Women flocked to the stock market during COVID. They include one who overheard a conversation about Wall Street Bets and another who lost her home in 2008.

• The number of women investing surged amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Washington Post reported.
• One woman started investing after overhearing a conversation about Wall Street Bets, the Post said.
• Another began her portfolio in the hopes of avoiding the financial struggles her family faced in the 2008 crisis.

Women investors flooded the stock market amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as some were inspired by meme-stock mania and others were prompted by scars from the last recession.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sabrina Scull told the Washington Post that she overheard two men in Central Park talking about Reddit’s Wall Street Bets and the GameStop frenzy that captured the market’s attention at the beginning of this year.

She went home and researched what was happening, according to the Post’s article titled, “These millennial women hadn’t invested before. The pandemic was ‘a wake-up call.’“

Scull opened a Robinhood account and invested $1,000 in mainly green and solar companies – instead of meme companies – according to the Post. Since then, her investments increased by 7%. Scull, an assistant editor at Ecological Society of America, did not immediately respond to a LinkedIn message from Insider.

The number of women on Robinhood quadrupled in February this year alone, to make up about a third of the customer base, Bloomberg reported at the time. In general, the mania around meme stocks awakened a new generation of investors, Insider wrote previously.

As investors flocked to the stock market during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fidelity Investments found that the number of female customers jumped 9% in 2020, outpacing new male customers, which rose 7%, Quartz reported.

Another woman, 25-year-old Juli Adhikari, told the Post she googled “how to invest” in April 2020 and opened an account with Ellevest, an investment platform targeted to women investors.

Amid the 2008 recession, Adhikari said she had “definitely felt” the impacts of the crisis and had to move homes. Twelve years later an adult during the pandemic, she wanted to change her financial situation, the Post wrote.

In a message to Insider, Adhikari, a policy and advocacy coordinator for the Women’s Initiative at American Progress, said she was extremely cautious and unsure in the beginning of her investment journey.

But, she told Insider, “My confidence has only compounded over time as I gain first hand exposure and experience in this world.”

A recent report from Fidelity Investments, found that more women are joining the stock market, and they’re even outdoing men. In the last decade, “women not only realized positive returns on their investments, but also outperformed their male counterparts by 40 basis points,” the report said.