Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8th March 2026, Steph Willcox – Head Actuary at Dynamic Planner, tells us how this year’s theme ‘Give to Gain’ highlights the importance of giving time, knowledge, resources and opportunity, in order to support women’s advancement and strengthen community wide outcomes.
The theme for International Women’s Day 2026 is Give to Gain, a call to generosity, collaboration and shared progress. It encourages individuals and organisations to consider how purposeful giving can create stronger and more supportive environments for women.
In the financial advice world, the concept of Give to Gain largely translates into the way we give our time to help guide clients through decisions that support long term financial wellbeing.
This International Women’s Day, I take a look into the data we collect from advised clients, highlighting the differences we see between genders when it comes to attitude to risk, confidence and overall financial wellbeing, and what we can give to help improve financial outcomes for women.
Financial confidence and emotional resilience
We see that women consistently present lower average scores for financial knowledge, and emotional resilience when compared with men.
For paraplanners this supports the need for clarity in communication, transparency in assumptions, and a coaching style approach that helps female clients build their knowledge and emotional resilience, whilst still benefitting from good advised decisions.
Risk appetite and financial wellbeing
Our data shows a significant rise in all wellbeing measures as risk score increases. This suggests a strong association between the ability and willingness to take investment risk and improved financial happiness, knowledge, and resilience.
This is important because we also see that females are generally more risk averse and so obtain lower risk scores than men.
Attitude to risk, and therefore someone’s risk score is not a static datapoint and clients can become more willing and able to take risk through structured education and scenario modelling.
By helping female clients to become more comfortable with risk, we expect to see their measures of financial happiness improve too.
Marital status
We find that marital status affects a client’s overall financial happiness with a clear decline in wellbeing scores for divorced individuals, largely driven by a fall in financial resilience.
Divorce can cause many impacts on someone’s finances in terms of pension inequality, reduced asset accumulation, increased responsibility for dependants and a knock on effect into disrupted employment history.
Paraplanners can support better outcomes by encouraging early review of pension ownership, benefit entitlements, protection structures, and income security planning long before life events force change.
Age patterns and the confidence curve
The data shows that emotional and financial resilience rise steadily through the middle age groups before softening in later life.
Anecdotally this seems reasonable; the years between age twenty five and fifty five often involve career breaks, part time work, and significant caregiving responsibilities.
These are the same years in which many of the most important financial decisions need to be made.
The upward slope into mid-life suggests that confidence grows once responsibilities stabilise and earnings recover. However, the decline after age seventy five should also not be overlooked.
Clients at this stage, especially women who are more likely to outlive partners, need careful planning around longevity risk and income sufficiency.
Turning insight into practical action
The Give to Gain theme encourages financial professionals to consider the role that generosity plays within advice. Some ways that you might embrace this ethos is to:
Give clarity: Ensure women understand the financial concepts and rights that directly influence their long term outcomes. Clear information reduces uncertainty and encourages greater engagement.
Give confidence: Use modelling, plain language and scenario based conversations to build client confidence. When women understand both risk and opportunity they can make decisions that align with their long term goals.
Give support early: Encourage early action on pension contributions, protection reviews and planning for potential career breaks or caring responsibilities. Early intervention prevents larger gaps from forming later.
Give space and voice: Ensure both partners in a couple are equally heard and equally involved. Make space for questions and invite discussion without assumption or judgement.
Conclusion
International Women’s Day is a reminder that we have the ability to improve the gender gap in many ways.
When we give our expertise with intention, clients gain confidence, resilience and a stronger sense of ownership over their financial future.
Main image: women, table, chatting, office, parabol-the-agile-meeting-tool-e5ob6fBTi64-unsplash
