Most women don’t ‘buy the dip’ when stocks fall, adding to the investment gender gap

May 22, 2025 at 10:27 AM EDT

When the stock market falls a lot, as it did after the announcement in early April of the imposition of hefty tariffs on U.S. trading partners, are investors more likely to put more into the market in what is known as “buying the dip” or pull back because of volatility?

A survey from BlackRock out Thursday, first reported by Axios, found U.S. investors overall split fairly evenly on that question: 48% said they were more likely to buy and 50% were not. But when Blackrock looked at the numbers by gender it found women far more reluctant to buy the dip: just 33% said they were more likely to do that vs. 63% of men.

That behavior can put women, who are already behind men when it comes to savings and retirement investment, at a greater disadvantage. As was the case in April, those who jumped in on the weakness in stocks were handsomely rewarded: The S&P 500, down about 20% near its bottom from its 2025 peak, rebounded in the next month to erase most all its losses for the year.

Investors who just sat tight during the flurry of tariff-driven market moves ended up no worse off. But buying the dip in this case allowed mostly male investors to pad their accounts.

The BlackRock survey asked 1,000 registered U.S. voters about their attitudes toward retirement and investing between April 17 and April 22, a time when the market had recovered little from the drop. The vast majority of investors followed conventional advice and rode out the storm:

80% of respondents said they didn’t do anything different when markets fell.
10% said they put more money in their retirement account.
Another 9% either moved money into cash, sold investments or cashed out a retirement account early.

The results are “heartening,” Jaime Magyera, co-head of BlackRock’s U.S. wealth advisory business, said in a statement given to Axios. “I’m reminded of a timeless piece of investment wisdom that was once told to me: ‘It’s not about timing the market. It’s about the time you spend in the market.'”

The survey did not break out any other gender statistics. But as Axios reported 37% of women have no retirement savings, per a BlackRock survey from January. And 45% of current retirees, including 54% of female current retirees, said they found entering retirement to be somewhat or very stressful in terms of financial anxiety, in a recent Goldman Sachs survey.

The problem for women is that they still, on average, make only about 83% of what men make in similar jobs. Women also take longer time-outs from the labor market, typically to care for children or other relatives. Fewer high-earning years mean less savings and also lower eventual Social Security payouts.

As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pointed out in his 2025 annual letter to investors, the retirement “situation is dire,” in the U.S. He cited underfunded pension plans and lack of savings by Americans — one-third have no retirement savings at all and one-third say they would have a hard time paying an unexpected $500 bill — as major concerns.

Just a little more than half of U.S. investors said in the January BlackRock survey that they worried more about outliving their savings than they worried about death itself.

“As money runs shorter, lives are getting longer. Today, if you’re married and both of you reach 65, there’s a 50/50 chance at least one of you lives until 90. And with biomedical breakthroughs like GLP-1 drugs, many more chronic diseases might soon become curable,” Fink wrote in the letter.

“That’s an incredible blessing—but it also underscores something frustrating: We’re great at extending people’s lives, yet we hardly spend any effort helping them afford those extra years.”

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Most women don’t ‘buy the dip’ when stocks fall, adding to the investment gender gap

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