I was making small talk with the man sitting next to me at a holiday open house. We turned, inevitably, to the discussion of what we “do.”  He was micro-lending to government enterprises in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I was changing the way personal financial advice is delivered to women.  Of the two professions, I would have said his was far more dangerous.  In his opinion, however, it was my work that was full of land mines and embedded explosive devices.  After all, I was dealing with the issue of gender.

He was clearly uncomfortable at the mention of women and finance in the same sentence.  He presumably had guessed my approximate age, and possibly had me figured for one of those 1970s, bra-burning feminists who hated men, but wanted to be just like them.  “Why single out women?” he asked.  No doubt he saw my efforts to financially empower women as another form of misguided “affirmative action:”  giving women extra attention and guidance as a way to make up for all the years where women were kept financially in the dark.  “Why should women be any different when it comes to money?”

I knew I had to work carefully to avoid closing his mind even further.  So I started with all the factual stuff, hard “nuts” of information that even a blind squirrel would happily chew on.  Women’s longer lives, their years out of the workplace to bear and raise children, their ineligibility for workplace benefits if they work part-time: all these facts adding up to women needing more wealth, but handicapped in trying to accumulate it.  It was, however, when I mentioned that Social Security benefits are computed on 35 years of earnings, which penalizes mothers and caretakers whose average workplace tenure is approximately 29 years, that I could see he was beginning – just—to respect what I had to say.  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” he conceded.

I then tentatively introduced the observation that women think and talk differently about money, citing the neurophysiology and sociolinguistics supporting this assertion. He was making eye contact with me now, no longer searching for a diversion on the buffet table.  However, it was only when his wife joined the conversation that he became convinced.  Hearing only the tail end of our conversation about why personal finance is different for women, she announced, “Well, of course it is.  Everyone knows that…”

We said our goodbyes a few minutes later, with the Pakistani microlender saying – quite genuinely – “It sounds like you are doing some interesting and important work.”