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🛒 Why You Keep Impulse Spending—And How to Finally Stop · Money Healing Club Podcast

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I mean, just thinking about, Women's short history of wealth, right.
And the fact that we, our sex, our gentle sex has not been able to own things.
We've actually been the thing that was owned.
Yes.
Oh, that.
Hit me so hard in my chest when you said that that hits, I know it makes me want to cry.
Um, uh, Uh, All right.
Today in the money healing club podcast, we are going to talk about the very spicy topic of gender and money.
Angie, would you mind introducing yourself? Yes, my name is Angie Fitzpatrick.
I am the community program manager for the money healing club.
And in my past life, I was a professor of women's and gender studies.
So I'm very interested in the topic of women and money.
So we just thought this is a conversation that comes up so much.
There are a lot of women in the club and Angie and I are fired up about this.
So fired up.
We're like, where do we even start? So I think we're going to get started with, you know, the thing that we, I think has talked about a lot is the wage gap, but there's so much more to it than simply women tend to be paid less than men in full time roles.
Do you want to unpack that first? Yes.
I guess one of the things that I have found frustrating when we talk about the wage gap is this assumption that the gap occurs because of choices that women make, right? So women don't make as much as men because we are choosing to go into education or social services, you know, the helping professions that don't pay as much.
But when we look at the data, what we find is that the gap exists across occupations.
And in fact, when women enter male dominated fields where the pay tends to be higher, the gap is bigger, it's an even bigger gap.
So like, sure, the CEO is making more than the elementary school teacher.
But she has a bigger gap with her male peer than that elementary school teacher.
I did pull some data.
Do you want to hear some numbers? Let's do some numbers.
So the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2020, based on their 2018 data, that on average, Women were making 82 percent of men's earnings, and this is across race and across occupation.
and this is full time workers who aren't self employed either.
We're getting a good snapshot, but there are some pieces left out.
We'll come back to those.
About 45 percent of the workers in this study were women.
So that's a pretty good chunk of the workforce.
chief executives, women are paid 75.
6 percent of what male chief executives make.
Financial managers, women are paid 66% of what their male peers are making and in STEM, right? We push STEM for women.
One of the biggest gaps in occupations were in medical scientists.
So the women working as medical scientists were making 55 percent of what their male peers were getting paid.
And we see something similar in legal occupations.
the breakdown in the Bureau of Labor's report does not break it down by here's a clerk, here's a judge, here's a lawyer, but for the overall legal profession, women make 55% of what men are making, and I don't want to say make they're being paid because that's the other thing.
It's not like women are earning less.
Somebody is making a very conscious decision to pay women less than they're paying men, right? Very conscious decisions in hiring, you know, bias and hiring.
I feel like we hear all the time.
Oh, these resumes are going to be anonymized and all of that.
But let's get real.
Like the bias is very real.
When I've been involved in hiring before, I couldn't help but have some bias.
I imagine this role being filled by a woman.
And even if it's so subconscious, we don't realize we're doing it.
Oh, this leadership role, of course it will be filled by a man.
Like we have this implicit bias.
So it starts at the hiring process.
It starts with the applicant pool to even begin with.
And I think too one of the sad things and the hard parts about all of this is this whole cultural narrative that we have about who is the breadwinner and who is the caretaker in the home? For the longest time, we've perceived men as being the primary breadwinners for their families, right? So, they didn't have to pay women as much because of this assumption that behind her was a man who was actually paying the bulk.
So, the woman was earning some purse money.
But we know now that over half of all households are dual income households, right? Like in the economy today, we have to have two incomes.
Um, but the other thing I think is like for all the men in particular who are in these hiring positions, who may or may not consciously be thinking, Oh, we don't have to pay her as much because there's a man who's also contributing to the household.
I want you to think, don't you want more money in your house? Wouldn't you want someone to say, this is your family income.
We need to think about family incomes and not just, this is what the men should be paid.
And this is what the women should be paid.
We need to advocate for equal wages because it impacts everybody in the household.
Well, and I feel like we saw so much with the pandemic of Wow, it is actually more expensive for if there is a two parent household for both parents to be working that I that calculation definitely happened in my household.
I was starting my private practice doing art therapy when the pandemic hit.
So, well, if anyone was going to scale back to be with the kids, it was obviously going to be me.
My husband has a full time job in tech.
But.
I love working.
I'm so passionate.
I, in some ways I like working more than my husband does.
And so it's like this funny mismatch in our family where I have a lot of the drive and the entrepreneurial spirit and, he's maybe burned out too, like if anything, I should be the breadwinner, so to speak, but he works in tech, like there's also no way.
And we need someone available for the kids.
So I am lead parent, I'm reading the school emails.
I'm doing the drop offs and the playdates and everything as well as doing my business in like fitting in and all the little bits.
Sometimes I sit there and be like, gosh, how did I fall into this super gendered situation, but also made the most practical sense.
Yeah.
That is the hardest part, right? Going from being a single person without kids, who is looking at that paradigm and thinking, well, that doesn't make sense.
I'm not going to have that.
Right.
Like that's not for me.
And then you find yourself there and you're like, oh, Okay.
This is why the labor gets divided like this.
Here's the thing, right? I think it's different for our generation, Rachel, and for this time period, because the truth is we're operating at a time when both people in the house are working.
Right.
And so if we're just thinking of like, you know, your heteronormative family structure, that, you know, dad's working, mom's working, but we're both working.
I think it's more important today, more than ever for our male partners to realize that they need to be pitching in, in ways that their fathers didn't right, we're seeing men stand up and take on the task of fathering in ways that our fathers and grandfathers didn't.
But it's not just enough to take the kids on a bike ride right or go to like the cool new trampoline park.
We need folks who are doing the dishes and planning school lunches and helping with all of that work.
There's a statistic from a while ago that says when women get married and have children, we end up with, I think it's about 14 more hours of work per week.
Men end up with two more hours of work per week, just two.
I believe it.
What the heck? I believe it.
and, Hey, I'm a feminist.
All my friends were, but I saw this happening as we got married and started having children in our thirties that like it's such an insidious, like cultural thing and structural as well my friends that I know, in heterosexual relationships, the woman has to have the most flexible job.
Well, and here's the other part of this wage gap that we don't talk about: the lost wages in caregiving.
In taking time off, not only for children, but for parents.
I took time off of work to care for my mom.
I was the one to do that, you know? There's so much in terms of the caregiving, the unpaid caregiving that our culture, our economy is based on there is an assumption of unpaid caregiving that women by and large fill in those gaps.
And that often means lost wages in the long run, that that 82 percent doesn't even touch.
Absolutely.
When we start to factor that in, what we see is women making 44 percent of what men are making right over their lifetime of earnings.
I mean, they are losing such a significant amount of money and I would say it's not just like the wages that are lost when you have to leave work to pick up your kid, right.
or take off a year because something's come up.
Our wages grow based on our performance.
And unfortunately, in a patriarchal society where caregiving isn't valued, your boss isn't going to say, well, Rachel was taking off all this time to care for her kids.
And that means she's a great person.
And, we're still going to put up for this promotion.
Sometimes it means, wow, Rachel's taking a lot of time out for her kids, I don't know if she's ready for this promotion.
I think we're going to give it to somebody else, somebody who is here.
So the other thing, when we talk about the wage gap is that there's this huge penalty for mothers.
That is, women, even without children experience, gender discrimination in the workplace, but it's mothers who really, really bear the brunt of that.
And it just reminded me of an article I read years ago that, we always put on high like the Scandinavian countries and their paid time off, their paid paternal leave and all of that.
And that's very true and very real.
But there was a study about what these fathers did.
On their paternal time off, and they tended to advance their careers.
There still is a wage gap, even in Scandinavian countries.
And one of the things is that the men take that time off to advance their careers.
Yeah, so it's not all like perfect over there in Scandinavia, like they're also taking advantage of it where they don't skip a beat and they can go back into work, you know, at a higher level or job pivot or whatever and upskill during their parental leave.
As you were talking about all this, unpaid, invisible labor that we're doing.
I was reminded of a project called bill the patriarchy.
Have you heard of this like bill B I L L.
Yeah.
Like I'm going to dear patriarchy.
Here's the bill for all of the work I do to keep this society going and you owe me big time.
So it's bill, the patriarchy.
com it's.
All about, shedding a light on the unpaid domestic and emotional labor that women are doing.
I'll definitely check that out.
That is great.
Like, yeah.
How do we put a number to that? How do you, and it often comes up in divorce.
If this couple splits at the family splits, what would, in this case, you know, a heterosexual couple, what would the father need to pay to be doing this on their own? well, actually, if you had a full time personal assistant and a house manager and a caterer and da da da, we're looking at 80 to a hundred thousand dollars a year, usually, and so these things get factored in with spousal support.
Okay.
Let alone child support, but this is the cost that you've been getting for free.
I think that we are entering an age of reckoning where, there are so many influencers out there on social media right now, drawing attention to invisible labor.
Um, I know you mentioned that you follow somebody who is a white male and is bringing this up.
I'd seen a post recently about Ways that your spouse can ask you questions that don't seem like he's asking you to be the manager of everything at all times.
In the comment sections are interesting because there's people who get it.
Right, but there's also a lot of people who don't get it, who are still thinking like, oh, no, no, no, no dad is out there making all the money.
So when he comes home, he shouldn't have to add ketchup to the list, right? Like, he shouldn't have to be the one who figures out what's for dinner.
Again, in many cases, mom has been out there to working and obviously putting ketchup on a list is a small thing.
But when you think about the amount of time the mental energy that goes into running a household.
Like it's so difficult to do that really well on your own and to manage your children and your spouse and then also to show up at work and to give everything at work, you know, it's, I mean, and we know that multitasking doesn't exist.
We actually only single task and by and large, I believe this is like a lot of what the fair play method talks about.
There's a book fair play and there's a documentary and actually a card game.
The mental load is also about switching tasks that women get interrupted a lot more.
It's like, it's harder to get into deep work.
And that probably, just like you were saying, like adds to job performance and things like that.
When, Hey, I'm, I'm the first one that gets called when my kids need to be picked up at school.
Like I'm interrupted constantly, right.
In a way that probably my husband isn't really, it's also the structural thing.
So Angie, what do we do? What do we do about this? Right.
I think that people listening are really getting this.
Yes.
This is my lived experience.
Like, okay.
I think it's number one is always normalized, right? That's always like the number one in therapy.
So if we're feeling this, you're not alone, there are structural things.
It's much more structural than individual.
I think recognizing too that structures are made up of individuals, right? And so finding our power where we have it.
I'd love that there are more influencers talking about this.
Fair play is a wonderful resource.
So I think when individuals take it upon themselves to look into this right and to do that work in their own homes and then can normalize equality and to even model it for their peers.
Well, there's been a lot of consciousness raising where women are saying, Hey, hold on.
Something's wrong.
Right.
So it would be wonderful to see more men standing up and saying, Hey, you know what? I think it's kind of unfair that we're putting so much work on our spouses.
Like what can we take off their plates? How can we show up in meaningful ways? That is a big part of it.
And I think questioning the norms, like I've, I know of several couples where the male partner took the caregiving role for the children and the babies and that actually made so much sense for that couple.
Questioning norms is so important.
And if it makes sense in your family go contrary to the pervasive beliefs or switching up those roles, roles are hard to switch, but sometimes it really makes sense for your family.
You know, like I hope someday that the roles will get reversed in our family actually, cause I'm, I have a lot more passion for my work than my husband does.
Maybe it makes sense for us to really have different roles and to be thinking about that.
And I think also, if any of us are in a position of hiring, making any of these decisions, it's so important to check your bias, right? I feel like a lot of this came up with elections, right? How we perceive women as leaders versus men as leaders, the same qualities in both, but have a negative perception with women candidate, and I think we see this a lot in hiring as well.
So if any of us are in a position of hiring to really be excavating that stuff too.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I hope that.
folks in these hiring positions are, are making strong sound financial decisions and being as generous as they can be when it comes to the salary, right? So not going in with a low ball, um, but going in and saying.
I mean, I've seen job posts where they say, listen, we.
Want to pay you as much as we can.
And so we don't actually negotiate here's the salary.
And it's a really nice salary.
It's the kind of salary I see.
And I think, oh, I don't know that I would need to, like, I don't feel like I'm getting low balled and I have to go in with, you know, my Duke's up.
Um, so it'd be interesting to see more of that, but at the same time, we know, like in general, women need to be advocating more for themselves when.
It comes to hiring, right? Like when it comes to, um, being on the job market and dot, dot, dot.
So we need to also advocate for women because we don't want to get into this thing of like, oh, well, you just need to get a job that pays more.
Like, that's saying that's an individual problem too.
I think we need to help women negotiate and help each other, counter and offer and go through that because for it to suddenly be an individual thing.
I know for me, I was never taught To negotiate, or I was always taught to be grateful, just be grateful for the money you have, be grateful that's a steady job.
And then when I was in a position to negotiate, I had never, literally never done that before.
So then if I didn't get the promotion or a bonus or whatever, then, Oh, it's on me.
Well, no, it was on my whole community.
It was on my family, my friends, my workplace.
And my boss to also help me negotiate, help me learn that because that's another thing that girls tend to not be taught.
Well, and that's a thing that I love about the money healing club is that it is a community where we can have conversation, like real conversations about finances and support each other because talking about money can be taboo Um, uh, Uh, I'm taking a little break here from my conversation with Angie to tell you a little bit more about the Money Healing Club.
Angie and I actually met in the Money Healing Club.
And our doors are open for you as well.
I have designed the club to be the thing I wish I had had.
When I was trying to figure out my relationship with money, We have at least two live events every week, sometimes more.
They range from book clubs to money master classes, to money healing sessions, coworking sessions, and open coaching hours.
Every quarter, we do a sprint together to get our money organized with a very special spreadsheet that I made just for you.
I've also put everything I know into the 12 week roadmap for money healing course, which is included in your membership.
We have a wonderful forum that is available all the time.
It is not on social media, no Facebook.
Club members also get special discounts on other services like one on one intensives with me.
So if you are ready to finally look at money in a new way that costs far less than your last impulse purchase, I want you to go to moneyhealingclub.
com and use code podcast at checkout for 50 percent off your first month in the club.
I can't wait to meet you there.
Um, uh, Uh, And I think it's especially taboo when it's women talking about money and like, this is another podcast for another time.
Right.
But like, even just thinking about how women haven't been able to own property and money for very long at all.
Right.
Like what was it? Women could have their own checking account and is it the sixties and seventies? I'd have to look that up.
Right.
That was the Ruth Bader Ginsburg legacy.
Yeah, I think it does feel strange for women to be advocating for ourselves and anything.
Right.
Because you're supposed to be nice, but then to also be asking for more money, you, you want me to do that.
Right.
Again, I think the club is a really great place where we can have those conversations and, you know, hype each other up, give each other some tips.
We've had some conversations with like, girl, you could actually, you could be earning quite a bit more with your skillset.
Right.
And sometimes we didn't know, right.
The theme of September is income.
And we've had a career counselor, a career coach in, that just like inspired me so much, We're smart people.
We can like, we're very capable and job hopping is honestly one of the best ways to, to actually make money.
That's the stressful way, but it is the way it is.
It's hard.
You know, I'm thinking though, like, so these are some really great individual actions that we can take, but going back to the structural thing.
Right.
I have been thinking for a while now about how, and I'm not the first to say this by any means, but like the 40 hour work week.
Is totally outdated right like that work week was built around the idea that there is a woman at home who doesn't work and who takes care of the house and the children, but now we're over half of us are also like we're both working.
It's just, it's too much and it's very expensive to be a parent, right? So if both parents are working 40 hours a week, guess the hours of school, you know, schools, nine to two 30 or eight to two 30 it's, and so then you have to pay for the extra childcare and all the camps and you and I are both parents, like, Oh my God, the camps, the inflation of camps and enrichments and things like that.
And then the pressure, Oh, your children have to be enriched.
They can't just be in daycare.
Right.
And there's like so much pressure to do this right.
That's one of the decision points of, of me working less.
It's like, it is just more expensive for me to work more, especially trying to grow a business because like, then we're just paying for all the childcare.
Also, it doesn't align with our ethos.
Like my children don't like being away from home that long.
And, you know, we value a lot of closeness with them.
And so it's, it's such a trade off where like, yeah, the school thing doesn't align at all.
The school schedule does not support working parents at all, but really by and large, both parents need to work.
And then talk about summer.
Don't even get me started on summer and how hard that is.
Right? So it's like, there's a book that came out a while ago by Cornell West called the war against parents, and he really pulls apart, like how we're really punished for having children.
And so then we wonder why birth rates are so low and why people leave the country.
because literally there's so little structural supports.
It is very, So expensive to have a child in, in this country.
And those are some structural things where, yeah, for 40 hour work week, doesn't make sense.
Absolutely.
And you know, what else is wild is that if you talk to folks who work in the childcare industry, They're broke too, right? Like they are also struggling.
It is hard for them to be able to pay staff, especially staff who have been to college and got their degree, right.
In education and are providing the enrichment that we want.
So like we're over here paying as much as our mortgage to send an infant to a place where they're pretty much just held and fed and kept safe, right.
Maybe played with a little bit.
And still the child care centers are saying this is not sustainable for us either.
So, it's obvious that we need some government intervention, I would say, right? I'm a big old socialist, but I really do think that, we need some subsidies to support child care and to make it more feasible for us to be able to send our children to safe places.
Places where we know that they're being cared for.
Um, and, and we don't have to do it in a way that like drives up our debt.
Right.
It makes it difficult for us.
And in a way that supports parents.
Right.
That like we should have the choice about working or not working, or I would say not working.
I put that in air quotes, you know, working at home.
Yeah, I was thinking about that with the 40 hour work week also with like AI and stuff and talking about that being such a big industry disruptor, is the upshot of this us actually being able to work less because AI is going to take over some of that stuff.
I'm not like a labor force expert or anything, but it seems likely in the next few years that that's going to shift.
And there are a lot of big name companies who are doing like 35 hour work weeks and, unlimited PTO.
And like, people are playing with this and it's working by and large, these things are working.
So it's a huge sea change, really.
We need more flexibility, um, to support everybody.
That's it.
We need more flexibility for everybody.
And, um, I think.
What's exciting is we see, you know, like if you really think about the history of women in the workplace, like there've always been women that have been working outside of their home, right.
Um, except for like aristocratic women or, you know, women who were married to like the merchants or whatever, the bourgeoisie.
Um, but you know, women have been working.
We've had to do things to help support our family.
And what's exciting in this era is that we're seeing more and more women get into leadership positions where they get to be the decision makers.
They could change the structure, right? And so my hope is That the women in these leadership roles are feeling protected enough by the community that they can make bold decisions like, you know, shortening the work week or pushing for legislation that subsidizes childcare right or like, whatever it is, but we definitely need more policies in our workplaces and policies in our communities that support.
Families and that support working parents and just parents in general, right? And we're coming up on election season, you know, it's not just who's president.
It's all the down ballot stuff.
It's all the local stuff.
Um, so it's so important to research those things and really see what's there.
And I'm okay.
I'm going to bring up something super heady.
So I recently read the book.
Eve.
Have you read Eve? No, It's basically a walkthrough of human evolution from the perspective of the female body, like the mammalian female body.
She has some like really interesting, thesis, but one of them is if you just look at human's anatomy, it looks like humans evolved actually in matriarchal societies.
And we can tell that by our anatomy and patriarchy is actually a recent phenomenon evolutionarily.
And I think it's of the reasons we feel such a struggle, where it's like, there have been really effective female leaders, right? She sees it as the sexes kind of reckoning with the fact that these babies need so much help and that female primates gave up Being matriarchal to get more help from the men because they needed to be more of a unit.
So it's just a fascinating thing.
So I've been thinking about that a lot, actually, because yeah, there's nothing stronger than a group of women, like making decisions, right? Like nothing happens without a group of women, like making it happen.
And there's these little bits of evidence of this matriarchy that we have in our bones.
That it is actually part of our evolution.
And that patriarchy has been a more recent add on.
So it just makes you blow everything out.
Like, everything's a construct.
Like, this probably happened in the last 40, 000 years.
Like, not that long.
So we can also redo it in a way that works for everybody.
Yes.
I love that.
Okay.
You are bringing me back to 2001 and I'm sitting in class or my intro to anthropology I remember reading some of these early anthropological studies that shifted the way we thought about early hunting and gathering societies, because this whole idea of men as the breadwinners comes from some of these old ideas, right.
About like the men have always been the providers.
They would go bring home the meat.
Right.
the women are the gatherers and dah, dah, dah.
Feminist archaeologist would say, listen, so the women did provide the sustenance right for early human communities because they were gathering from the area and there was a lot of rich food there.
So while the men would go out, they would be gone for a really long time.
On a long hunt with pretty crappy weapons.
And so sometimes they would come back without any food at all.
And it would be the small animals, the things that they could forage from around that the women had provided.
So like the women were truly the providers and the men were supplementing.
They were not providing the bulk of it.
But also, so what you were seeing, Rachel, about the matriarchal society, Oh my God, of course, women were running the show.
They were the ones at home.
And interestingly in this book, she's like, and also matriarchal societies were not peaceful.
It's still pretty violent, which was also interesting, like throwing it on its head a little bit.
It's not like it's, it was all like perfect and lovely and all that stuff, but it's, it's all about these babies.
Okay, these babies take so much work.
I actually, we need to have more allegiance.
We need to have more connection and more allegiance with all the adults to help grow these babies.
That was the compromise that patriarchy was supposed to bring.
So, okay, well, I'm definitely going to read.
You have to read it.
Okay.
I feel like I know we have so much more to say, but I think we're going to have to wrap up on our rant about the wage gap about patriarchy about invisible labor.
I'll link to some of my favorite people in the show notes.
Also, Angie will contribute as well.
And I think we all have a part to play in this.
We all are decision makers in some way or another.
And also you're not alone.
We really, we unpack this in the club all the time.
If you need a place where there are other people, a lot of women really normalizing that the struggle is real, but also like the hope and the capability is also so real and we need each other.
So thank you so much, Angie, for bringing your amazing expertise into this conversation.
I learned so much.
So thank you, Rachel.
Thank you for inviting me to be part of the conversation.
And I learned so much from you as well.
So I'm really grateful to be here.
We'll do it again.
Thanks.
Um, uh, Uh, Thanks for listening to the Money Healing Club podcast.
You can find resources and links from this episode in the show notes at moneyhealingclub.
com slash podcast.
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