The Top Personal Finance Blogs by Women
‘œRank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.’‘“ Peter F. Drucker
Yesterday, Wise Bread put together a list of Top Personal Finance Blogs by Women. The post was prompted by Lynn Truong’s attendance at the BlogHer conference in San Francisco last month where she expected to run into quite a few personal finance bloggers… after all, there were over a thousand women bloggers attending the event. The conference planners set aside a room for a personal finance meet-up and nobody showed except the host, sponsors and contingency of writers from Wise Bread. I attended BlogHer 07 and AOL sponsored a lunch with Mary Hunt, AOL Money Coach and author of Debt-Proof Living. The turn out was about the same.
So where are all the women personal finance bloggers? And why are women afraid to write about money? Or are they writing about money but their blogs are classified as something besides personal finance blogs. Here are a couple of comments from the Wise Bread post:
I think the fact that women write about personal finance (mostly) from a personal perspective causes a lot of PF blogs to get classified as other sorts of blogs- family or mommy or giveaways etc- in the minds of the authors. Almost as if there were the attitude that I’m a mom, so it’s a mommy blogger talking just about money.
I consider my own site a hybrid between personal finance and mom-blogging, even though I almost exclusively write about finance and frugality.
I think it’s interesting what one commenter said about women financial blogs being written from a personal perspective giving the impression that they are mommy blogs or whatever. I find it interesting because Trent from The Simple Dollar writes from a personal perspective but people just accept it as is, without putting him in the same camp of personal blogs.
A year ago, I looked at this topic in a similar way by noting how few women rank in the Top 100 Personal Finance blogs. Only two blogs written by women made it into the Top 25.
In a follow up post, Kay Bell at Don’t Mess with Taxes weighed in on the topic. She writes:
I do believe there are gender differences in how women and men approach finances’¦ Even today, some gender-specific societal expectations manage to persist. That’s a topic for a whole ‘nother set of blogs. But perhaps some of these antiquated ways are partly behind a trend I’ve noticed. That is, a lot of women take a more ‘œsupportive’ fiscal approach, focusing on money maintenance, holding on to what they have, instead of taking steps to advance it.
We need to get over that right now and get more aggressive when it comes to money ‘” making it, saving it, investing it. The go-for-it approach seems to be more typical of male financial bloggers. Men, at least in my anecdotal observations, are more apt to be risk takers with their money. They embrace the idea that to make more money you sometimes have to take some financial risks with what you’ve got.
Okay, so men and women think differently about money. Why is that? Perhaps this classification stems from something broader and we can partly blame the media. Look no further than the magazines lined up at the newsstand. Women get touchy-feely encouragement and men get hard-hitting advice.
Do you find this is the same with personal finance blogs? Those written by women focus more on the emotions around money while the guys are writing about what we should be doing with our money. I’m certainly guilty of this. For every post I write about creating an alternative revenue stream, there are three about my fears with spending or my emotions around not saving enough.
Am I over simplifying this topic by making such a broad statement: women are one way and men another? Agree or disagree? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
Nina, your original question about Firefinance’s list of top bloggers is responsible for inspiring that post. Thank you so much for raising this important issue.
So interesting!
I’ve tried, twice, to start blogging about personal finance. For whatever reason, I never manage to keep it up for more than a week or two. I guess I have more to say about the maternal side of life.
WRT BlogHer, I remember thinking about going to that session in 2007, but there was something else I wanted to attend more. For me, that’s kind of it in a nutshell — I’m interested in PF, but it generally seems to hover around #3 in my list of things that I’m most interested in — and only reaches #1 for a little while at a time.
Lynn: Thanks again for putting the list together over at Wise Bread.
Liza: You make an interesting point and I wonder how many other women feel the same way. When I first started blogging, I vacillated between topics that interested me the most: money or food blogging were my top two picks. I went with money because there seemed to be fewer personal finance blogs. But thinking back, this site could easily have been Queereats.com.
thanks for the list and for your effort as well..
I’m a female personal finance blogger who focuses on finance for women and I balance the “masculine” do something mentality with the “feminine” emotional side of money because both sides are important. I encourage my readers to actively seek out ways to better improve their financial situation and every month I pose a challenge to my newsletter list to do something that shakes up their usual ways of doing things so that they continually move forward in their financial journey.
I frequently read lists of the top Personal Finance blogs and I’m appalled by the lack of women on the list, but it’s the same if you look up a top 30 under 30 list or any other kind of top people in business list. There is unfortunately a gross lack of acknowledgement of women in business.
One thought is maybe it’s due to who women network with. I tend to solely go to women’s networking events because I get a better vibe there, so if I’m not networking with the right men, then I don’t end up on the right lists. Sad, but could very well be true.
Thank you for writing about the list from the female perspective; I appreciate it!
Women and men certainly approach and treat money differently and as such this is reflected in our magazines and personal finance blogs.
Women are are socialized to spend and men are taught to invest for the long term. Women get into their emotions when dealing with money issues and men automatically shift into how to fix and what to do about it.
This is part of why I started my blog because while I think it’s important to be touch with your emotions when facing financial difficulty, it’s also important to know what exactly to do about it ie create a game plan to get out of debt, save for emergency fund etc etc
Hopefully I’m headed towards a happy medium!