Women’s financial wellness: employers can play a part

IT IS commendable that Singapore’s healthcare system is shifting from one that is reactive to being preventive in order to nip problems in the bud as early as possible and thus reduce the burden to society of rising medical costs in an ageing population.

There is, however, another area of wellness that needs to be studied, one in which employers can play a big part, namely, financial literacy.

 Although this relates to everyone, there is greater need to cater to women since all surveys on financial wellness consistently show that women are less financially prepared for retirement compared to men – for example, a 2018 HSBC study found that 41 per cent of working-age women (versus 31 per cent of men) in Singapore either don’t know how much they are saving for retirement or haven’t started saving at all.