Female First-Time Gold Investors +116% Since Covid
Thursday, 3/07/2024 08:44
4x men's growth in 'long-term reliable investment...'
"EVERYTHING's changed since Covid,"
writes Adrian Ash at BullionVault.
That's how one woman choosing to use BullionVault since 2020 explains her decision to start investing in gold.
She's far from alone. The rise in female investors
buying gold bullion since the pandemic began 4 years ago has been remarkable.
This trend is global, and it's accelerating.
Women as % of new precious metals investors
Source: BullionVault
The Covid Crisis saw
a record number of people buy gold for investment. But while the pace of growth has eased back overall, women continue to make up a greater share of new buyers.
In fact, since the Covid Crisis began at the start of 2020, the number of women choosing to use BullionVault's platform to put money into gold for the first time has grown by 116% compared to the previous 4-year period. That outpaces growth in the number of new male users, at 28% worldwide, more than four times over.
The trend for women to invest in gold is happening across all of BullionVault's major markets, as the data in our table above shows.
Over the past 4 years – and with the pandemic followed by the worst inflation in four decades, plus Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the return of banking stresses and failure in the USA, and now the Hamas-Israel war spilling into the Red Sea – BullionVault has seen female investors account for more than 25% of its new users worldwide, up from below 17% of 2016-2019's new intake. Across 2023 alone, that figure rose to 29%.
This switch over the past 4 years marks a much greater proportion for female vs. male gold investors than during the global financial crisis, and it contrasts sharply with the pre-Covid period as well.
Something is different, in other words, about the 2020s so far. Women are now choosing to buy gold for investment in a way that they didn't when Northern Rock or Lehman's failed 15 years ago, or when the Eurozone debt crisis threatened to crash the single currency a decade ago, or when Brexit and then Trump shook UK and US politics in 2016 as the migrant crisis continued to shake the European Union.
Is this trend being seen in other investments and asset classes? A survey for brokerage and fund management firm Fidelity in 2021 said that two-thirds of women in the USA were now investing money on top of their workplace retirement savings plans, up from below 1-in-2 three years earlier. Half of women answering that survey also said they'd become "more interested in investing" since the start of the pandemic in 2020.
But rather than reporting what people say to market-research surveys asking about their money, the trend at BullionVault is shown by hard data from our client base. It also marks a jump in allocations to a 'safe haven' investment – one which tends to gain appeal among all investors and savers when the economy stumbles and other assets do poorly.
Of course, everyone has personal reasons for reaching the financial decisions they make. But when asked what led them to choose gold, female customers of BullionVault have repeatedly used words such as:
- "Mistrust" whether of government, central banks, the financial industry or the social/economic system more widely;
- "Inflation" in the cost of living, "debasement" and "devaluation" of currency;
- "Unsustainable debts" facing Western economies;
- Wanting to "diversify" their other investments, spreading risk overall, especially versus shares;
- "Uncertainty" and "crisis".
Against those challenges, women using BullionVault to invest in gold since the start of the pandemic say that the precious metal offers "security...stability...protection...preservation of value."
Do men see the gold differently or use other words to discuss it? In our experience, no. The same issues and concerns are raised by BullionVault's male customers, too. Again however, the number of men choosing to buy gold hasn't risen anything like as fast as the number of women over the past 4 years.
No doubt every age in history felt uncertain at the time, if not turbulent.
But the 2020s began with governments worldwide imposing the most sudden and aggressive interventions of any peacetime period into our personal and economic lives. Now this decade continues to deliver what feel like ever-more epochal shifts and shocks to the economy, personal finances, investment markets, social cohesion and political order.
Women using BullionVault tell us that such uncertainties are the drivers for them acting to diversify their investments, spreading risk in their portfolio and retirement savings with an allocation to securely stored precious metals led by gold.
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