Why I love powerful women

Below is an e-mail a woman I highly respect sent in response to a sadly sexist webcast by an investment company. The fact that these "wake up" e-mails still need to be sent is exactly why I will continue to cast women as my heroes. Until a powerful woman in fiction and film is just as normal as a powerful man, we still need some work.

Dear Vanguard,

Let me try to express to you the depth of my disappointment and "WTF!?" moment I had this morning when I saw the subject line "Women and money: What you need to know" in an email from you.

I understand that as a college educated, 29-year-old woman working in high tech, who also happens to be the higher wage earner in the household, that I might not be your target demographic for this webcast. However, I would urge you to take a moment to reconsider how you're targeting your female customers, as this subject line smacks of condescending sexism. Perhaps it's a poorly worded subject, but the impression it leaves me with is that Vanguard as a company feels its female customers need extra help in dealing with really hard things - like money and numbers.

I'm sure that someone in Vanguard knows this, but here are a few things that are true in 2013:

- More women than men are completing college educations (where we learn about things like math and economics)
- Women are better investors than men, on a factor of 4-6% (Forbes, the Economist)
- Gen Y women, on average, tend to have a much better grasp of financial principles than their male counterparts (there's a great article on this by the Davidson Institute)

These are your future customers (and they are me).

Back to my original point, I admit that I'm dealing with a very limited view of your strategy. Perhaps next month I'll receive an email that says "Men and money: What you need to know." If that's the case, accept my apologies for the long email. But please do keep in mind how these gender-specific emails can come across (no matter what gender you are). And perhaps revisit how you promote your resources and make sure that you're offering to help people for the right reasons. For example, maybe what you should be promoting is planning for the loss of a spouse or financial planning for single parents.

My grandmother (who is herself a pretty savvy woman) makes cupcakes for the customer service people in her life who treat her right. You, Vanguard, do not get a cupcake today.