Simran Kaur (Photo: Supplied)

PartnersJuly 4, 2023

This is Kiwi: Simran Kaur on owning your financial future

Staff writers

Simran Kaur (Photo: Supplied)

A Kiwibank series in collaboration with The Spinoff Podcast Network, This is Kiwi celebrates extraordinary achievements by ordinary New Zealanders. In the second episode, Jane Yee interviews Simran Kaur.

Simran Kaur is the founder and director of Girls that Invest, a financial columnist, best selling author, TEDx speaker and financial literacy advocate. With a focus on empowering women and minorities to own their financial futures, Kaur inspires thousands through her online presence.

Her podcast, Girls That Invest, has topped the business podcast charts all over the world with 4 million downloads, and her instagram account The Indian Feminist, which aims to “smash the patriarchy, one post at a time,” has over 300,000 followers.

This year Kaur was a guest speaker in the UK house of parliament for International Women’s Day, and she was also named a Forbes 30 under 30 Asia honouree alongside her business partner and best friend, Sonya Gupton. With several lifetimes of extraordinary achievements under her belt, it might come as a surprise to learn that Kaur is only 26 years old.

Facing each day as a new opportunity to grow her business and to empower others, Kaur is showcasing the potential for young New Zealanders to not only gain financial literacy, but to strive for greatness.

Kaur spoke to Jane Yee on the This is Kiwi podcast – read an excerpt from the full interview below.

Jane Yee: What is it that made you so passionate about helping women gain financial literacy?

Simran Kaur: When I was younger I really experienced around me the impact of what a woman’s life looks like when they’re financially independent, and what a woman’s life can look like if they’re not financially independent and they’re in a sticky situation. I remember even at a party that my parents took me to, a lady said to me “What do you want to do when you grow up?” And I was unsure. I was like, “I don’t know.” My parents were behind me so I was like, “Maybe I’ll be a doctor.” And she was like, “Good, you should do something like that. Because when you have money, you can choose who you marry.”

I just remember thinking, “What a weird thing to say. You can always choose who you marry, or, you can always have choices in life”. But the idea that you have more choices in life when you have financial independence just became so important to me. I don’t know why I got tunnel vision with it, but I just did. And that’s just been a huge passion of mine since.

Tell me about how you went from studying optometry to creating this mini empire that you’ve got now with Girls That Invest, your book, speaking engagements, masterclasses… How do you do it all?

We started during March 2020. And that was because the stock market dropped and dropped in a way that was quite scary. Covid was this new thing, and because of my health background and my financial background, I was like, “Oh, people are a little bit scared. They don’t understand what this is. It’s just a virus, but like, it could be big, it could be fine, I don’t know. But the market will recover from it”.

I remember just being like, it’s another day, let’s actually invest a little bit more, because it’s so down. I went to work and heard a lot of commotion around me, concerned colleagues talking about, “Well, what about my KiwiSaver? Should I pull out from my growth fund and put it into a conservative fund? Because it dropped 5% today?”

Simran Kaur on planning for future wealth

Find out how this 26-year-old defied the odds to become a global advisory sensation, and learn from her experience to improve your own financial prospects

I realised that financial literacy is not as common as I thought. I’ve been quite lucky – I studied finance alongside my optometry degree, and I’ve also had parents that were good with money and I just kind of thought everyone got to have the access that I did. That was the kind of lightbulb moment where I was like, “OK, well, I love teaching”. And I think more than anything, if people wanted to attribute what we’ve done to like, one skill, it’s been being a good teacher, I can just jump online and start sharing about why you shouldn’t be pulling your money out of KiwiSaver when the market drops, because it actually solidifies your losses.

My experiences are not that unique. If I’m wondering these things at some point in my life, I’m sure other people are as well. And so that’s how we began, we did not realise that three months later, the stock market would rebound and go on this massive bull run, which in non-jargon terms means it just did really well. It was going upwards and upwards and upwards and suddenly everyone else was wondering about the sharemarket. And so we were kind of at the right place at the right time. Yes, we worked really hard, but we got to ride a wave that we didn’t see coming, and it was just by actively starting and doing something that we were able to catch on to it.

Do you think of yourself as a role model? Because your instagram The Indian Feminist has 300,000 followers and I would argue that there are a lot of people who are looking up to you, and the stuff that you say does have an impact.

Sometimes I look into what we do, and I would kind of wish I had this growing up. Because I didn’t, and I think it was a case of, well, there weren’t many strong women of colour role models in the business space in New Zealand when I was younger. There’s so many now and it’s fantastic to see and social media makes it much easier to find those people, but I became an optometrist because a woman at my temple was an optometrist. And I was just like, “Well, she can do it. And she’s amazing. And she looks like me, and sounds like me. So I can probably do it too.” And that’s just what representation does. So I’m appreciative that we can expand representation in the space that we work in.

You’ve done hundreds of podcast episodes, you’ve written a book, you’ve done speaking engagements, all these things. But if you were to just take a couple of key messages for your listeners, readers and audience members to take away, what would they be?

The main thing I would say to anyone, whether you are someone that’s trying to get better with your money or you’re someone that’s looking to start a business, is never underestimate how much you can learn, and never underestimate what you can understand. What I’ve run into a lot with the people that we’ve worked with is a lot of self-limiting beliefs, not because it’s their fault, but just because we’ve been taught “Look, money’s really hard, or it’s really hard to get unstuck and it’s better to bury your head in the sand than to call up your bank and go, ‘OK, I’m actually struggling here’.”

What does debt consolidation look like? Or what can I do? What are the proactive steps I can take? If you believe that, you have the ability to go, I don’t understand this right now, but I’m sure I can learn it, and if I can’t learn it from this person maybe I’ll go to someone else, or I can’t learn it from this book, maybe I’ll go to this podcast or I’m not really a podcast or a book person, I need someone to talk to me, I’m gonna go to an advisor. All these different options we have to learn whatever it is that you want to learn.

I don’t know if this is naivety, but I don’t believe there’s anything in the world that I can’t wrap my head around.

To hear the full kōrero, listen to This is Kiwi wherever you get your podcasts.

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Image: Tina Tiller

PartnersJuly 3, 2023

Beyond the boys’ club: Making the trades a more inclusive industry

Jihee Junn

Contributing writer

Image: Tina Tiller

Diversity and the trades haven’t always been phrases that fit together, and many would argue there’s still a long way to go to break down the ‘boys’ club’ attitude. Trade Careers is trying to bridge that gap by supporting underrepresented groups to enter the trades.

Eight years ago, during a night out at Splore, Genevieve Black received an offer that would unexpectedly change her life. A friend of a friend who worked in construction suggested she could help out on a job building a fence. At the time Black was training to join the fire brigade, but since she’d always liked being active she agreed to muck in.

“The next week he gave me a call and yeah, that was it. As soon as I picked up a nail gun I just knew. I just knew that this was what I wanted to do.”

Today Black works as a builder in Auckland and says she finds the job as rewarding as ever. But getting to where she is now hasn’t been an easy ride. As a woman working in a traditionally male-dominated industry, Black says she’s experienced sexism throughout her career, from the classroom studying for her qualification to the construction site while learning the tools of the trade.

“When I started doing my pre-trades course at Unitec, I really struggled with the other students. I think I was the only girl out of the three classes there at the time and there were these young boys who’d talk about women in such a derogatory way. It was horrible, and it was my first introduction to just how horrible it could be.”

“Then I started working for my current employer and, looking back, it didn’t really start off all that well. A few of the contractors that came through the company… I definitely felt sexism and bias [from them]. I’m a boyish girl, but I was never exposed to that kind of culture of how guys behaved. It was a real shock for me.”

Unfortunately, experiences like Black’s are all too common for women working in the trades. It’s an industry with a deeply entrenched “boys’ club” culture, and many women have struggled to enter and remain in the field due to the misogynistic attitudes and behaviour they encounter, ranging from degrading verbal comments to more serious physical abuse.

“We know from our research that about 30% of people in the sector in the last five years have experienced sexual harassment, and that’s mainly from men towards women,” says Phil Aldridge, chief executive of construction and infrastructure workforce development council Waihanga Ara Rau. “We also know that almost one person every week in the construction industry commits suicide, so there’s definitely a wider cultural issue that needs to be addressed.”

As of 2021, women make up just 13.5% of the construction and infrastructure industry – many of them working in the administrative side – and 15% of all apprenticeships and managed apprenticeships in the trades. The barriers facing women, as highlighted in Trade Careers’ Insight Research report, are clear: a lack of support from employers and colleagues, a lack of flexible working and home/life balance options, and the pay parity issues for women compared to men. The majority of the women surveyed in the report also believed that jobs in the trades were more likely to be offered to men, with very few perceiving the industry as suitable for a primary carer of children.

Thinking of joining the trades? Check out Trade Careers for resources to get you started, and help you through your trades journey.

Black says although she knew what to expect entering a heavily male-dominated industry, it didn’t make the experience any easier. She says she was confronted with sexism not only from other builders, but also discrimination from those in charge.

“I struggled with anxiety almost every day because I just felt like I had to be perfect. My mistakes felt like lasting mistakes compared to the other guys’. It’s hard to prove these things, but you just know. You get a sense for them,” she says.

“It was also really tiring being doubted for my skills and not being given the chance to prove myself. I’d often get given lesser tasks because they didn’t want to ‘risk’ me messing it up or they didn’t believe that I could do it.”

Despite the huge difficulties she encountered, Black refused to give up on pursuing a career that she loved, and instead used her frustrations to “fuel [her] determination to get through each day”. To make up for the lack of opportunities coming her way, she started to carve out her own, taking on extra jobs as a side hustle in order to get more time on the tools.

“Things definitely improved once I got more competent, but I feel like it took me longer to get competent because I wasn’t getting given the opportunities to learn.”

While Black admits there’s still an “underlying sexist mindset” present in many men from her field, she says she’s also seen some improvements over the years with things like men’s mental health (“a lot of the bad treatment comes from toxic masculinity”) being talked about in the industry more openly and more often.

Part of this comes down to a wider generational shift among those in the industry and society as a whole, but also the concerted efforts made by organisations and employers across the country to better conditions for women in the workforce. For example, Waihanga Ara Rau in partnership with Hanga-Aro-Rau (workforce development council for manufacturing, engineering, and logistics), launched its Keep It Decent guidelines last year aimed at creating safer and more respectful workplaces. They’re the first industry-wide guidelines to address sexual harassment and bullying in the trades.

“What we’re trying to do is work with a lot of different groups in the industry and talk about what they need in order to encourage more women to enter the sector,” says Aldridge. “Recently we’ve been working on some guidelines focused on things like recruitment, retention, and diversity to help employers create a more supportive culture.”

“It’s very much a long term game, which is hard because you won’t see [the results] for a long time,” says Aldridge. “But we know it makes a massive difference to the culture of an organisation having more women on board.

“And with such a massive labour shortage in the industry right now, there are lots of opportunities for more women to come in and build a good career and make good money. So a lot of employers are really keen to support more women into a career and make it a safer environment for everyone, regardless of their gender, background or ethnicity.”

From better protections against bullying and harassment to simply having access to clean toilets, there are still plenty of improvements to be made for the trades to become a truly inclusive and equitable industry. And while it might still be an uphill battle for most now, having more women entering the field (up 1.5% from 2020 to 2021) is a slow but sure sign that things are changing for the better.

“I definitely recommend [a career in the trades] because you’ll feel so empowered and strong,” says Black. “I’m so confident and solid now. You feel like you can do anything. And the skills that you learn are so transferable to your own life as well.

“You’re going to come across some battles, but you just have to be strong. Hang in there and stand your ground. It’ll be worth it in the end.”

Thinking of joining the trades? Check out Trade Careers for resources to get you started, and help you through your trades journey.