I volunteer with the Savvy Ladies Financial Helpline, a nonprofit that gives women free, one-on-one financial guidance. Women bring their questions, and volunteers like me help with the ones that match our expertise. Do it long enough and you start to notice something: almost none of these women were ever taught how money and credit works. No one walked them through it before they needed to know. That gap doesn’t close on its own, no matter how successful you become.

I think about that a lot when I’m in a room full of women who lead, which is why I wanted to write this for you. You run a large part of your company and make decisions all day that other people depend on. And I’d guess that more than a few of you have a corner of your own financial life you’ve been meaning to deal with and haven’t gotten to. Maybe it’s a retirement account you’ve never looked at closely, or what would happen to your credit if your marriage ended, or just a nagging sense that you should understand this better than you do.

That’s not a personal failing. No one taught you and you were busy holding everything else together. We tend to talk about financial stress as something that happens to other people, to women who are outwardly struggling or in crisis. However, the connection between how we’re doing financially and how we’re doing physically doesn’t sort itself by job title. A 2025 Mayo Clinic study of more than 280,000 adults found that financial strain can age the heart faster than many traditional clinical risk factors. It shows up in the sleep you’re not getting and the decisions you keep pushing off, and it reaches the top of the org chart, too. It just tends to stay hidden there because the higher you climb, the harder it becomes to admit there’s something you were never taught.

Therefore, I have a few small asks.

The first is for you. Let yourself ask the question you’ve been carrying, even the one you feel you should already know the answer to. You spend your days making sure everyone else is taken care of, and you’re allowed to be on that list too.

The second is for the women who work for you. Retail employs an enormous number of women, many of them young, many in their first real job and many managing money for the first time with no one to ask. The associates on your floor and the managers in your stores are often carrying the same stress you are, just without talking about it, and usually with far less to fall back on. You can’t solve their finances for them, but you can set the tone. You decide whether pay is something people can talk about honestly, whether a schedule is steady enough to build a life around, whether your benefits include real financial guidance, and whether a woman on your team can ask a money question without feeling like she’s confessing something.

The third is for your kids, if you have them. Talk to them about money and lean in a little more with your daughters. When these conversations never happen, women are usually the ones who pay for it later. You don’t need to have all the answers to start. I wrote about how to approach it at each age in a piece for Mother’s Day this year.

None of this requires a program or a budget. It just asks you to pay attention, starting with yourself. The women I help didn’t fail at anything. The conversation just never happened, and most of them needed one person who would have it with them — without judgment. I’d love it if a few more of us, at every level, gave ourselves permission to be that person for the people around us and for ourselves.

Cathy Dolsen is senior vice president and portfolio credit leader at Synchrony and a volunteer with Savvy Ladies, a nonprofit founded in 2003 that provides women with free financial education and one-on-one guidance. You can learn more about the Synchrony and Savvy Ladies partnership and how you can get involved here.