Why Women Fear Finances? Ft. Meenah Tariq

I sit down with Meenah Tariq, CEO and co-founder of The Metric App, to talk about a fear that stalks so many women I know. It is not fear of failure or fear of being seen. It is the quiet, gnawing fear of finances. Of numbers. Of money itself. Meenah has spent years working with startups, training women entrepreneurs, and investing in businesses, so she has seen this up close. This conversation is the one I wish someone had with me a decade ago.

A little girl who wanted to be a bride, and then a wolf

Meenah was born in Peshawar into a family that started with nothing. Her parents had a love marriage, were thrown out of their homes, and began life in a single room. Her father was a doctor but he did not even complete his house job before jumping into the development sector to survive. When she was four, they moved to Islamabad, to the sector G-10/3, and that became home base. The community was conservative. Women driving, women working, these were not normal. “I saw women be very powerless around me,” she says. “Financially independent women be otherwise extremely dependent. Domestic violence was completely normalised. And I thought, how do I make sure this does not happen to me?”

Even as a child, Meenah daydreamed herself into powerful roles. She wanted to be a dulan, a bride, when she was very small, because weddings looked magical. Then she started imagining herself in three-piece suits, driving a car, because in her head, that was agency. That was power. It is a fascinating piece of the puzzle. She had never seen a woman in a suit, never mind one driving, but something in her reached for it. “I always wanted the powerful parts,” she says. She sees the same in her three-year-old daughter now, who insists on being the wolf in the Three Little Pigs, because the wolf has agency, even if the wolf is the bad guy. Little girls unspoiled by conditioning are comfortable with that.

The mother who said, just apply, just apply

Meenah’s mother is the quiet architect of so much in this story. She did not work for money but she worked relentlessly at home. She forced Meenah to apply for the Fulbright scholarship. “I was very happy and satisfied in my life,” Meenah laughs. “I’m like, why would I leave a place where everybody knows my name? I’m king of the world.” Her mother would not have it. She drove Meenah to GRE classes, sat outside to make sure she stayed inside, and kept repeating, “Just apply. Just apply. Just apply.” That push changed everything. The Fulbright transformed who she became. It also showed her that being comfortable is not the same as being free.

Her mother also opened bank accounts for all the children when they were young. She loaned Meenah money for her first big investment in herself, a photography course, and expected it to be repaid. Not as a gift. As a loan. That small act planted something profound: financial responsibility is not a burden, it is the muscle you build. Meenah and her husband now do the same for their daughter. From the time she was six months old, they put baby gifts into her own bank account, and every month they deposit a fixed amount. The money is invested. “When she grows up, she will have something of her own, and she will then be able to take it forward,” Meenah explains. It is not about creating a safety net of cash. It is about creating a relationship with money that is built on control and growth, not anxiety and avoidance.

The numbers lie we keep telling ourselves

This is where my heart truly sat up. Meenah talks about how, in her work with business owners, 98 percent of the women she meets tell her the same thing. “I’m the creative person. I’m the operations person. Numbers, oh, that’s not me.” She says it without shaming anyone, because she completely empathises. She hated accounting. Her first job in finance at Ufone made her miserable. But here is the thing: this idea that women do not have a head for numbers is not a natural fact. It is a story fed to us for generations. We are given money casually, never taught to manage it, and then told we are no good at the very thing we were never equipped to handle. Meanwhile, men are socialised into that responsibility from boyhood, even when they are not naturally good at it either.

“Financial independence is not just earning money,” Meenah says plainly. “Being able to control your money and where it goes and how it grows, that is financial independence. You can earn money and give it to someone else, and then you are not independent.” I felt that. I have been that. Many of us hand over our earnings to a father, a husband, a brother, and feel proud we contributed, while losing the very agency that the money was supposed to buy.

Meenah’s own impostor syndrome nearly kept her from breaking into venture capital. She knew the startup ecosystem inside out. She had trained hundreds of entrepreneurs. Yet when a partner reached out to offer her a partnership, she cried on the phone because she could not believe she deserved it. “He said, I don’t care about your accounting or financial modelling. I saw something in me that I could not see myself.” That belief from someone else gave her the push to learn the numbers she needed, to build that muscle. It was not magic. It was permission, plus practice.

Building metric for the woman who hates accounting

So many of our money fears come from the shame of not understanding the basics. Meenah co-founded The Metric App precisely because she saw extremely smart business owners struggling with their finances. They were making decisions blind. Women especially were undercharging, discounting too quickly, afraid to ask what their work was worth. When you do not know your numbers, you cannot make confident decisions. You cannot scale. You cannot even know if your business is surviving or just limping along. Metric was built to be so simple that even the most numbers-averse founder could open it and in one glance see exactly where their business stands. Real time, no confusing spreadsheets, no shame. As Meenah puts it, “I actually hate accounting, and that is why I believe this is perfect. I want to make it so easy that nobody else has to struggle the way I did.”

In her trainings across Pakistan, she saw the same patterns again and again. Women pricing their handcrafted products too low because they lacked the confidence to value their labour. Women disappearing from family businesses once a husband or brother decided finances were his domain. Women thinking small because nobody had ever asked them to think big. The questions investors ask women are often about risk, while men get asked about growth. It is a quiet conditioning that shrinks our vision before we even start.

The partner choice is a career choice

Near the end of our chat, Meenah says something that I think every young woman needs tattooed somewhere visible. “The biggest career decision that we make is who we marry. And the worst career decision we make is also who we marry.” She is not being dramatic. She and her husband, Omar, built their lives together from a point of deep alignment. Even when they were struggling, when he was a student earning ten thousand rupees, even when their families did not invest in their business, he was her partner. Her privilege, she says, started with her mother who pushed her toward education, and then it multiplied with Omar. “My privilege stems from the fact that he is my partner. Because of that, we accelerated each other’s financial growth.”

It is a mirror for my own life, and I know it is for many of you listening. The person by your side can either be the wind or the wall. Meenah stresses that the choice is not just romantic or familial. It is financial. It is professional. It will determine whether your ambition is watered or starved. And yet, so many of us are taught to be grateful if a man simply does not stop us. Our standards are so low. We need to raise them, not just for ourselves but for what we model to the next girl who wants to be the wolf.

A small invitation for you

This episode is not a lecture on how to become an investor overnight. It is a long, honest look at the roots of our fear around money and the small things that can loosen its grip. Maybe it is opening a bank account for your child. Maybe it is asking your mother for a loan and repaying it, just to feel the responsibility in your bones. Maybe it is looking at your partner and asking whether they truly believe in your growth as much as you believe in theirs. Maybe it is simply sitting down with your business numbers this week, not to judge yourself, but to see clearly. These are the small things that matter. They build the muscle. They rewrite the story. And they start with a conversation exactly like this one.