Being both tough and tender are not mutually exclusive," says Leslie Dashew.

Both in terms of home life and career, women need to learn how to draw from both sides.

There's a prevalent Jungian theory developed by Maureen Murdock in "Heroine's Journey", that successful career women feel that they have to adopt male toughness and may have metaphorically "murdered their mothers".

However discounting the soft feminine side as a weakness is a mistake, says Ms Dashew. It may cause you to miss out on the wealth of experiences that come from close female relatives and companions

Ms Dashew is a qualified psychologist and runs her own company which specialises in advising family businesses.

She says there is a need to be tough, but you have to try to achieve a balance in the assertiveness scale.

"Have you heard the one about the co-dependent woman who died and went to heaven and saw her husband's life flash before her eyes?"

If you are not assertive enough, family members may walk all over you.

Speaking from her personal experience of looking after an alcoholic mother and making sacrifices in her career in order to support her husband's, Ms Dashew concludes that a woman's role as caretaker should not be allowed to subsume her own needs.

" I will try to take care of you and while I'm doing that I'll help you to achieve your goals while not letting go of mine."

But avoid being too assertive and shutting people out. Speaking to the issue of single parenting, she says there is also a potentially harmful stereotype of the strong mother who is taking care of everything and does not need anything. "Sometimes it is difficult to be nurtured, to ask for what you want and to accept help." Even if a man is offering help, many women find it difficult to move mindset from being totally self-sufficient. It can be an issue of trust due to having been burnt in the past.

Asked what a woman should do if her career is doing better than her partner's, she replies: "Have a husband who is not threatened by your success."

She acknowledges that it can be very difficult, however, due to the stereotype that men are supposed to be bread winners.

The key is to take competition out of the relationship. "Our self esteem shouldn't come from competition."

The best relationships, Ms Dashew believes, are where you have a true partnership with complimentary skills, perspectives and dispositions. If one partner is feeling less competent or successful than the other, it is important to take it out of the framework of competition and explore it as complimentary.

Consequently, if the demands of a husband's career calls for a woman to give up her own, Ms Dashew suggests an alternative way to view it: Your husband's career was doing well, and while he was doing this, you were taking care of the household. Through a system of reciprocity, you were able to achieve mutual goals.

But even where they are not the bread winner in the partnership, women should not become complacent and entirely withdraw from the financial side of things.

"It's important to learn as much as you can about what your financial status is."

Ask yourself these questions: what are your savings, what is your pension situation, what assets are in your name. "Project a series of worst case scenarios: death, divorce and other disasters and determine how you would survive in each of them," says Ms Dashew.

These issues were borne out in the investment workshop given by Karen Hendrickson: "Everything you wanted to know about investment jargon but were afraid to ask".

Several women participating mentioned that they tend to hand over their money to an investment professional and just forget about it.

It appears that most women prefer to be able to trust their financial advisors and keep out of the nitty gritty of investing.

According to Ms Dashew, women still have the notion of a white knight to look after them, be that either a husband or a financial planner. Women have to make the shift to looking after their money more assertively. If they are not making that shift, perhaps it's because they are still holding on to that notion of a "handsome prince".

"It's part of our collective consciousness. I still hear that in young women. Particularly young women from wealthy families."

It appears that archetypes persist which detract from female empowerment: "We are not out of the woods yet."

As a new generation of daughters of working mothers grow up, they are still picking up stereotypes from sources such as the media which teach them that they have to depend on marriage for financial security.

The lesson for the new generation is that if you don't have financial security and financial savvy you may end up feeling trapped in different life situations.