`It's About Time!'

Abstract

In recent years numerous financial services companies have explored the profitability of marketing specifically to women. These practices are largely informed by traditional product and service distribution methods where the target is predominantly male `heads of household'. This article provides alternative approaches to the issue of gender and its bearing on financial services consumption. We argue that women's everyday lives frequently result in gendered relations to, and perceptions of `time'. These temporal orientations are often incongruent with the predominant linear, temporal framework within which many long-term financial services products (e.g. pensions) are embedded. Insofar as financial services companies continue to subscribe to a linear model of time, reproduced through marketing discourses and embedded within their temporally oriented products, their efforts to capture the `women's market' will continue to be constrained.