A few weeks before the school year ended, I visited Westover School in western Connecticut to sit in on a class aimed at encouraging teenage girls to consider careers in finance.

The class was run by a nonprofit group called Invest in Girls , which is using three private schools — Westover, which is all girls, and Milton Academy and Middlesex School, which serve both boys and girls — to test its program. The goal is to be more than another “kids and money” program, said its founder and chairwoman, Dune Thorne, who is also a partner at Brown Advisory in Boston.

“There are a lot of financial literacy programs out there, all doing important work,” Ms. Thorne said. “What we saw was missing is that when you have finance as a core tool in your toolbox, it opens up the world in a different way. You think about decisions differently.”

This intrigued me. After all, getting teenagers interested in finance — and teaching the subject in a way that links it to the moral complexity taught in, say, English class — is certainly a good idea. But why just focus on girls? Are they any more or less adept at understanding finance than boys their age?

To their credit, the organizers did not try to explain this away. The reason, they said, was that their program emphasizes learning techniques that work better with girls.

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