There is a version of your relationship with money where what you have built is actually doing something.

Not sitting in an account you avoid opening. Not scattered across a handful of investments somebody recommended to you years ago. Working, deliberately, toward the things you have decided matter.

Most of the women I work with have become very good at the earning half of this. The part that comes after tends to stay foggy for far longer than it should, and not because they are not capable of understanding it. It stays foggy because the industry that manages wealth was never built with them in mind.

I got into this recently with Catherine Dorazio, who spent twenty-five years inside that industry, managed sixteen billion dollars in client assets, and became the youngest and first female partner at Canada’s largest private money manager. She now runs Worth, a community for women who want to think differently about what they are building. She has a name for what is arriving right now, and once you understand it, a lot of things about the next decade come into focus.

The Pink Tsunami Is Not a Forecast

Roughly eighty percent of women will be in charge of the finances at some point in their lifetime. Add up the forces behind that number and the scale becomes clearer. Women outlive their spouses, and the first baby boomers are now turning eighty. Divorce rates account for another slice. So does a generation of women coming out of universities, into careers, and building meaningful assets of their own or adding substantially to the family’s.

Put those pools together and you get an influx into the trillions, arriving in the hands of women, inside an industry that has historically treated women as a secondary audience. That is the pink tsunami.

What makes this more than a statistic is that we have already watched the pattern play out once. The silver tsunami came first. Baby boomers retired, and they directed their accumulated wealth toward what they cared about. Cruise lines, golf, entire categories that swelled because a generation with buying power pointed itself at them.

People send money toward what matters to them. So the question for any business owner, in any industry, is a simple one. Do you know who is about to be holding the decision-making power in your market, and do you understand what they actually care about?

The Second Me Too Movement

Catherine has a phrase for the shift she watched happen around her, and it did not come out of a marketing session. She started sharing her own pivot with women in her network and kept hearing the same two words back. Me too.

The framing borrows from the idea of a second mountain. The first mountain is the one most of us climbed. School, accolades, the ladder, the sacrifices, the job, the family, everything piled on. The second mountain is what starts calling once you have credibility and experience and a growing sense that you would like to use them on your own terms. What is my actual gift here. What am I for. Where do I want to leave a mark.

More women are making that jump, and Catherine’s observation about the money side is worth sitting with. When you build from purpose, the income tends to follow. When you go looking for the money first, you usually end up fitted into something that was never really yours.

That is the part I see constantly. The women I work with could often earn more doing something else. They choose the harder route because it means something, and the wealth arrives later, on the back of work they are proud of.

An Industry That Never Had You in Mind

The standard read on female investors is that they are more conservative, more long-term, more values-driven. Some of that holds. The undertone is the problem, because it quietly frames caution as a personality trait rather than a response to how the information was delivered.

What Catherine describes is different. Women want to understand the whole picture so they can make their own call and take the risks they are genuinely comfortable taking. What reads as conservative is often what happens when nobody bothered to explain something in language you could integrate into your actual life.

I have my own version of this. Years ago I asked an advisor about putting money into a values-aligned fund, and I was steered firmly away from it. The message was essentially that if I wanted to do good in the world I should go do that somewhere else, and if I wanted returns I should stay over here with the top performers. Two separate buckets. Never the same conversation.

I did not have the language then to name what was off about it. I do now. That advisor was not answering my question. He was answering a different one that he found easier to answer.

Nobody Talks About It, So Nobody Learns Anything

Money is a taboo subject in this country. When people do share, they share a sliver, and the sliver is almost always a win. Which means you cannot learn from it, because you are not seeing the whole equation. What was tried. What did not work. What it cost.

The result is that most of us walk into financial decisions with an option set of one. We do X, because X is the only thing we ever saw modelled in our family or heard about from a friend. A good advisor’s real value is often less about performance and more about widening that set. Here is X. Here is also A, B, C and D, and here is what each one trades away.

A Bucket of Stocks Is Not a Strategy

Catherine has a term for one of the most common situations she encounters. A bucket of stocks. You have bought a collection of things that were performing well, with no view of how they work together, how they behave in a given environment, or whether they connect to anything you actually want.

Her analogy is a house. You cannot build one by acquiring good materials. You need four walls in the right places before anything goes up. Strategy is what holds the pieces together and points them at a destination, and she is direct that this is work worth handing to someone who does it professionally.

Underneath it all sit two questions she brings to every client. What is this money for. And how do you get from where you are to where you want to be.

I had my own moment with that first question recently. We bought a home on the Sunshine Coast, and afterwards I opened my investment account and saw a noticeably smaller number. There was a flicker of anxiety before I caught myself. That money had done exactly what I intended it to do. It bought the house. It served its purpose.

That reframe is available to anyone. The measure is not only the number. It is whether the number is doing the job you assigned it.

The Move Available to You Now

The line from this conversation I keep returning to is this. All women need is to know that they can, and then they will.

Catherine calls it life design. You would not let someone else design your home without you in the room. The same logic applies to the structure holding your assets. Divide and conquer works fine for most of domestic life. It works badly here, because the person who steps back from these decisions is usually the one who ends up living with them longest.

So get curious. Be willing to say out loud what you want and what you do not yet understand. And when you are choosing someone to help, do not stop at performance and fees. Ask whether this person can see you clearly enough to connect what you own to what you are actually building.

Start with one question. What is this money for. Almost everything else follows from your answer.

This post is inspired by Episode 42 of The Soulful CEO Podcast with Catherine Dorazio.