Friday, March 18, 2011

Let's put gender and $$ into perspective here.

Young women, welcome to paradise.

There is a lot of noise from some quarters that  make absurd assertions regarding gender and money.  For the most part, those assertions are either disingenuous, or flat out fabricated.  Let's examine the evidence


According to Girlpowermarketing.com ("Strategic marketing to the intelligent woman"), women control a disproportionate amount of wealth:
  • Women account for $7 trillion in consumer and business spending
  • Women control more than 60 percent of all personal wealth in the U.S. (Time Magazine contradicts this number, placing it at 51.3%)
  • Women comprise 51.4 percent of the U.S. population, and make or influence 85 percent of all purchasing decisions
  • Women are starting their own businesses at twice the rate of men
  • Women make 80 percent of health care decisions and 68 percent of new car purchase decisions
  • In 31 percent of the marriages where women work, women now out-earn their husbands (See the "*" below).
  • One out of every 11 American women owns a business (U.S. Dept. of Labor)
  • Women purchase over 50 percent of traditional male products, including automobiles, home improvement products and consumer electronics
  • Women account for 58 percent of all total online spending
In Warren Farrell's book "Why Men Earn More" (The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap - and What Women Can Do About It), Farrell argues that "the power of money is not in its earning but in its spending."  American women control over 80% of discretionary spending, resulting in a "massive transfer of wealth from men to women."

*When it comes to controlling money, there are some disturbing statistics about who controls the money in a marriage.  "A recent PEW study of 30-to-44-year-olds showed that when a husband is the primary or sole breadwinner, household spending decisions are divided roughly equally.  He makes about a third of them, she makes a third, and they make a third jointly.  But, in the 22% of households studied in which the wife earned more, she made more than twice as many decisions as her husband about where the money would go.  The more money women earn, the exponentially more money they manage."  (Luscombe, Belinda; "The Rise of the Sheconomy," Time Magazine, Nov. 22, 2010.

In the overwhelming majority of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, single, childless women in their 20's earn substantially more (108% mean) than their male peers.  In selected cities, that number gets bigger; New York City (117%); Atlanta (121%); Memphis (119%); San Diego (115%); Sacramento (116%). (Sheconomy again).


Image source, The Financial Brand

4 comments:

  1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plkeKMTDM9g

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  2. I hear there is an intersting study on the welfare state in Denmark that found that women take 133k more out of the system than they put in v's men who put 400k more in than they take out.

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  3. I don't understand how women choosing to control more of their own money than men do is a problem. Men can always, you know, control more of their own money like women do.

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  4. April, men could do that to their partners but it could easily be classified as domestic violence.

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