Banks need to make financial information easily accessible to help close racial wealth gap: Goldman

Brian Sozzi
·Executive Editor
·2 min read

A recent report out of Goldman Sachs highlights the significant gap in asset ownership — notably stocks and homes — between Black women and their white counterparts.

Single Black women are six times less likely to own stocks than single white men, Goldman Sachs found. Further, single Black women are nearly 50% less likely to own a home. Goldman's research shows that a mere 0.5% of single Black women have their own business, a rate that is 24 times lower than single white men. The report pointed mostly to "lower earnings" among single Black women as the reason behind less relative ownership of high-return assets such as stocks, homes and businesses.

"I think a big part of that [these findings] and what we saw is just access to financial information," Gizelle George-Joseph, Goldman Sachs chief operating officer, global investment research, told Yahoo Finance Live. George-Joseph co-authored the exhaustive study, "Black Womenomics: Investing in the Underinvested."

Continued George-Joseph, "If you don't have the financial information to inform your decisions to actually help you plan budgeting and the kind of decisions you make about what loans you take, that actually is quite an impediment to being able to make smart decisions that move the numbers on your ability to get yourself out of debt, for example. So I think to your point... all the banks on Wall Street have a very key role to play in being able to make that information easily accessible in a way that can educate."

The pay disparities are sizable, reports Yahoo Finance's Brian Cheung. Black women in the United States are paid 35% less than white men and 15% less than white women, Goldman's research showed. Black women are also 10 percentage points less likely to be employed than white men.

Goldman Sachs is stepping up to help narrow that gap in asset ownership.

The investment bank said it will spend more than $10 billion over the next decade to advance racial equity and economic opportunity in Black women. The initiative is called One Million Black Women, named for the bank's goal of impacting the lives at least 1 million Black women by 2030.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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