Anne Boden was at the salon one morning, flipping through some magazines. “I wanted to look at the language around men, women and money,” she said. Boden, the founder and chief executive officer of Starling Bank, based in Britain, had been wondering why her customers were mostly men. Looking for clues, she noticed that the women’s magazines focused on saving money and deal hunting, while the men’s talked about money in terms of power and luxury.

“The next day, I walked into my office and made a joke about spending too much on shoes,” she said. She had a light bulb moment: “If a woman who was so confident with money that she started her own bank was making fun of her frivolous spending … Had I been influenced by these magazines my whole life?”

She commissioned a study on the gendered language around money — and found that 65 percent of financial articles in women’s magazines categorized women as excessive spenders. Of those aimed at men, 70 percent emphasized making money. “Women are told to cut back on coffee to save up for a new pair of shoes,” Boden said. “With men, money is all about power suits and investing and long-term goals. Supercars and yachts and people looking quite smug.”

Money isn’t gendered, but men and women deal with it quite differently. Women spend more than men on apparel, according to Smartasset, a financial technology company. But men spend more on other things, like takeout, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, alcohol and cars. Over all, single men spend slightly more than women, but that may also be because they outearn women. Frivolous spending has nothing to do with gender. Nevertheless, the myth of the frivolous female spender won’t seem to go away.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Boden said. “The media talks about women and money in a certain way, so the people reading it start talking that way, too. It’s what sticks in your mind.” In other words, perhaps women become more interested than men in pinching pennies and more embarrassed about their frivolous spending because it’s how we’ve been socialized.