Designing Money for Women with Chaitra Chidanand
What are you working on at the moment and what led you to it?
I’m currently building SALT — a platform at the intersection of women, money and choices. Financial technology has been growing leaps and bounds over the last decade. From online banking to insure-tech, digital payments to neobanks, robo advisors to NFTs – the changes we are witnessing are unprecedented and only just beginning. However, the gender ratio of adoption is skewed 90/10 for male/female. I believe that this participation ratio does not represent the inherent acumen women have for finance.
As a product person I always had this belief that you solve for ease, you solve for adoption. But this was a myth that was busted during my first entrepreneurial stint – Simpl. True to its name, Simpl was a one-click payment solution and signup took under 10 seconds. Yet adoption was slow. It baffled me. But over time I came to realize that when a new product or service is introduced, the journey from no-to-yes is just different for different people. I studied platforms like Nykaa, Zappos, Diapers.com which have a huge female customer base and observed how they did a few things differently from the start. From choice of distribution channels to messaging to nuances in the product, they designed for women. In their case they did so because women were a natural audience for the products they sold.
My question was, if we take a similar approach on products or services that are not necessarily only for women, would it still work and drive adoption? I looked around for examples and found inspiration in the unlikeliest of places – online gambling! Historically, the commonly held perception has been that women do not like gambling or even worse that they prefer games of chance over strategy (subtly implying that they do not have the acumen for strategy). This latter perspective is the implicit undertone for many things – from driving to finance to IIT-JEE (engineering university entrance exams in India).
I learned from a female researcher’s reports that in the UK, female participation in gambling is close to 50-50. And, they are the high engagement users that on average have higher winnings than men. In fact, even in finance recent research shows that women’s investment returns outperform that of men.
While all these factors combined led me to start SALT, there was one more major observation which sealed the deal. It was the observation that women were lower risk and higher retention customers. In other words it makes business sense to focus on them!
My previous startup Simpl, was about making payments effortless. Salt is about making all aspects of money, especially the parts that are essential and transformative intuitive and fun.
What have you learned about designing finance for women?
Women’s path to “yes” is different
I’ve found that men and women respond differently to new-product sales pitches. Men are more binary in their responses: they either said yes or no to the sign up. Women on the other hand would almost never give a clear yes or no and would always postpone the decision on some pretext (most common being, let me speak with my husband) — their path from 0 to yes was longer. They wanted to be given space and time. To first learn about the app, see it being used by or talked about by others and then be allowed to try it out without being asked an arm and a leg to sign up. In other words the key ingredients were – an obviously superior product, adequate and frequent social proof, effortless trial or signup. This was a powerful discovery, because not only did it mean that we have to design a superior product and make the experience of onboarding different, but it also meant that the how-what-&-when of the design & measurement of marketing campaigns should be different too.
Women come together over collective struggles
Another phenomenon I studied prior to SALT was microfinance self help groups (SHGs) — the only financial product I know that is designed for women. Although this industry receives large amounts of programmatic funding from large foundations, there are parts of India where funding is absent.
In the absence of ‘easy money’ the SHGs were motivated by financial betterment (as opposed to a quick buck at the expense of the World Bank, for example).
In one such group, I observed that women came together to talk about money and address their collective struggle of not having enough cash for important expenses like buying a pair of school shoes for their kids, or replacing a broken kitchen appliance; or buying a new saree for a family wedding. They decided on the system of rules - 10 rupees per person per week across 15 women = 150 rupees per week of group savings, a 2% interest rate, a decision system that prioritized education needs over others. Very quickly, by making mistakes, they realized the need for a robust ledgering system and an oversight mechanism that would eliminate chances of mischief through collusion & thus inspire trust, as an essential for the success of the group and so they setup a rotating maker-checker roster, designed a triple balanced ledger - a tracking system of balances and loans and earnings — what I had studied as an accounting student, they were figuring out intuitively and therefore doing a far better job of!
This was a powerful observation for me—not only community and social proof coming together for a common purpose, but also the power of action or learning-by-doing through mistakes. These principles are foundational to SALT. Especially the latter – learn by doing through mistakes.
Women’s emotion is a feature, not a bug
Many traditional financial advisors will ask “what’s your risk appetite?” This is the most confounding and pointless question, for both men and women who are new to managing their money, unless you understand this esoteric concept of “risk.” But especially for women, their answers can be dismissed as “emotional,” instead of being seen as intuitive.
Further, financial advisors go on to speak to you in industry jargon that further alienates the individual from taking agency over their money decisions – and by design, increases dependencies on the advisor or institution. As a customer you feel inadequate towards a complex subject, and don’t have the tools to overcome the barriers.
At SALT we have done two things to flip this:
We make emotions and psychology a mainstay of our platform. We help customers understand their ‘money personality’ through a psychometric quiz.
We normalise all types of money personalities and ensure that customers understand that their personalities can shift overtime.
Women’s financial decision making can be rooted in their childhood
We learned the longer path from 0 to yes for women comes from anxiety of “what if I do something wrong” and the shame associated with having made a mistake. As a young woman (especially in India), mistakes around you often result in consequences to you whether it was your fault or not. For example, if you’re catcalled at, maybe you’re given an earlier curfew or not allowed to wear that skirt again. Therefore, women go through life being more afraid and feeling more judged.
Secondly, the societal expectation is that a boy grows up and takes care of himself, while girls grow up and someone else will take care of them—so boys aren’t thinking as much about making the right or wrong decision and that discomfort with making decisions isn’t a monster under their bed anymore. But, for girls, it is. This doesn’t change with knowledge, or education or income levels – and that was a really powerful realisation for me.
The path from shame to normalcy is through pride
Because of women’s tendency to blame themselves for mistakes, product designers must think about their UX journey as one where certain moments can instill pride in the woman. At Salt, for example, we’re doing that by letting women try things out on their own in small ways. Instead of getting women to teach themselves mock trading, we started groups off with simple google sheets and 5 stocks where they could learn, feel the emotion and the knowledge together and go from there. Once they are able to see that they can make decisions without “making huge mistakes” they begin to gain confidence and pride.
Women’s lives are not linear, but financial products reflect the opposite.
In fact Gen Z and onwards, lives of both men and women will start to look similar and financial product makers will have to either catch-on or cede their market position to others who do.
In India, most financial products are designed for a man with a linear life – expected to start working at 22 years, get married around 28-30, start a family by 32-34, buy a car and then a house by the time he is 40, pay for kids college by 50 and retire at 60. From loan EMIs (mortgage) to insurance premiums everything is designed for a monthly payment, with no feasible scope for breaks in between.
Women do not usually lead that kind of a linear life. Though they might also start working at 22, they may change or quit due to marriage, to care for children or other responsibilities. Their life stories vary and are more diverse than that of their male counterparts. And therefore they are reluctant to take on products that penalize breaks in monthly incomes. Catering to women requires product redesign at these fundamental levels.
In doing so, companies will also make themselves relevant to Gen Z, where gender lines are blurring. More and more men are putting life experiences before ‘safe’ career paths. More men are taking breaks to care for kids and family or to travel. Portfolio and lifestyle careers with non linear income streams are soon going to become the norm.
To be relevant, products and services will have to address these needs proactively. And therefore my belief that if you design for women, you will also be designing for men. In fact, if you design for women thoughtfully, you will be designing for the world. Women have so much going on in their lives, they don’t have time for inefficiently designed products and solutions. They have a high barrier for trust and they have higher loyalty. Designing for them is designing for long term success.
What are some common misconceptions about designing for women?
Woman is a “type of man”—and therefore designing for her is “charity”
Design often thinks of women as a type of man—I saw this somewhere and thought about how such thinking can lead to feeling like you’re doing women a favor by designing for them. Designing for women isn’t less valuable, it should not be driven by charity or seen as a CSR effort.
Designing for women makes business sense. They maximize utilization of services they sign up for and like – making them significantly more profitable than men. They have lower risk - in e-commerce for instance men make 3-5 times more returns than women (i.e.: return costs from men are 3-5 times higher for men).
It is a no brainer to design for women in any business.
Pinking it and shrinking it is enough
In designing for women, most companies do the superficial (pointless) stuff. Example: Make it pink! From debit cards to digital applications this is the easiest thing to do – pink it. In doing so, all they do is shrink it. Examples include: pink debit cards, marketing collateral with images of women shopping or doing household chores or rewards with spa vouchers.
I say, don’t stop at the pink, if you find that women love color, treat them to the rainbow. In this case it will invariably lead you to the pot of gold.
Look beyond the stats to (in)validate all those female stereotypes...
There’s a stereotype that in gambling, women play games of chance (slot machines) and men play games of strategy (poker, blackjack). It took a female researcher to debunk this myth, finding that 50% of the users in online fantasy league games are now women and that they perform better than men because they cash out at a high – as opposed to men who continue playing expecting their winning streak to continue. But on a casino floor, we don’t see this play out. The blackjack tables are in fact full of men with women on the slot machines or on the fringe of the floor. This too, is by design. Casinos are designed for men. They are far away (women find it harder to leave family behind to access them), skimpily clad waitresses serving alcohol are really serving men, dimly lit rooms – of course casinos are less inviting for women. Online gambling allows women to play anonymously and on their own terms. Seeing other women play online creates social proof for her and decreases the stigma around gender-based gambling.
Another stereotype is that women aren’t good at tech. In India, this plays out as women not performing as well in their engineering university entrance examinations. But there’s so much more to this story. Studying for the exams requires staying away from family in a hostel together with a group or attending extra tutoring classes away from home. These conditions are much more suited to men who have the freedom of leaving home, whereas daughters are always “protected” with parents feeling uncomfortable or unsafe sending their girls away. This leads to the theory that women are not capable enough to pass these exams.
Overtime, such myths add up to generalised beliefs that “women are not capable of complex things.” It’s reductionist thinking and costs the world a contribution from 51% of the world!
About Chaitra Chidanand
Chaitra Chidanand is a well know financial technology entrepreneur in India with over sixteen years of experience in business and technology that spans across India, USA, Japan and China. She is the cofounder of Salt, a financial technology platform at the intersection of women, money and choices.