Women, Math, and Money: You’re Better With Numbers Than You’ve Been Told
Women, Math, and Money: You’re Better With Numbers Than You’ve Been Told
04.14.2023 - By: Anastasia Barbuzzi
Erin B. Haag, is a serial entrepreneur, mom, author, and creator of Pricing Overhaul. A self-proclaimed "math nerd," Erin has worked intimately with numbers, metrics, and pricing for large corporations and smaller, privately owned businesses for over 20 years. Today, she helps women gain control of their business finances so that they can do the jobs they love and pay themselves abundantly.
On the podcast, we discussed "fear of math," why telling girls they're good at math is important, why women often undercharge, why asking for more money and sticking to pricing is challenging, how inflation affects pricing, how we tie our self-worth to money, why encouraging women to pursue careers in finance is critical, and so much more.
There were so many great takeaways from my conversation with Erin. Still, I wanted to highlight a few tidbits that focus on how our understanding and confidence in our ability to do math affects us and how the stereotype that women are not as good with numbers is perpetuated. To listen to our full chat, tap or click here. Read on for the rest!
Anastasia - $HMONEY Radio: I would love to talk about your journey to founding Pricing Overhaul, and I would love for you to tell everyone a little bit about how you help women gain control of the numbers, finances, and metrics inside their businesses.
Erin B. Haag: We went into a recession and I was laid off from my corporate sales job and like I said I had spent years making millions of dollars for millions upon millions of owners of these businesses that I worked for. And in an instant, I was expendable. And it was in that moment that I realized, okay, the only financial security is going to come from working for myself and being my own boss.
So at the ripe old age of 27, I opened my first business and it was a brick and mortar pilates and yoga studio. I went into it with all of these, all of this experience from working in corporate America with sales systems and strategies and metrics and numbers and all of that, and everything was going well, but I still made horrible decisions in my business, especially as it came to pricing.
And several years into my business, I landed in the hospital with viral meningitis to at home. I was running this what was supposed to be or what I thought was a successful business. Like we were making more and more money every year. But despite the increase in gross revenue, I was working more and I was paying myself less and I was sick and tired, literally sick in the hospital. And the neurologist came in and just said, considering your stress level, I'm like, what are you talking about? I'm not stressed. And he was like, I think you a business, you have two babies under the age of two, all of that to say I had to go on bed rest and during that time on bed rest, I really had to analyze my business.
It came down to, I simply was not charging what I needed to charge in order to be profitable. And if I wanted to continue operating my business, something had to change and that was in my And I made the changes necessary and I did it based on math, something I didn't do when I first opened my business. And three years later, I sold my business, cash positive business, for 40 times my original investment. And I started coaching. I started consulting with other service-based businesses to help them turn their businesses around. And paying the owners more and have a profit. today.
Erin B. Haag
Anastasia - $HMONEY Radio: I'd love to read this little blurb I think I found on your website (might have been from your book) that says, “Girls are statistically given less attention by teachers than their male counterparts in areas of science, technology, engineering are encouraged to excel in other areas such as reading, social studies, and art. Furthermore, parents tend to spend less time playing games with their daughters that involve spatial cognition, a skill that further develops math ability, then they play with their sons.
Girls pick up on these societal cues and focus their attention on other subjects and interests, all while concluding to themselves, I must be bad at math.”
Can you unpack that a little more and talk about why it contributes to a lack of financial independence, confidence, or literacy?
Erin B. Haag: Yeah, and I'm gonna take it from the lens of business ownership because the women who I support are all independent business owners. So what happens is, and I have found that women, we open up businesses because we're passionate about something and we're really skilled or talented service. And we open up businesses thinking that that's all it's going to take. That I'm super talented at this, people are going to want to work with me. Then we just copy what everybody else is doing because we assume that everybody else who is already in business in this industry is smarter than we are.
Well, they must have done the math. And because society has conditioned us to believe that we as women are bad at math, we suck at numbers, managing our money, we again just assume that everybody else is better than us. And so we copy what everybody else is doing.
We have this self doubt that we are capable of doing the math. And the truth is the math is so, so simple. We just have to reframe the narrative in our minds to convince ourselves that we actually are good at math.
Anastasia - $HMONEY Radio: You've talked about how when women pursue careers in finance and when they flood the financial job market, companies will have no other choice but to change their practices when it comes to hiring and paying women what they're worth. How does that play out in the near future?
Erin B. Haag: I’m going to take this back to business ownership. We’re at a stage, an era post-pandemic, where more and more women are leaving the traditional workforce, the nine-to-five, because they realize they're not making what they need to make in order to live the lives they want. And we have more and more women by the millions opening up their own businesses.
As we start to see the markets change, where there are more women-owned businesses, I'm hopeful this idea that - it’s not even an idea, it's the way that it is - this idea or this way of women undercharging completely changes and consumers and companies start to pay women more. They’ll have no other choice if women begin to flood finance jobs as well.
Thoughts? Questions? Leave ‘em in the comments below 💚
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