2 of 2

Write now Article Tools

Women On Top
"What do women want?" The businesses that answer and deliver to that question are walking off with the very profitable prize of the fastest growing, the largest and most robust of industries.

Marketers, mistakenly, and at great cost to their companies, still think that men are in charge when it comes to buying. Females are the majority of buyers.

Females drive, shape and decide most purchases of homes and home improvement items, electronics, clothing, automobiles, sports equipment, furnishings, sex toys, food, guns, etc. Female buying power is the dominant fact. Females are the majority of students in college educating a new generation of females that contribute to the ever-increasing rise of women's purchasing power. Not an American phenomenon, four women graduate from an American college for ever three men. Females are the majority of voters.

Did you know that females outspend males on technology by 3 to 2? Girls are more likely than boys to buy a cell phone, digital camera, satellite radio, and DVD recorder/players according to the Consumer Electronics Association. Females want their gadgets to be light, durable and effective. Females want a gadget that accentuates a room instead of taking it over. Hence, the immense popularity among females for flat-screen TVs.

Females are the majority of drivers, and they want their automobiles to be affordable, practical, safe and low maintenance.

Results Of The 2008 BrooWaha Sex Survey revealed the preference for the women on top. The largest and fasting growing niche in the porn industry is a dominant woman. The largest and fasting growing sex club is the B&D clubs with the role-playing dominatrix.

Here is what's been driving Women Rule.

The economic logic of costs, risks and benefits. A very small difference in innate capabilities leads to immense differences in how people actually spend their time. Why? Because of economies of scale. Little differences lead to big effects.

For example, the breakdown of the traditional division of labor in the economic unit known as marriage. Technology has made house-work less time-consuming and more manageable. That is an incentive. Rationality is thinking ahead and responding to incentives. Two other incentives responded to were the introduction of birth control and no-fault divorce laws. Suddenly women had options and choices they previously hadn't. That empowered them. Women quickly realized several things then. One was the rational choice to maintain career options as divorce insurance. Another was marriage was no longer an economic requirement for women.

The Pill and no-fault divorce laws strengthened marriage as divorces dropped. After the initial divorces immediately following the new no-fault divorce laws, there were, and remain, less divorces. The number of marriages then dropped. So also did domestic violence against women, by 33%, and husband's killing their wives, by 10%, when men figured out their wife could just walk. That gave men a stronger incentive to behave themselves within the marriage. That spilled over into less affairs by men outside the marriage. That dropped sexually transmitted diseases. Female suicide rates dropped. With the no-fault divorce laws, men and women both realized it was now much more risky and expensive to commit to a marriage as either could now just walk. Riskier to have children, riskier for the wife to support a husband while he is in school, and riskier to remain a homemaker while the husband focuses on his career. With no-fault divorce laws, wives stopped putting the husband through school, delayed having children, and increasingly moved into full-time careers.

Employers, recognizing the trend for women into full-time careers, and The Pill eliminating an accidental pregnancy, became more confident in hiring, training and promoting women. That opened up the talent pool for employers to draw upon and business productivity exponentially grew. For women, by having the ability to delay pregnancy, they now had access to more career stability and income. For every year a woman delays having her first child, her lifetime earnings rise by 10%. That is a perfect example of economies of scale. The more work one has done in the past, the more productive each additional working hour one does.

Now people get married because they want to, not because they had to. People now live romantically together because they want to, not because they have to. Who contributes what to the relationship is now negotiated. That is a comparative advantage for the modern economic unit for marriage, and spousal-equivalent partnership. Either way, the division of labor within the romantic relationship is governed by both an absolute and relative sense of who is productive at what. Which is good simply because getting men to help around the house is too often impossible.

The result is that it is a brave new world where women want men but do not need them.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2005, females were 57% of American news analysts, reporters and correspondents were females. 70% of public relations was then females. In 1971, there were, nationwide, 9,947 female lawyers. In 2000, that number was 288,050. In 2005, females were then more than half the law school graduates, two-third of the law schools had female deans, half of law firm associates were females, and 17% were law partners. Females have taken over journalism, law, marketing, and communications. As architects and engineers, females were then 15% of the fields. In major technical universities such as Caltech and Georgia Tech, females were 15% of the professors. Females were 16% of the top executive positions in the Fortune 500 companies.

In 2000, female weight lifting became an Olympic sport. In 2004, female free-style wrestling became an Olympic sport. In April 2007, Ria Cortesio became the first female in decades to umpire a Major League Baseball exhibition game. In 2007, three professional female football leagues, made up of eighty teams, played, up from fewer than ten such teams in 2000. In rugby, 10,000 American females are playing rugby in college and another 3,000 females in high school playing rugby.

Five percent of paid firefighters are female. In law enforcement, it's 25% and for sworn police officers, it's 10%.

The National Association of Women in Construction is 6,000 members and 180 nation-wide chapters.

Female's average strength is increasing. Since the late 60's, females have improved their marathon times by thirty-one minutes, while males only improved by three minutes.

Nearly 15% of the American military in 2005 was female and there were then 1.7 million female American veterans.

A 2002 National Center for Women and Policing study determined that the average male police officer costs his jurisdiction at minimum 2 times up to 5 times more than the average female officer in excessive force liability lawsuits paid out. Why? Female officers tend to diffuse situations while male officers tend battle it out. It was America's first female Attorney General, Janet Reno, that focused America's police enforcement on community policing and prevention.

Just a generation ago there was "great concern expressed that American women might "have" to be police officers or serve in the military. That "concern" was used against the Equal Rights Amendment. What a silly concern that turned out to be.

The modern American female has discovered what men have known all along. They can be strong, proud, intense, intelligent, and lead the way. American females like their work, their independence and their power. 44% say they love their work and 52% say they like their work most of the time. Moreover, 99% said they recommend their work and choices to younger females.

Women more likely than men to head successful businesses of the future.

Sources: World's Female Billionaires; In Pictures: The World's Billionaire Women; India's Top Business Women; "Toys for Boys and Girls: Technology Companies Must Come To Grips with the Fact That More Women than Men Now Buy Gadgets," The Guardian (London) February 10, 2006; "Best Buy Gets In Touch With Its Feminine Side" USA Today, December 20, 2006; "Study: Women Buy More Tech than Men" www.cnn.com January 16, 2004; "Shopping for Electronics: Isn't Just A Guy Thing Anymore" Associated Press January 22, 2005; "No Longer An Afterthought: Women and The Aftermarket" Aftermarket Insider, Vol. 9 2001; A Treatise on the Family, Gary Becker; http://www.wfsi.org/womenandfi refighting/faq.php; http://www.beliefnet.com/story /33/story3340l.html; http://www.religionlink.org/ti p040120b.php; http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius04/ lawenforcementpersonnel/table7 4.html; http://www.boston.com/news/glo be/magazine/articles/2003/09/2 8/gendergames/; American Bar Foundation, Researching Law, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter 2005, p. 7; http://www.abanet,org/legaled/ statistics/fall2004enrollment. pdf; Bureau of Labor Statistics Table 11 "Employed Persona by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity;" http://womenandpolicing.org/PD F/2002ExcessiveForce.pdf; http://www.iwpr.org/[df/C364.p df; http://www.womensfootballcentr al.com/teams.html;; http://www.iwflsports.com/team s.php; http://wwwwomensprofootball.co m/teams.php; http://census.gov/prod/2006pub s/07stateb/defense.pdf.

Photo is J.K. Rowling

"What do women want?" The businesses that answer and deliver to that question tap into the spot-on marketing differentiation walking off with the very profitable prize of the fastest growing, the largest and most robust of industries, the ones catering to what women want.

Learn more about this author, Morgana Reno-Tahoe.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about Gender branding: Assessing the trend of business websites designed specifically for women?
We want to hear your view. Write now!