For Women\u2019s Equality Day, I\u2019ve been thinking about the unspoken rules women inherit about money, power, and taking up space\u2014and just how much more complicated those rules are for women of color.<\/p>\n
August 26 marks the 1920 certification of the 19th Amendment. It was a huge milestone, but progress didn’t happen evenly. Black women faced discriminatory voting restrictions for decades after, Native American women weren’t granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, and many Asian immigrant women remained entirely excluded.<\/p>\n
I recently learned about Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant who marched for suffrage as a teenager<\/a> in New York. She spent years advocating for voting rights despite knowing Chinese exclusion laws meant she couldn’t actually vote herself. That contradiction stayed with me: What does it mean to fight for a seat at a table you aren’t even allowed to sit at?<\/p>\n Today, women have access to opportunities that Lee\u2019s generation could not have imagined. Unfortunately, the limiting messages about what we should want, how ambitious we can be, and how much space we can take up still persists.<\/p>\n The Rules We Learned Early On<\/p>\n I grew up in a traditional Vietnamese household where being a \u201cgood girl\u201d meant being obedient, dutiful, humble, and quiet. Unfortunately for my mother, I loved asking questions. I wanted to know why my younger brother could run around outside freely or go on sleepovers when I couldn’t. The answer was usually simple: \u201cBecause you\u2019re a girl.\u201d<\/p>\n As an adult, I look back with a lot more compassion. My mother was passing down the exact values handed to her, driven by real fear<\/a> and a protective instinct. And not everything she taught me was something I wanted to discard\u2014she taught me how to read a room, listen carefully, work hard, and put the collective before myself. I still care deeply about those values.<\/p>\n Things got complicated when I entered professional spaces operating by a set of completely different rules, rules that I never learned. Suddenly, success went to the people who advocated for themselves, negotiated, spoke up early, and assumed they belonged in the room.<\/p>\n This is a central conundrum for many of my clients: How do you ask for more when you were raised to just be grateful<\/a> for what you have? How do you speak up when humility is the core of who you are?<\/p>\n Women and Money<\/p>\n I recently read Cary Carbonaro\u2019s Women and Wealth. I appreciated her honesty about how, even as a highly successful financial advisor, she kept running into systemic roadblocks. Her individual success didn’t magically rewrite the system or erase the fact that financial structures were never built for women.<\/p>\n It\u2019s astonishing how recent basic financial rights actually are.<\/p>\n Bella Abzug, who pushed to recognize Women\u2019s Equality Day, also fought discrimination<\/a> in credit. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in the 1970s, banks routinely required a husband or male relative to co-sign on a woman’s account. That was only a few decades ago. <\/p>\n So while women are now allowed to build businesses, manage portfolios, and act as primary breadwinners, that does not mean our inherited scripts have changed. I’ve spoken with too many women who out-earn their partner but still feel guilty spending on themselves, who inherit wealth and question if they deserve it, or who run a successful company while wondering if they’re “smart enough.”<\/p>\n This is why financial psychology<\/a> matters so much to me. Financial literacy matters, but so does unpacking what we attach to money: safety, obligation, loyalty, and our definition of what a \u201cgood person\u201d does with wealth.<\/p>\n Beyond Gender<\/p>\n For women of color, the layers run even deeper. Race, immigration, class, and family history shape every financial decision. I sit with clients navigating the heavy dynamics of out-earning their parents, dealing with class mobility, or feeling exhausted by financial filial duty after growing up believing that they had to “repay” their families for their sacrifices. <\/p>\n Also, what sometimes gets mislabeled as a \u201clack of confidence<\/a>\u201d usually has a much longer backstory. A woman might hesitate out of respect for an elder, or stay quiet because keeping family harmony was the highest virtue growing up. Before telling women to just be more assertive<\/a>, we need to understand the rules they learned and what those rules were trying to protect.<\/p>\n What I Am Still Unlearning<\/p>\n My mother was thirty-six weeks pregnant<\/a> with me when she boarded a boat to leave Vietnam without knowing where she would end up. She wanted a better future for her daughter. <\/p>\n I have opportunities she never dreamed of, but I also carry inherited fears and instincts. That is part of what draws me to this work, especially with women navigating major life and financial transitions: inheritance, divorce<\/a>, career<\/a> changes, caregiving<\/a>, sudden wealth, entrepreneurship, or becoming the first person in their family to build significant wealth.<\/p>\n I am interested in what happens when our circumstances change, but some of the old rules follow us. <\/p>\n I want us to get curious enough to ask: Which rules still fit? Which ones still feel like mine? And which ones can I thank for getting me this far before saying, “Thank you, but I don\u2019t need you anymore.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For Women\u2019s Equality Day, I\u2019ve been thinking about the unspoken rules women inherit about money, power, and taking…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-604659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}