Getting on the money trail

What is it with women and money? Anne Dempsey meets two women whose eight steps to becoming wealthy include giving as well as getting.

It is often said that while the best things in life are free, you need money for everything else - but this is a message that women can still struggle with.

Although women have achieved recognition and parity in most aspects of public and private life, when it comes to money, we are, it seems, still unequal. Many women earn less, have less and perhaps even feel they deserve less than men. It's a situation Aine McCarthy and Bernie Purcell want to change.

"About 18 months ago, Bernie and I had one of those exciting conversations that sparked new thoughts. It was about the difficulty that women have around money," says McCarthy (44), a writer, university teacher and international writing tutor (who uses the pseudonym Anna Ross for this book).

"We are the generation that expected things to be different, to make and to see significant change for women. As we talked, we became aware that many we know are disappointed about their relationship with wealth. In my adult education courses I had come across women who struggled around money, and Bernie found it a recurring issue in her psychotherapy practice. We realised there was no culture around women and money, and nothing out there dealing with this."

Bernie Purcell (50) has been a teacher, psychotherapist and adult educator, and is currently director of a counselling centre and a nursing home. The women met three years ago when doing an MA in Women's Studies at University College Dublin, and became friends. How to address the gap they identified?

"A book was an obvious idea, but a book might not be enough. The questions around money are deep and profound, affected by both internal and external forces. Money is connected to every single aspect of our lives. It would be hard for an individual to change on her own, but we felt that women could do it together, in giving and receiving," says Ross.

"Women are naturally very good at networking anyway," adds Purcell.

So they founded Women of Wealth (WoW), an organisation to increase women's understanding of and access to material, social, psychological and spiritual wealth and began conducting pilot workshops on this theme. Their book The Woman's Way to Wealth is published on November 13th, and the first "Become A Woman of Wealth" roadshow is on the same day, aimed at starting a national conversation.

There is plenty to say. On average, Irish women earn 85 per cent of men's earnings while doing the same job. Women in the EU earn an average 75 per cent of men's wages and progress towards equal pay in Europe has moved into reverse. Education can widen the gap - women graduates earn on average 32 per cent less than men with similar qualifications. Many financial products, such as pensions and loans, are not suited to women's life circumstances. Women who opt out of paid work to care for children are penalised - a home-based woman is regarded as unemployed, but is not entitled to any unemployment payment. After a lifetime of work, paid or unpaid, only three out of every 100 women can support themselves without help from family or State.

So what is the McCarthy/Purcell attitude to money? "I would have seen money as something that had little do with me. I always worked hard, in paid and unpaid work, sometimes work that was never going to pay me a lot of money," says McCarthy. "The script I had was: 'I'm really into fiction, politics, art, family.' Money was slightly over there," waving her arm, "and there was an underlying feeling if I did earn more, I might lose people.

"I wanted to earn more money, but life defeated me. I was never fully dependent on a partner but for periods when my family was younger, my income was reduced and I worked mainly to stay connected to the world of work. About four years ago, I began to think that more financial success is not going to happen by itself, and to wonder more deeply about money. I realised I had applied myself to fiction, to having children, I began to apply myself to the issue of wealth, to find out as much as I can about the stuff and to gain an understanding of my relationship with it."

Purcell's feel for finance was very different. "My father died when I was four. I saw my mother worrying a lot about money, about getting us all through school and safely out into the world. From an early age I decided I needed to feel secure around money and never to be financially dependent on someone else. My mother worried that this would make me hard. I knew my choice of partner would be someone who would fit with that ethos, someone who would share homemaking and careers.

"When our first child was born, I faced another big hurdle. Very soon I didn't want to be leaving them so I continually changed life and jobs, varying my career options to encompass the childcare aspect of my life." Their book begins by exploring the conflicting philosophies which can throw us into a muddle about money. Contemporary western materialism can be in conflict with traditional religious taboo against excess; global poverty can make us question what we have, while some new age therapies suggest we can have all we desire if only we learn how to attract it. Allied to this, many women have inherited their own limited script about money, wealth and what they deserve.

The authors define wealth as not only cash but love, power and other resources that flow to us, through us, then back out to others. With this ethical definition, it follows that their eight stepping stones to wealth include giving as well as receiving. These are: knowing what you truly want (a major feat in itself); accessing riches and prosperity; feeling gratitude and appreciation; recognising opportunity; making a contribution; becoming creative; staying in balance and living now. True wealth, they say, is not about accumulating more and more but about personal growth, selection, choice and commitment. These ideas are fully explored in the book.

How to move from ideas to action? While lists and questionnaires get the reader focused, the core tool offered in Part II is one each had discovered independently before they met. "I had always used writing things down as a way of dealing with situations, solving dilemmas," says Purcell. "Even if I had only five minutes, I would write. It freed me up, gave me insights and changed my mood. Some years ago, I was at a crossroads and did not know the new direction I wanted to take. I began to write deliberately every day, not censoring myself, just letting out what was there, and within a short space of time, I knew what it was I wanted to do."

A few years ago, when struggling with her first novel, McCarthy reread Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, and, at the same time, came across two other world-renowned writing instructors, Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg. All three recommended keeping a particular kind of journal as a way of accessing our intellectual, emotional and spiritual selves. She began to try it. "The results were miraculous. Within days I noticed shifts in myself and within a number of weeks I had made massive changes in my life.

"Because I had discovered something wonderful, I wanted to tell others about it. I have taught this form of writing with my students and outreach groups and, irrespective of your level of literacy, it works. It invariably clears blocks and is universally powerful in drawing out the best part of you.

"So when researching the book, we discussed what self-development tool we could use. We looked at different approaches but came back to what we both knew to work - learning through writing to meet yourself on the page.

The kind of writing they advocate is called F-R-E-E writing, standing for Fast, Raw and Exact-But-Easy. Writing fast gets beyond conscious censoring to access subconscious levels. Raw means losing control and letting the words flow as they will. Writing exactly is about using original detail of your life, and this comes with practice.

While you don't have to know how this form of writing works in order to benefit from it, its effectiveness has been linked to developments in neurological brain science. It has now been proved that our thinking, emotional and instinctual brain plus our unconscious and transcendent selves can all be accessed through this method of writing. The book explains the method in detail and readers are provided with wealth-related topics to explore for themselves.

Gandhi said: "We must be the change we want to see in the world." This manual is written primarily at a micro level, as bottom-up development, encouraging women to discover what they deserve and find ways to access it for themselves and others. The authors believe that by working towards a deeper definition of wealth, women can change themselves and begin to create a different world order, linked to other progressive self-development movements worldwide.

"We feel that mutual co-operation and women discovering the strength of such connections in themselves, is the only way things will change on a macro level," says Purcell. "People start believing that something isn't right, is not appropriate and want to change it. I see this as completely possible and it is the way new movements begin."

Cash poor, time poor?

You are not wealthy if you: