Gender
Women, Wealth, and the Rules We Inherit
How culture and family shape the stories women inherit about money and success.
Posted August 25, 2026 Reviewed by Monica Vilhauer Ph.D.
Key points
- Women’s financial independence is recent, and inherited beliefs about money can outlast legal change.
- Success does not erase the barriers women may still face around money, authority, and power.
- For women of color, money can also reflect culture, family obligation, migration, and class mobility.
- The goal is not to reject inherited values, but to choose which ones still belong in our lives.
For Women’s Equality Day, I’ve been thinking about the unspoken rules women inherit about money, power, and taking up space—and just how much more complicated those rules are for women of color.
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.
I recently learned about Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, a Chinese immigrant who marched for suffrage as a teenager 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?
Today, women have access to opportunities that Lee’s 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.
The Rules We Learned Early On
I grew up in a traditional Vietnamese household where being a “good girl” 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: “Because you’re a girl.”
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 and a protective instinct. And not everything she taught me was something I wanted to discard—she taught me how to read a room, listen carefully, work hard, and put the collective before myself. I still care deeply about those values.
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.
This is a central conundrum for many of my clients: How do you ask for more when you were raised to just be grateful for what you have? How do you speak up when humility is the core of who you are?
Women and Money
I recently read Cary Carbonaro’s 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.
It’s astonishing how recent basic financial rights actually are.
Bella Abzug, who pushed to recognize Women’s Equality Day, also fought discrimination 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.
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."
This is why financial psychology 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 “good person” does with wealth.
Beyond Gender
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.
Also, what sometimes gets mislabeled as a “lack of confidence” 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, we need to understand the rules they learned and what those rules were trying to protect.
What I Am Still Unlearning
My mother was thirty-six weeks pregnant 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.
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, career changes, caregiving, sudden wealth, entrepreneurship, or becoming the first person in their family to build significant wealth.
I am interested in what happens when our circumstances change, but some of the old rules follow us.
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’t need you anymore."
References
Carbonaro, C. (2025). Women and wealth: A playbook to empower clients and unlock their fortune. John Wiley & Sons
Catania, C., Zucker, J., Luccini, A., Haag, G., Kaur, H., Sreenivas, M., Das, N., & Pittiglio, N. (2025, May 8). The new face of wealth: The rise of the female investor. McKinsey & Company.