Tuesday 28 April 2009

Kiwibank cracks a funny

Wandering through the train station, I saw a billboard advertising Kiwibank's new debit card. It read:

"Mine won't let me spend what I haven't got... (unlike my girlfriend)"

It's not entirely clear, but I take this to mean that women are prone to be a bit frivolous and self-indulgent with money - or at worst, gold-diggers. And I was kind of surprised. That's not a stereotype you see much these days, outside of sitcoms.

I tried to reverse the genders in my head, to see if the joke still worked. Nope. There's no equivalent comic stereotype around men being daft with money. I assume this is because women have traditionally been non-earners, caring for homes and children. Because that sort of work isn't paid, it's regarded as a kind of dependence or - at worst - a form of economic exploitation of blokes, who have to work for a living while their wives muck about at home.

Everyone knows a woman or two who's poor at managing her money, and relies on her partner. Everyone knows a man or two who does the same. I'd say that financial scatterbrains are distributed pretty equally between the sexes. For every closet full of unworn clothing and impractical shoes, there's a huge screen TV and a garage full of under-used power tools.

I wasn't particularly offended by the billboard - I just thought it was a bit dumb. If Kiwibank wants to attract a female clientele, making us out to be financially useless isn't the best tactic.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Although it's still a silly ad, I don't buy your reading of it here. It works just as well the other way - at least, it works with "husband", and you see that in ads all the time. It's interesting that "boyfriend" doesn't fit as well, but I really see the choice word used in the poster here as a flip-a-coin situation (or maybe use both).

Anna said...

I think there is a stereotype around women and money (although I don't know if that's what this ad is alluding to, and I doubt many people take the stereotype too seriously).

I once read somewhere a rebuttal of a study that found that women do most of the unpaid work. The rebutting person (a bloke) argued that shopping is not work when women do it, because we enjoy it.

Hmmm. There's nothing more enjoyable than trying to calculate the best value for money toilet paper while your toddler throws a tantrum in the supermarket aisle...

Anonymous said...

I've heard quite a lot of people stereotype men this way too. Certainly the man spending all his money on flashy electronic goods or other 'toys' while the wife tut-tuts knowingly is something that's shown up in the media more than a few times.

A Nonny Moose said...

I'm with Anonymous (the 2nd): the old advertising tropes/media stereotype (Confessions of a Shopaholic eesh) has male-telling-off-woman as an authority figure shaming the silly bint who can't control her credit card; but when it's woman-telling-off-man, she's a nagging bitch, denying him of his hard earned right/cash.

jo said...

besides that, it's hetero-normative..but then what would anyone expect from a billboard ad.

Moz said...

Jo, must be the ad itself then, coz the line quoted is only as hetero-normative as the readers makes it. If it's a billboard I can imagine that making that type of ad not gender specific would be a bit challenging.

As far as the ad itself goes... doesn't mean much to me. I can see there's a target market that need and perhaps want this type of assistance, and at least with Kiwibank you can be pretty sure that signing up will not result in them targeting you with credit card offers. That type of customer is the credit card companies' dream... willing to borrow more than they can pay off every month.

T said...

I always liked the fact that Kiwibank was fronted by a woman. This kinda makes me grrrr.

Dave said...

A lot of guys I know are more responsible with money than their wives / girlfiends.

My ex wife was made brankrupt last year, 5 or 6 credit cards total debt $250 - $300K maybe even more! She had a shopping problem along with others.

stargazer said...

oh well, if we go by anecdote and extrapolating from a few examples to a whole gender...

well, i'm a chartered accountant & i see lots of accounts of lots of people. and i see plenty of men who are unable to control their spending and who get into financial strife and who place pressure on the whole family because of some pretty poor decisions on their part. i've seen a client pay about $150,000 in extra taxes last year because they decided to take daddy's advice over the advice of qualified professionals who they pay to manage their tax affairs. dave, i could give you so many examples of men who totally fail to manage their money & spend much more than they earn.

i've also seen women who have done the same thing. so stereotyping is pretty useless really, and it's certainly not a smart move if you want to keep your female customers.

Anonymous said...

I think we can all agree that neither gender is more financially able than the other. We appear to be talking past one another on this issue.

katy said...

I haven't read much about microfinance beyond what I might find in my favourite weekly news magazine but I understand that one of the basic ideas is that the loans should be given to women because they will manage the money more responsibly, and that this is not considered to be a particularly controversial. Maybe someone should tell Kiwibank??

Anna said...

Dave has accidentally raised an interesting point - the fact that marriage legally obliges you to share some aspects of your financial life with your partner. When one racks up a debt, the other is obliged to share it - including if this means selling your joint property to cover it. Conversely, if only one half of the relationship is earning, the other has to rely on the generosity of that person to make sure they have enough to live on - there's not law that makes a man share his money equitably with his wife instead of putting it in the pokies, for example.

stargazer said...

um anna, i'm not sure you're correct about debt. i recently went to a course on the relationship property act, and was told that if the debt is taken on by one partner, then the other partner isn't liable for it.

ie if you both sign the debt contract, then you're both liable. but if one party goes on a spending binge and racks up heaps of debt which the other party hasn't agreed to, then the other party isn't liable for that.

Anonymous said...

Of course if one party takes out a loan and keeps the cash or buys something with it, and the relationship ends, the man is entitled to a 50% share of that cash or object even if the woman is responsible for all of the debt, unless she is prepared to go through the humiliation of going to court and trying to argue that he was a bad husband... and we all know how difficult that is.

So while the obligation of a debt will remain with the woman, the benefit will be split between the man and woman. Which seems sexist and unfair, to me

jo said...

moz - i haven't seen the ad so was only going by what anna was presenting! also think that the ad was designed to create this kind of antagonism and discussion on purpose...but of course. Again, what would you expect?