Females' attitudes toward finance: an exploratory study

In spite of the amount of research which has been devoted to the issue of financial literacy, the literature offers little information about the role of attitude toward finance and its relation to financial knowledge. This study aims to fill this knowledge void by investigating the phenomenon of ‗attitude towards finance‘, which is viewed as ‗something‘ that is potentially connected to people's financial literacy levels. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, we pursue a deeper understanding of women‘s ‗attitude towards finance‘, providing a rich and detailed set of data about their beliefs, emotions and self-perceptions toward finance in their own words. Secondly, adopting an inductive approach, our focus group results are also fruitful to generate a set of testable hypotheses for further investigation. The study focuses on women of three groups – young, ‗minority gender‘ and aged – in order to assess and compare their attitude toward finance. With regard to the practical method of this study, this is a qualitative study based on focus group discussions. We find different ‗profiles of attitude‘ in our sample depending on the complex interaction of affect towards learning finance, cognitive competence, value, difficulty, and interest toward finance. As might be expected, ‗minority gender‘ members show a positive attitude toward finance; conversely, aged women and young women have predominantly negative attitudes. Implications for research and practice are included.