Pensions. Equity. Compound interest. Yawn. Yes, financial stuff is all a bit tedious but since there will be no escaping it this year we may as well start getting our heads around it. Ah, but that's just the problem, see. One half of the population apparently finds that easier to do than the other. Women frequently have a mental “off” switch when it comes to financial jargon. They tend to be more frightened of and embarrassed by money, making them less likely to ask for a pay rise. Sometimes they are positively babyish, happily letting men take charge. Their attitude to spending is much more emotionally driven than men's, which is why so many females shop to cheer themselves up. Theirs is a world of illogical priorities where they will happily spend hundreds of pounds on a dress that they will wear once, yet won't buy a small pension.

    This is according to Sheconomics, a new book written by Karen Pine, a psychologist, and Simonne Gnessen, a financial coach. If it all sounds a bit patronising or sexist - and, frankly, parts of the book do - the authors, both women, say they know that there are many women who are brilliant with money. But they are acknowledging what research and years of experience bears out: that in general women struggle more to plan for their economic futures than men and the very language of the financial world tends to alienate them.

    When Andrea Dworkin said: “Money speaks but it speaks with a male voice”, she probably didn't mean it literally, but Pine, a professor of Developmental Psychology at Hertfordshire University, says that most financial advice is indeed “written by men for men; it is very dry, very boring and doesn't use a language that speaks to women”. While parts of this book sound fluffy (things such as “interest rates change more often than the fashion for skinny jeans”), the underlying message is not: if women don't grow up about money and start behaving more like men then financially they could be looking forward to a bleak old age. Especially since many will be divorced and facing retirement single.

    Women generally earn less than men and live for longer yet, says Sheconomics, though they can often, say, “plan a wedding with military precision” they cannot order their own economic lives. This can sometimes stem from “low self-efficacy”. The term self-efficacy was coined by the psychologist Albert Bandura and means having a positive belief in your capability to cope with whatever life throws at you. I certainly recognise some of the phemonena, such as being able to spend £50 on a meal out with friends and not batting an eyelid but feeling guiltily extravagant if I spend the same amount on a top. Such varying value systems around money are called “mental accounting”.

    Pine and Gnessen began writing Sheconomics two years ago. Then, the recession wasn't even on the horizon but they were already exasperated by the way in which financial advice is so one-dimensional, focusing purely on the practical and taking no account of the behavourial difficulties and emotional obstacles that human beings have around money - problems that seem to affect women more than men. The psychological aspect of spending is a hugely neglected area, they say. Now with the credit crunch biting harder, the book might prove to be one of the best-sellers of the year.

    “Research shows that when women shop, it is not necessarily related to how much money they have to spend but what is going on in their minds,” says Pine. “They shop to cheer themselves up, when their boyfriends have dumped them, when they are not getting on with their husbands, when they've had a bad day. The thinking is ‘I work damned hard, I deserve a reward'.” And Gnessen says that these emotional triggers are exploited to sell unsuitable products that waste their money. “A lot of financial advice plays on the emotions,” she says. “The selling of critical illness policies and life insurance is often on the basis that you have to do this, otherwise you are not looking after your loved ones properly. And women are more susceptible to this.”

    She has met many single, childless women, for instance, who were sold life insurance policies by slick salesmen. “If you have a mortgage they might play on ‘well, if you die you don't want to leave the debt to your parents',” says Gnessen, “when actually your debt dies with you. It is playing on fear. It's not that women are stupid, but they are more likely to be susceptible.” Indeed, Gnessen used to be a traditional financial adviser but seven years she ago switched to being a financial coach because she felt that her old job ignored some of the key issues around people's money difficulties. “It soon became obvious to me that most women's financial problems were either the result of or complicated by their underlying attitude to money, alongside a variety of personal issues or self-limiting beliefs,” she says.

    It is annoying when the phrase “retail therapy” is used by TV and women's magazines in an upbeat, even sisterly way as though it is a cosy force for good without so much as a nod to the misery and bad credit ratings that astronomical credit card bills can bring.

    But Sheconomics is not merely about credit card abusers. It is about the reluctance that even high-achieving women feel about finance. Pine and Gnessen admit they were worried about the book seeming sexist. But Pine says: “We have met a lot of highly paid professional women who admit ‘I am a financial disaster'. Yet in every other area of their life they are sorted. They might be running multi-million pound companies, or managing huge budgets on behalf of their companies, but when it comes to their own financial situation it all goes to pot. There was even a financial controller who couldn't manage her own finances.” Indeed, there is a sense that it isn't sexy or fun or feminine to be sharp about money. Some women readily infantilise themselves around household bills, letting male partners take charge. The image of a Carrie Bradshaw-- ooh! - just not being able to resist another pair of Manolos might be cute on TV but there's nothing attractive about appearing on credit blacklists and not being able to get a mortgage. The authors acknowledge that this modern creature, the female financial airhead, is far removed from that of the household matriarch of the first half of the 20th century who masterfully managed household budgets and made every penny count. The spanner in the works, they say, has been the availability of instant credit and the fistfuls of store credit cards that many women carry.

    “Instant credit has completely changed our relationship with money,” says Gnessen. “It used to be that when you got married you had grandma's old sofa but now you go to Dfs for a new one and don't pay anything for three years.

    Money is now invisible. When we used to keep the money we had in a pot, the system worked beautifully, but now it is much easier to spend money you can't see.” Pine adds: “You detach. You get the buzz but you don't feel the pain.” One woman was divorced and in a poor financial state but had remortgaged to pay for her half of her daughter's wedding. She didn't want her ex husband to outdo her. “There are people who are remortgaging every three to five years, thinking ‘Oh it doesn't matter, it's going up in value',” says Gnessen. “But property prices aren't going up anymore. I have clients so badly into debt that they have had to sell their houses and are now in rented accommodation.”

    Their message is that women should take action now. They recommend trying to live on the state pension for a week to shock themselves - though they know that for a generation raised on instant gratification, the thought of spending on something they won't see for 30 years is not appealing. Pine is also concerned that the tough times ahead might even cause mental health problems for those women who have used their plastic as Prozac. “The emotional drivers are not going to go away. “I'm worried that there might be a rise in mental health problems such as depression.” Gnessen says: “Once they start to feel bad about overspending, then from the research that Karen [Pine] has done, the shame and the guilt are negative emotions that are likely to perpetuate the same behaviour.”

    But if the credit crunch shakes us out of our torpor and makes us take responsibility for our futures instead of living in the present, then maybe it will have done us a favour. As Pine and Gnessen say: “Money is such an important part of life. It affects everything. And yet it's the one thing we don't really talk about.” A bit like death then, except more taboo.