INVESTMENT PATTERN AVAILABILITY AND FINANCIAL DECISION-MAKING AMONG WORKING WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION

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The behavior of working women about investment has been a significant subject of interest because women socioeconomic empowerment is more and more a part of the financial autonomy and long-term security. Women working in an institution of higher learning face unique financial difficulties because of the different structures of employment, different work loads, and varying levels of institutional support. The proposed empirical paper will look at the access to investment patterns and the confidence of women working in the higher education sector based on primary data of 500 respondents and the findings of the current research on financial literacy, behavioral biases, and demographic factors. The empirical study is devoted to the availability of fixed interest programs, provident fund programs, pension products, insurance products, real estate programs and commodity selection giving a detailed report of the availability of investments and preference allocation. Besides this, the paper also examines employment status of respondents, access to employer sponsored investment scheme, and respondents level of confidence in financial decision-making in order to determine patterns based on real behavior responses. The results indicate that although a considerable percentage of working women can access more traditional forms of investments like fixed deposits, gold, mutual funds and provident fund arrangements, some gaps are still visible in investment awareness, trust and usage of more sophisticated forms of investments. The data also suggest that even though a significant proportion of the respondents report as being neutral or high in their confidence with investment decision making, a large proportion still do not have institutional support in making investment decisions and do not have access to a variety of financial products. It is on the basis of these empirical understanding that the study proposes that special order financial literacy, employer-based investment facilitation, and institutional enlightenment are necessary to support the creation of well informed and confident financial decision makers. The article is relevant to current debate on women financial empowerment because the study establishes that employment context, access to investment, and determinants of behavioral choices are the main contributor to financial-choice decisions among higher education working women.

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