Socium Advisors’s Panel Encourages Women to Be Financially Courageous
By • May 12, 2025 0 329
Socium Advisors—a wealth management company whose name comes from the Latin word for “ally”—-hosted their second annual D.C. Women’s Luncheon at Ned’s Club on May 2. After attendees were treated to cuisine, cocktails, and the chance to customize their own fragrance at a station run by The Perfume Bar (@theperfumebar_events), everyone took to their seats and tuned in to the afternoon’s main event: the Women, Wealth and Navigating Uncertainty panel.
Moderated by Michelle Magner, a partner at Socium Advisors, the panel featured two impressive panelists: Kymber Lovett-Menkiti, the co-owner and president of a real estate brokerage company called Keller Williams Capital Properties, and Maria Cardona, the Principal at a public affairs strategy company called The Dewey Square Group who also works as a CNN political commentator. In light of recent data indicating that women entrepreneurship is on the rise in D.C.—according to D.C.’s 2024 Small Business Profile, 48.6% of D.C. businesses are women-owned, up 14.1% from 2007—this panel aimed to empower local women looking to better their financial futures.
Towards the beginning of the panel, Lovett-Menkiti shared a fascinating observation. While preparing for a recent episode of the Empire Building podcast, a show she co-hosts with five other women working in real estate, Lovett-Menkiti decided to ask ChatGPT a simple question: “If I want to make money as a woman, what should I do?” Its answer provided her with an onslaught of security-centric advice: “set realistic financial goals,” “develop a savings mentality,” “budget wisely,” and “be consistent.”
Then, she asked ChatGPT the same question but replaced the word “woman” with “man.”
Photo by Hailey Wharram. @theperfumebar_events
The difference was staggering: “invest in yourself first,” “create multiple streams of income,” “make your money work for you, and “start and run a successful business.”
“What are we learning?” Lovett-Menkiti said. “That is scraping everything that we digest.”
As this anecdote reveals, women are not taught to approach economics with the same ferocity and confidence as men. Thus, in helping to flip the script on this restrictive narrative, Cardona shared a piece of advice that an older male mentor once told her that has stuck with her ever since: “whatever number you think you want to ask for, ask for $50,000 more.”
“What my mentor said to me is the worst that they’ll say is ‘No’ or they can say, ‘Well, we can’t do that, but we can do this,’ and the this—I guarantee you—is going to be a lot more than what you had originally asked for, or even what they had originally offered you,” Cardona said.
Shortly after hearing this, Cardona decided to put her mentor’s words to the test. Sure enough, this strategy worked like a charm. She walked away from her next negotiation with $50,000 more than she was originally planning to ask for.
“That moment was such a moment of clarity for me, because never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought of doing that,” Cardona said.
In hopes of encouraging women to engage in these types of transparent conversations about money that they are often taught to shy away from, in the middle of the panel, Magner asked attendees to turn their attention towards their neighbors. Among each table, guests were invited to reflect upon how they were conditioned to think about money growing up, to share one recent financial accomplishment that they were proud of, and to brainstorm one financial goal that they hope to achieve in the future. Though conversations started slowly, eventually the ice thawed, and the stories began flowing out—many of which were quite moving.
According to Magner, normalizing talking about money is an essential component to building financial confidence among women.
“If we don’t know where we’ve been and what has influenced us to think about money and finances the way that we have and the way that we do, we’re never going to get beyond that,” Magner said.
More information about Socium Advisors can be found at their website.
