Girls and Their Gold

A LOOK AT FEMALE INVESTMENT INTO COMMODITIES

Glistening, glimmering, glamorous. She adorns my fingers, stacks of rings adorned with stones stamped with 916 on the inside, and sits on my collarbones, dangling daintily like bunting at a spring fête. She is gifted at birth, promised at marriage, and inherited upon death. She is like the sun, bringer of light, and the moon, bringer of lustre. She is Gold.

As women move rapidly into financial spaces, both as institutional investors and themselves as retail investors, there are conversations being had about the intersection between gender, economics, and empowerment. Women have historically invested less than men for financial, psychological, and cultural reasons including the wage gap, risk aversion, and cultural stigmas around women and money. Yet, through the twenty-first century, financial and professional services showcase a shift towards increased financial inclusion via market investments. Investments, and its subsequent returns, pose many benefits including meeting long-term financial goals through holding for an extended period or generating short-term returns to utilise as disposable income. It also poses as a buffer against national inflation, a cushion during individual financial crises, and a safety net in times of personal turmoil. 

Despite this, investments in traditional stocks hailing from the developed “Western” world do not guarantee positive returns and the small print when you make a deposit assures you of this. There is something poetic about how something far more traditional, far more “Oriental”, is the saviour during times of economic crisis as we watch Wall Street traders take a gold leaf out of our ethnic foremother’s playbook. 

She is as pragmatic as she is pulchritudinous. 

In financial terms, gold is a commodity (a real asset, tangible and holding intrinsic value). Unlike financial assets, like good old debt and equity, commodities have a negative correlation to other asset classes. This means it does not necessarily suffer the same wretched fates or sweet successes. Hence, when the market crashed in March 2025 and many portfolios fell into glaring hues of crimson, gold absorbed the shock reaching a record high of USD$3,000 per troy ounce (t oz). It is not the first time this has happened. Gold performed similarly, reaching record highs of USD$2,000 and USD$1,000 per t oz during the global pandemic and financial crisis respectively. Indeed, history does not repeat itself, but it does often rhyme. 

Precious metals, such as gold, serve as a means of protection during waning conditions and thus global central banks, recognising this, have been stockpiling gold to diversify holdings through recent geopolitical and economic uncertainties. Yet, it is not only these glamorous professionals with office jobs and Financial Times subscriptions who recognise this. Across various landscapes around the world, seemingly unassuming women from different ethnicities, religions, and classes are of the most underestimated investors in this highly sought after commodity. 

Shuna

Until 1956, when the Hindu Succession Act granted women inheritance to other assets, such as property, Hindu women in the subcontinent were only entitled to financially manage their streedhan, gifts given to them during auspicious events such as birth and marriage. Famously, Islamic inheritance and financial management laws differed vastly in that women were entitled to a percentage of all total assets from parents, spouses, children, and other relatives, regardless of their marital status or existence of male relatives predetermined by Islamic law in the Quranic chapter “The Women,” and were entitled to manage these themselves roughly thirteen hundred years prior. Nevertheless, given its inherent value, to both groups of women, gold would have been the most valuable asset in their possession. 

Gold was not only beautiful and a means of adornment for the woman, whether it be a small bangle from a parent at birth or a necklace set from a spouse at marriage, it was a symbol of social standing and a means of economic security. Being the only asset many would have had any claim over, gold played a crucial role in forming the identity of a woman. 

Socially, as is the case with streedhan or mahr (what a Muslim woman receives from the groom when she is wed), gold is inexplicably tied to social status. A woman from a family of a higher social standing would receive a higher amount of gold. Not only would it reflect her worth and her status, but it was also a means of showcasing the status of the groom’s side and their capacity to provide. Though it is counterproductive to assume she would always exercise full ownership over this, it is equally redundant to ignore the agency many women would have retained over at least a part. If not all, then a pair of earrings, a ring. Economically, this proved to be practical as, though unfamiliar with the terminology, women knew gold was a liquid asset and could be exchanged for more usable cash. In times of short-term financial crises, it was easily pawned or sold to pay for a medical bill or a debt and in the longer term, it maintained a consistently worthy repute, and so was passed on to the next generation, something beautiful and practical from mother to daughter over decades. 

Across time and space

As migration made its waves and women crossed lands and seas to begin new lives in unfamiliar places, just as it was passed through time, gold passed through space. Leaving everything and everyone they loved, many women carried with them thin clanking bangles and delicate dangling earrings. Many would not have known what a commodity was, nor the concepts of inflation or liquidity, but sufficiently, someone she loved had gifted her love, safety, and assurance from afar in the form of her adornments. 

As news headlines reduce something so dear in many cultures to a mere tool for portfolio diversification during financial crises, one must pay homage to our foremothers who safeguarded these assets for centuries. To them, she was never a block of metal. Never just a small fraction of their wealth. To many, most, she was everything. She was a ring of status, a bracelet of security, a necklace of love. Passed from grandmother to granddaughter, she symbolised independence and resilience. She is more than a hedge against market crashes. She is a safety in times of threat, a healing in times of sickness and a promise in times of devotion. 

A bangle speaks a thousand words

Years pass, and there is wisdom in the leathery hands, beady eyes, and broken voice of an aging woman. She slides a bangle off her refined wrist and there is something symbolic in how she overcomes the barrier that is her knobbly knuckle into a smooth descent down fragile fingers. As she passes it on to her female kin, she passes on more than an adornment. Unspoken and yet unmistakable, she passes on a legacy and insurance in the form of one of the world’s most valuable commodities. 

By Zainab Haque