Six of us women were clustered together, making animated conversation at a friend’s wedding. The bride’s brother-in-law joined us and said indulgently, “So, what are you discussing? Clothes, servants or romance?” We looked at him. “Investments,” we said. The expression on his face was, unlike our stocks and shares, priceless.

The six of us had been handling our own finances, sometimes in tandem with husbands and partners, since we’d begun earning salaries or creating our own wealth. Two were serious punters on the stock market; one was a mild risk-taker who invested in mutual funds; two of us were off-the-wall, one investing quietly in rare books, the other in art; one had put her faith in property.

To us, this was nothing unusual. But when I heard the brother-in-law and his friends discussing the incident in incredulous surprise, I realised that the revolution in the way that women handle money has been almost silent.

My banker works at a branch that appears to be staffed entirely by women at the senior levels. She seemed to be the right person to ask whether women’s investment and earning patterns had changed. We had a revealing conversation, after which she put me in touch with a few colleagues in different financial sectors.

In urban areas, women in the over-50 age group seem to either not handle their money themselves, or to prefer conservative financial strategies. They are more likely to hire a financial consultant or trust their chartered accountant to handle large amounts of money. Some still prefer to let husbands, fathers or brothers handle anything to do with money. There was a small but interesting segment who had actually taken control of their financial planning for the first time in their fifties and sixties. By and large, this group still saw property or secure deposits as the safest investments; some adhered to the old-fashioned belief in gold and jewellery.

Women in their thirties and forties seemed to be increasingly comfortable with handling their own money, though there was a small segment here that was happy to trust their investments and planning to their partners. One consultant said that the increasing demand for fiscal independence had led to “relationship stress”, with both men and women struggling to handle the new balance of power, but others saw this as empowering, especially when men had to carry less of a financial burden.

Strategies in this group leaned towards the conservative, but many women ? especially middle-to-high income earners ? split their investments between safe bets and high risk strategies.

And women in their twenties? “Oh, they’re definitely part of the spending generation,” sighed my banker friend. They tended to get into credit card debt most often, tended to make bad and risky get-rich-quick investments or not to save at all. “That’s an alarming pattern,” I commented. “Yeah,” she said. “They should look for role models among older women. Instead, they’re learning from the men.” And she shook her head in disgust.