Tuesday April 25th is Equal Pay Day! Evelyn Murphy who runs the WAGE project and the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of organizations working to eliminate wage discrimination, and the Business Professional Women/USA, will announce a new grass-roots effort to close the wage gap between men and women.

In spite of all laws that make discrimination illegal, women earn in 2006 only 77 cents for every dollar men make. The difference is not because some women take more time off; the statistic measures only women and men who work full time, all year round. Most women who take time off and then go back to work full-time earn more; hence taking time off does not pull the averages down.

While there are still differences in pay between women and men as a result of either poor measurements or real discrimination, there is nothing that prevents women to make better returns than men on their investments.

In Investing requires focus, discipline, patience and perseverance we described essential skills for achieving investment results. Many of these skills are more natural to women, more so than men.

In Time is not Money we learned that patience is far more important than speed. Lessons on market timing and money management, as practiced by Jesse Livermore in the 1920’s, actually are easier to absorb by women than men. Lots of men tend to think that speed matters (which is probably why they like sport cars)!

In Ten Rules for Investment Success we showed that some of the best investment advice one can find today, still can be improved a lot to make investment know-how easier accessible to women. The investment workshops offered by William O’Neil, are still attended mostly by men…

Given all this (and many more sources that could be mentioned), why are so few women interested in investing in the markets? Why is so much effort going into achieving equal pay, while there are no real obstacles for women to make better returns than men in the markets? Why are women in Japan, Korea and some other countries much more involved with the markets than men? All of these questions remain a puzzle, especially if one considers that women are much better at shopping, at finding good value, at discovering “gems”. If more women were to practice these skills for their investments. e.g. finding “gems” among all listed stocks, improve portfolio management, there is no doubt that the performance of portfolios managed by women would get better returns or get ranked among the top best managed portfolios.

Taking a straw from Evelyn Murphy’s work on equal pay, what may be needed is a grass-roots effort to encourage women to take charge of their financial assets; to encourage them to start investing; to demonstrate that un-equal pay is in all fairness, the lesser issue; the bigger challenge is getting better returns! Such a grass-roots effort may very well be the one BellaOnline is promoting by having a Investing Site.