Woman are more likely to become insolvent than men for the first time
A study of insolvency statistics for England and Wales 2014, from R3 the insolvency trade body has shown that women are more likely to become insolvent than men.
This is most likely due to changes in the insolvency system, which makes it easier to deal with consumer debt and in particular lower value debts. It has been suggested that woman are less likely to ignore rising financial worries and that lower value or consumer debt probably has a larger impact on women than men.
Based on opinions gathered from insolvency practitioners it would suggest that most consider consumer debt issues to be a major cause of insolvencies for females, with 10 % less suggesting the same for men. Conversely the majority of insolvency practitioners say the failure of someone’s own company is a leading cause of insolvency for men, whereas less than half of the insolvency practitioners polled cited company failure as a major cause for insolvency in women.
In the last five years, the number of women entering Individual Voluntary Arrangements, which are linked to consumer debts, have risen while they have fallen for their male counterparts.
However these figures probably do not show the whole picture. The figures relate to the formal insolvency regime and do not take into account data from non-statutory debt management plans.
While this data doesn’t take into consideration the difference in proportion of male owned businesses vs female, it could be interpreted as women are lousy at managing their shoe shopping habit but better at running their own businesses………