These millennial women hadn’t invested before. The pandemic was ‘a wake-up call.’

When Scull got home, she read articles about the phenomenon: A group of amateur traders had gathered on a Reddit subgroup called WallStreetBets to raise the stock price of companies shorted by more established Wall Street funds. One of these stocks, GameStop, increased by 400 percent in a single week. What Scull noticed, she said, was that it seemed predominantly male investors were finding financial success. It made her think, “If so many people are investing right now, primarily men,” said Scull, “why am I not?”