in making a guess, let alone make an assured statement on financial terms and trends.

At this point, you may think that this does not feel like a UK problem. Perhaps the notion of not knowing basic financial skills and terminology seems really absurd to some of you guys. But apparently, the situation is a little more dire than we may acknowledge. According to GFLEC’s (Global Financial Literacy Excellence Centre) July 2017 report, ‘77% of the global adult population—roughly 3.5 billion people—most of them in developing economies, lack an understanding of basic financial concepts’. 

There appears to be a pattern of financial literacy and the country’s economic levels. The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) have a significantly lower literacy rate than the G7 (Canada, Japan, France, Germany, the UK and the US) countries, and within those groups, women are overall lower than men in financial literacy measurements.

The UK has higher female literacy rates among the rest, so, we don’t seem to be doing too bad. However, there are many elements to such experiments and surveys… I don’t imagine the families and regions that would house the lowest-income earners, the highest 

crime ratings, refugees and immigrants (who would have even more obstacles to their financial literacy, such as language barriers and lack of knowledge of helpful resources and organisations) would have participated in such surveys. Such letters tend to go straight to the bin, in my experience.

This article is a nod to the absent minority, to the ‘refuse to answer’ people, and the minorities that struggle to get even half of the questions right. I address this population, because there lies my own origins. I am one of the minority women that were born to parents that barely finished primary school, never owned a business or were wary of all things deemed financially risky and unknown – credit cards, inflation and savings accounts were not more reliable to them than keeping your savings rolled up under your mattress. This derives from a fear of the unknown, of course. However, lack of proper education and opportunities is the excuse for their generation and social status. Which is fair. So, what is the excuse of girls and young women my age? How do I explain my lack of knowledge when I have grown up in a Western society, completed a university degree and have computer and critical analysis skills to do research and learn? Not to mention the self-awareness to make a whole article about my own faults.

The answer is quite simple. And annoyingly, it is exactly what you hear in those intrusive, forever appearing Instagram posts and YouTube advertisements you see when you are scrolling. It is in the title of that best-selling book ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’. Tangible knowledge and practical actions are not the only things you inherit from your parents. You can also inherit their mindset. And that mindset, when coupled with neurodivergence or many other factors that might lead to your social isolation (which you also probably inherited from your parents), means you are essentially quarantined in a vacuum where you do not take in any useful advice and do not step out to even attempt to put the said advice into action. Depression and anxiety are the most common mental disorders of our generation. The existence of social media, hustle porn and success stories are all factors that impact us negatively, and the pandemic was really just the cherry on top. 

Change your mindset, but just be kind to yourself

(Listen, I myself despise the command tagline. This fact does not bode well on my role as a writer, I suppose, but they can be pretty useful in motivational pieces. And I’m about to get really motivational. Ready? Ok, here I go.)

The answer to our problems seems obvious. 

We need to try to shed the mindset that is keeping us stagnant, and try to create an awareness of the ever-flowing information that is surrounding us, to filter out which will be the most suitable to our goals and circumstances. In her inspiring TedTalk, Natalie Torres-Haddad presents the notion of financial literacy as a ‘foreign language’. In that, to the girls and women from lower social classes, financial literacy is a whole new language that you have to learn and navigate: one that, historically and culturally, has not been encouraged for women to master. This new tool will then impact your retirement, your future career and family and your overall freedom and peace of mind. She underlines the significance of patience and consistency in viewing this process as a new territory that you need to map out over time. But the key is action.

Go ahead and invest in that stock you have been eyeing. Research about what types of insurances, and ISAs and properties you have been hearing about. Discuss and take action with your sisters or other family members that are also yearning to improve their knowledge but are nervous. Stop avoiding the friends that are knowledgeable in finances out of fear of being mocked or condescended and instead try to be honest about your doubts and lack of knowledge – your honesty will perhaps be rewarded with empathy and advice. 

It may not be the case. Maybe you are not surrounded by motivated people or kind friends. You might be all alone in your conquest for personal growth. You might not have access to the best resources. But the point remains the same. You need to start from somewhere, and why not do that today. It is better to start small and early (see: ‘compound interest’) than to let your lack of confidence keep you stagnant for another month or year.

And no, I am not preaching. This article, in fact, is a letter to myself. I have made huge progress and yet still have a long way to go. Hopefully, by the end, I will have made a seat for myself at the table with many other women taking their futures into their own hands.

See you soon at that table.