After Britt Baker graduated from Harvard Business School in 2016, her friends back in California begged for a souvenir: the best investment advice she’d learned.

Baker, 37, indulged them, starting out of her Fairfax, California, living room a finance club that eventually became her present-day financial education startup, Dow Janes — which boasts an Instagram following of nearly half a million. But the wisdom she doled out at those early club meetings didn’t actually come from business school, she said. It came from her parents and grandparents, who instilled in her from childhood the importance and mechanics of managing money wisely.

Not all of Baker’s peers were so fortunate, she said. Indeed, research has shown that many parents in the U.S. are unlikely to teach their children, particularly their daughters, about managing money beyond packing a piggy bank.

education gaps

More than half of Americans said their parents never discussed money with them in a 2024 Fidelity survey. Additionally, a 2021 CardRatings.com survey revealed a significant gender gap when it came to early financial education, with 22% of female respondents never having received such education from their parents compared with 15% of male respondents. A 2024 PNC Investments survey similarly found that at a young age, female respondents received less instruction about wealth-building strategies than their male counterparts.

These education gaps have led to low financial literacy rates among women in the U.S., especially those belonging to Gen Z. But social media-savvy money experts like Baker in recent years have aimed to change that with accessible financial education content.

Their engagement has surged as a volatile stock market and global turmoil surrounding Trump’s tariffs have left American consumers, especially those new to managing their money, desperate for guidance.

On Instagram, finance education accounts like Dow Janes use anything from infographics to trending meme formats to repackage complex economics concepts for public consumption.

The goal, Baker said, is to get more finance-related content in front of more eyes.

“The more people are talking about money, the better, because it gets less serious,” Baker said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve heard about a high-yield savings account because of some influencer, so now I’m going to look it up.’

“It’s less scary because (they’ve) heard it mentioned so many times,” she said.

building blocks

Dow Janes’ YouTube and social media posts consist mainly of what Baker called “building block content,” covering finance essentials from creating a budget to improving a credit score. Anyone can access those materials for free.

But for those looking for more personalized coaching and guided learning, the startup offers a 12-month financial literacy course, Million Dollar Year. Priced at $4,000 — discounted 50% for those who opt to join after attending a Dow Janes webinar — the program is a self-study video curriculum, Baker said, with corresponding fill-in-the-blank workbooks covering financial concepts “broken down into bite-sized pieces.”

Million Dollar Year is Dow Janes’ primary revenue stream, supplemented by occasional live events and Zoom retreats throughout the year. Baker declined to disclose financial details about the company, but she said Dow Janes is a full-time gig for both herself and co-founder Laurie-Anne King.

“We really hold your hand through the whole process,” Baker said. On top of completing their solo homework, participants attend weekly office hours and coaching calls as well as a monthly “mindset call,” wherein participants practice positive thinking and self-compassion when they’ve failed to meet certain financial goals.

“It’s not just, ‘How to save an emergency fund and where to save it,’” Baker said. Instead, Dow Janes encourages its members to shift their long-term habits by healing their relationship with money.

For program participant Meg Collins, 72, that psychologically informed approach was the thing she felt was missing from the series of financial courses she completed before finding Dow Janes.

Collins is no longer just tracking her spending, she said, “but I’m understanding why I’m purchasing things, what the triggers are for me.”

During a program exercise wherein Collins wrote a letter to “Mr. Money,” she discovered she blamed her father for not teaching her everything he knew about saving and investing, which was a lot. Then, she blamed the education system for failing to catch her up.

This pattern of women not having agency over their finances is rooted in history, said financial educator Berna Anat.

A self-professed “financial hype woman” and the author of “Money Out Loud: All the Financial Stuff No One Taught Us,” Anat, 35, said she aims with her beginner-friendly financial content to empower people, especially first-generation women, to build sustainable wealth.

Anat makes anywhere from $65,000 to $125,000 per year as a “finfluencer,” or finance influencer, primarily through speaking engagements and brand partnerships.

The Bay Area-based creator doesn’t have any finance certifications or a business degree, a fact she’s transparent about on social media. But over the years, she’s built a following of more than 100,000 on Instagram and brought finance content to a younger demographic than most finance gurus typically reach.

personal touch

As a first-generation daughter of Filipino immigrants, Anat said she is familiar with the obstacles women like her have historically faced in their pursuit of financial freedom.

“It was, like, a generation and a half ago that we couldn’t even get our own credit cards,” she said. “So there’s so much catching up that women have to do, not because we’re worse at money or we’re worse at logistics or math, [but] because we were structurally, purposefully held back from understanding money, accessing our own money and becoming empowered with our own money.”

Yet women tend to internalize that knowledge gap, leading them to adopt the identity of being “bad at money,” Anat said.

“We blame ourselves for not being as good at money as some of our male peers,” Anat said, “not remembering that a lot of these men have had generations of financial confidence and generations of secrets and knowledge being passed [down] in boys clubs, from father to son, grandpa to whoever.”

Anat acknowledged that “finfluencers” alone cannot and should not close that gap, given they are not held to the same legal and ethical standards as accredited financial planners, certified public accountants or tax attorneys.

Regulatory bodies in recent years have pushed for broader classification of “finfluencers” as statutory sellers and investment advisors. However, many are still protected via regulatory loopholes, such as exemptions for those providing only impersonal advice not tailored to any particular client or issuing such advice for free.