The following post was originally published on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network.

Financial services firms want to reach more women; so I conclude from data presented by Pamela Grossman of Getty Images at SXSW this year. According to data collected by Getty, financial firms are buying 20 percent more stock photos of women today than they were five years ago. At the same time, the share of men shown in their advertising has declined.

Of course, we live in a wildly diverse world; we want to be inclusive and broad-minded ourselves; and we therefore want our providers of financial advice, energy, and technology to reflect those values. We prefer Morgan Stanley or Citigroup to be talking to all of us, showing us that they have transcended their traditional, mostly white and male clientele. According to Chris Edwards, former Group Creative Director for Arnold Worldwide, we also want visual evidence that the professionals at these firms are as diverse as the clientele they seek. Advertising images reinforce and extend these efforts.

Financial institutions portray women today as competent and self-confident, and often feature attractive, middle-aged advisers talking to couples in which the woman is similarly well dressed and clearly attentive. According to Dr. Emma Firestone, who has studied the audience perception and response to images and words in media and entertainment, from a cognitive perspective, “It makes sense for advertisers to present women as strong, well-educated consumers. This is appealing to women who see an attractive self-image reflected back at them, and to men, who are flattered by the idea that smart, self-possessed, and financially secure women are their own life partners.” Men are much more likely today, than decades ago, to be comfortable with and appreciate their spouses as full partners in their own financial decision-making – at the same time, imagery of supportive female financial advisers plays into comforting stereotypes of the woman-as-helpmeet, perhaps humanizing an industry consumers view as confusing or even threatening.

However, there is a trapdoor in this picture. The rise in strong feminine images in financial advertising also coincides with some very negative portrayals of men in the industry: the testosterone-driven traders and gamblers who led us over the financial cliff in 2008. As Christine Lagarde, Director of the International Monetary Fund has famously stated, only partly in jest, if the firm had been called “Lehman Sisters” there might not have been the same resulting devastation to world economies. There has been extensive coverage of research suggesting that if financial firms had fewer men, those firms would have taken on less risk. Both headlines and Hollywood have also focused on the antics of a few particularly macho financial executives, from the “Wolf of Wall Street” to the “London Whale.” It may be that today’s financial firms are trying to portray a “feminized” face to distance themselves from stereotypes like these.

But it’s not all “optics” – more and more women are actually taking on breadwinning roles. Grossman touched on several demographic factors supporting the trend: one-third of working women earn more than their husbands, 40 percent of households with children under 18 are headed by a women; and female students account for 57 percent of undergraduates in the United States. More women have also taken on more responsibility for retirement planning, in part due to market and retirement plan upheaval; in 1978, the IRS created the structure in which the federal government essentially shifted the burden of retirement financing from employers to employees. Without the safety of defined benefit pension plans in an era of diminished job security, most Americans, as couples or individually, need to be much more active players in the dialogue about their own asset allocation and investment options well in advance of retirement.

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The G20’s Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion (GPFI) has just unveiled a “Basic Set” of indicators that help to solve the problem of how to measure financial inclusion. Their associated data portal will soon be available, too. This indicators release is timely—it corresponds to a massive increase in the amount of data that we have on financial inclusion, and it fills a need in the industry to define what we mean when we say “level of financial inclusion” in a measurable way.

The release also coincides with our own internal discussions here at the Center. Around the coffee pot, after meetings, and in blog posts, we have been wondering how to objectively measure and track financial inclusion. Beth Rhyne discusses the inadequacies of just using account penetration in her blog post “What’s Wrong with ‘Banking the Unbanked’?.”  Ignacio Mas posits “Mobile Money as a (Payment) Planning Tool,” a use that is not tracked in the headline indicators of available data. Leora Klapper’s “We Bring You… DATA!” underlines how critical demand-side data is to complement supply-side data-gathering efforts.

While the Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion does not solve every measurement problem, it certainly is a great start. The “Basic Set” covers five indicators, each measured in multiple ways: individual accounts, individual credit, small and medium enterprise accounts, small and medium enterprise credit, and branch penetration.

Image taken from “The G20 Basic Set of Financial Inclusion Indicators” by GPFI.

This amalgamated dataset recognizes a few critical challenges in the exercise of measuring financial inclusion:

• The measurement of financial inclusion must take into account both supply side and the demand side of finance. Accordingly, the “Basic Set” of indicators pulls from demand-side sources (the Global Findex and the World Bank Group Enterprise Surveys) and pairs them with supply-side sources (the IMF Financial Access Survey) within the same categories (see the “Indicators” column above).
• Financial inclusion is more than access to accounts. While the GPFI “Basic Set” does not include all indicators (mobile phones, for instance), it does include individual credit, SME credit, and SME accounts.
• In addition to use, financial inclusion measures should include availability of services. As a measure of penetration of points of service, the GPFI uses the number of branches per 100,000 adults from the IMF Financial Access Survey.
• People access financial services for both business and personal use. The “Basic Set” consists of both individual and small and medium enterprise use of formal financial services in addition to tracking both the supply and the demand side.

For more information, head over to the Global Partnerships for Financial Inclusion’s website, which will soon include the “Basic Set” of indicators data portal, complete with visualizations of the different datasets. We look forward to continuing to watch how the industry asks the question of how to measure and track financial inclusion.

Image credit: GPFI

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