Score, Save, Slay
By Damanpreet Singh, Erin Hirsch, Kenzie Amack, Kevin Duan, & Tobias McIntosh
Executive Summary
Our group focused our interviews on current female student athletes at Stanford. We were interested in exploring the personal finances of women athletes specifically because women’s sports are generally under-resourced and women often feel less equipped to effectively manage their own finances. So, we hope our proposed solution – Score, Save, Slay – has the potential to empower women early on to take tangible steps towards confidently and strategically managing their finances.
Women in Athletics
Women in the US are currently paid ~84 cents to every dollar a man earns. This gender-based pay gap is compounded by an even greater wealth gap and growth in the pay gap that occurs later on in career trajectory. In sports, this pay gap becomes even more extreme – for instance, a female golfer only earns 19 cents to a male golfer’s dollar and a female basketball player only earns 2 cents to a man’s dollar. These pay gaps generate overall wealth gaps that are primarily driven by lower investment rates. Because wealth compounds overtime, we find it essential to help female athletes make healthy financial decisions early on and maximize their personal finances in the face of significant pay gaps.
We found that all of the female student athletes that we spoke with were extremely driven and had high hopes for their personal and financial futures.
But, three main themes emerged for what is standing between them and their financial ambitions:
Women athletes are daunted by “getting started” with managing their finances because they do not know the tangible steps they should take to put their goals into action.
Women athletes experience imposter syndrome and therefore avoid asking questions or engaging in conversations about finance to prevent embarrassment.
Women athletes lack a trustworthy space outside of their families for learning about finance.
Overall, the women all expressed a “reactive” approach to their finances – waiting to take action until something sparked a necessity. Because of this finding, our group chose to focus our solution on teaching women athletes personal finance skills not necessarily related to NIL or their sport. While the students we spoke with were aware of NIL, none of them spoke of it as an integral part of their life, but all of them expressed great interest in learning about how to manage their finances more generally.
Score, Save, Slay Pop Up Workshops
For female athletes, we believe that approachable finance starts in person with community. So, we have designed the “Score, Save, Slay” Pop Up workshop series.
Pop Up workshops are fun, bite-sized, in-person workshops where female athletes come to accomplish a specific personal finance task with the mentorship of women. The workshops are intended to be approachable and achievable. Each session guides the participants through a focus task from start to end to create a clear purpose and leave participants feeling satisfied upon completion – focus tasks include opening a bank account or high yield savings account, starting a credit card, etc. The workshops are designed to be a women-centric space to combat the imposter syndrome experience by the women athletes we spoke with. The mentors guiding the workshops would be young women – either recent athlete alums or MBA students – who can relate to the experience of getting started with personal finance and now have expertise to share with the current student athletes.
Beyond completing a tangible task towards financial wellness, the workshops would focus on humor and community-building. For example, mentors could break the ice through by sharing funny “personal finance failure” stories. Beyond breaking the ice, these stories encourage all participants to be vulnerable and to laugh through the process of learning personal finance.
The workshops would be held in existing athlete centric spaces such as the AARC, locker rooms, or athlete dining. This is to alleviate some of the barrier to entry as the hardest component of these workshops is showing up – once the women are there the task is fun and painless. The workshops are also stand-alone so that women can come to them whenever they are able to, but there is no feeling of “falling off the train”. We hope that this would inspire the participants to stick with learning about personal finance and encourage them to be forgiving if they miss a workshop or make a mistake.
Impact
By creating a space for relaxed conversations around finance and for substantial progress to be made, we hope that “Score, Save, Slay” will help female athletes become proactive about personal finances and set themselves up for future financial success. The women athletes would gain three main things – the ability to advocate for themselves and their finances, a trustworthy network of female peers and mentors for their personal finances, and the discovery that finances are fun and satisfying.
In June 2023, the Redesigning Finance students presented their work to a panel of experts working in the finance and student athletics sector.
