Women today are earning their own money and forging successful careers. Yet too many still fail to save for retirement, flunk at salary negotiations and measure love by carat weight.

So says author Liz Perle, who has found that women's emotional hang-ups about money can cost them.

"For women, money and emotions are all enmeshed," she says, citing her interviews with hundreds of women. Coveting money is considered greedy, so women have a harder time demanding raises than men do — a reticence that can cost a woman a half-million dollars over the course of her career, studies show.

Talking about money is crass and "unfeminine," prompting even smart, college-educated women to defer important financial decisions, Perle has found.

With her book, "Money, a Memoir: Women, Emotions and Cash," out in paperback this month, asap spoke with Perle about how women's fraught attitudes about money are undermining hard-won gains in the workplace and at home.

You cite a bracing statistic: 85 percent of men know what they're worth while a similar number of women aren't sure. What accounts for this startling divergence?

Perle: I think that implicit in not knowing your exact financial situation is the thought that someone will take care of you. And, that someone doesn't have to be a husband. It can be an institution, it could be a family, it could be the novel in your drawer — you know, this magical thinking around money. ...

I'm a big feminist, but it's not a very popular thing to say that women who don't face their money issues squarely, somewhere in the dark recesses of their mind they're thinking someone else will come along and it'll all work out.

Of course, historically women married for financial security. Is that still true even today?

Perle: Women had an indirect relationship to money for most of history. It's only in the last 150 years that women have become financial entities in their own right. (Now), one-third of married women out-earn their husbands. There's a sea change in reality ... but there's a big difference between economics and emotions. ...

We're about to see it again this February — (the television commercial) "Every kiss begins with Kay," where this little girl is with her baby sitter and she says to the baby sitter: "Oh, Susie" — or whatever her name is — "I think Brian likes you." And Susie whips out a diamond from around her neck and says: "Yes, I know." ...

This equivalence of care and cash is really counterproductive.

Why do women keep falling into this trap?

Perle: We don't like to say this because it's not a popular truth, but something is stopping women from taking care of themselves financially. It doesn't stop us from earning, mind you. It doesn't stop us from holding good jobs. It doesn't stop us from working hard and being professionals. ...

We can bring the money in, but so many people don't want to look at what we do with it and take responsibility for it — which is weird, because more than half of all women admit to having a secret stash. More than half of all women admit to lying to their husbands about what something costs.

These are freaky little statistics that speak volumes about our twisted relationship with money.

Stephanie Hoo is asap's business writer.

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