Women as Consumers

In the September issue of the Harvard Business Review, there is a article about women consumers (The Female Economy. http://hbr.harvardbusiness.org/2009/09/the-female-economy/es) Women control more than $20 trillion in consumer spending and represent a market larger than China and India combined. As a state, we could do so much more to encourage businesses not only to address women’s needs, but also to encourage women’s businesses.
Recently, Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce took a trip to China to open up trade. All the while, Oklahoma is 46th in the nation as a great place for women to live and work. (Center for Women Policy Studies) I wonder what would happen if some of the energy we are using to seek new markets across the seas, could be focused on satisfying women’s needs locally, we would build a better state as well as create more prosperity for our companies.
The authors of the HBR article, Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, talked to women consumers and found that most women feel “vastly underserved. Despite the remarkable strides in market power and social position that they have made in the past century, they still appear to be undervalued in the marketplace and underestimated in the workplace.” Surveying 12,000 women, the authors concluded that “women not only will represent one of the largest market opportunities in our lifetimes but also will be an important force in spurring a recovery and generating new prosperity.”
Whether nature or nurture, women’s lives are different than men’s. We are responsible for the most part, for children, for care of our elderly parents and for housework. In the U.S. women reported that they do approximately 66% of all of the home chores. We do see the world differently-- often leaning more toward the importance of not leaving anyone out and caring about our environment.
In the survey that the Girl Scout Research Institute did before and after the election, girls see leadership as connection and relationship building, while boys aspire to power over. Post election, girls and boys both saw how hard it is to get recognition for your leadership skills if you are female. Girls gravitate toward making the world a better place. As the authors of the HBR article point out: “Women seek to buy products and services from companies that do good for the world, especially for other women. Brands that—directly or indirectly—promote physical and emotional well-being, protect and preserve the environment, provide education and care for the needy, and encourage love and connection will benefit.”
In a recent guest editorial I did for the Oklahoman, I wrote that “allowing women access to positions of power also creates benefits for companies and communities. Recent economic studies bear this out. Pepperdine University found that Fortune 500 companies with the best records of putting women at the top were 18 – 69% more profitable than the median companies in their industries. Sixty-nine percent! It would be foolish not to consider having women either in the C-suite or on your company’s board with numbers like that.”

“But it is not just this Pepperdine study. McKinsey looked at European countries and found that the companies with greater gender diversity in management had higher than average stock performance. Catalyst, a research firm found that Fortune 500 companies with just 3 or more senior women managers scored higher on top measures of organizational excellence. Companies with 3 or more women on their boards outperformed their competition by 40%.”

Women as consumers and/or women as workers: our world is changing and businesses and corporations need to change with it. Not just for women, but for all of us.