What if women designed a bank?
The Hilda Project is a research initiative to re-imagine a banking system based on the reality of women’s lives and the relationship they need with their money.
Interviewing 100 women in 100 days to answer the question:
How does money help or hurt the most important moments in women’s lives?
We’re interested in learning about the lived experiences of anyone who identifies as a woman or are non-binary.
Women are projected to become a powerful force in the financial sector. We make the vast majority of spending decisions for our households and it’s estimated that the majority of wealth currently held by Baby Boomers will transfer into the hands of women.
But research shows that’s not how we feel about our finances. Over 70% of women report a lack of confidence in their financial knowledge. Only 20% of women in the UK have any investments at all, compared with 33% of men.
Something about banking isn’t working for us.
70% of women report a lack of confidence in their financial knowledge
KANTAR
The harsh reality?
Banking wasn’t built for women
The Bank of England was established 327 years ago, but women’s relationship with banking is much shorter.
Only women who inherited money from a male relative had much to do with banks. And until the Married Women's Property Act of 1882, any property held by women automatically came under the ownership of their husbands.
Many banks required married women to submit a form of authorisation signed by their husband before they could open an account. Some banks even passed by-laws barring women from buying their shares. Until the 1980s, women seeking mortgages, loans, and credit were routinely rejected if they didn’t have a male guarantor.
Our lives are different
Our Plan?
Interview 100 women in 100 days.
Publish our findings.
And then build a bank (or whatever women tell us they need).
Photo Credit: Barclays
Who is Hilda?
The Hilda Project is inspired by Hilda Harding, who became Britain’s first ever female bank manager in May 1958. She joined Barclays as a typist in 1934 and spent her career with the bank until her retirement in 1970. According to Barclay’s history, the Investors Chronicle expressed “some doubt over the Bank’s psychology” asking whether the “average woman” would not rather have a “personable man” as their bank manager.
In 1988, Hilding wrote that: “…sensational though the reporting was at times, it was instrumental in giving me the courage to face all that was to follow.”
“Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth.”
— SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR