Almost 50% of Italian women do not know how much a current account costs and 14% do not have one, not even in a joint name. These are just some of the data that emerges from a survey by the Global Thinking Foundation who, with the contribution of Powderly, submitted a questionnaire to investigate the economic skills of a sample of 1.000 women, from North to South. A picture emerges which in some respects could have been expected: 68% have savings, but 56% leave them in their current account because they don't know how to invest them and 19% even keep them at home. Even from the insurance and social security point of view, the situation is no better: 21% of the sample is unaware of what supplementary social security is and almost half (45%) have no form of insurance protection against the unexpected.
And the survey also highlights how 34% of the women interviewed who have a partner, they have only a rough idea of how much you earn. (For more details, see the attached infographic) This picture once again confirms how much there is to be done in our country in terms of female financial literacy: the Global Thinking Foundation has been promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls for three years through the D2 project – Women Squared, an educational path that is divided into frontal and online lessons supported by mentorship actions and which involves over 45 AIEF (Italian Association of Financial Educators) certified volunteers, a real Task Force present in a capillary way. It's about women helping other women: Women x Women, that explains the name.
The teachers, on the strength of their experience, offer their knowledge and skills for free and throughout Italy, for the benefit of other women who are experiencing a moment of difficulty linked to the economic crisis, who face complex family situations, who want to take a role of protagonists aware of their own life choices, who wish to get back into the game on a professional level. And the social impact determined by the Women squared path was measured, in collaboration with ALTIS, the Alta Scuola Impresa e Società of the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, through a questionnaire administered to participants in the courses in the year 2019/2020 in two moments: at the beginning of the course and a few months after its conclusion.
Double dosing was predicted to capture the size
of change, relating to personalities, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. To show the impacts, a synthetic index has been constructed relating to financial well-being which is described by various dimensions, subjective and objective, which make up financial behaviour. The financial well-being of course participants grew by 5% and this figure is reflected in an improvement in the macroeconomic context (+6%), in an enhancement of the individual aspects of financial well-being (+5%) and in an increase in knowledge ( +10%) which then led to an improvement in the aspects related to personality (+5%), attitudes (+5%) and behaviors (+4%). In particular, awareness of debts has improved (+21%), control of impulsivity (+10%) and the ability to monitor one's expenses (12%).
The only aspect that has recorded a negative trend is that of fear and concern regarding the financial situation of the near future (-9%), perhaps caused by the increase in awareness and knowledge. “We are delighted – he commented Claudia Segre, President of the Global Thinking Foundation – to collect more than comforting data on the impact and usefulness of our constant work on the territory. A study by the World Economic Forum confirms that it is women who pay the heaviest price for the pandemic we are experiencing, and adds however that the recovery can only focus on them, in terms of both employment and social recovery. Well, we are here to support this relaunch".
