Pop quiz:
Which gender buys 68 percent of all books in the U.S.?
Who makes up the majority of students in American colleges?
Who makes 80 percent of buying decision in homes?
The answer to all of the above: women.
While the glass ceiling still exists, and men continue to make more money than women, we’re making phenomenal strides. According to the U.S. Labor Department, women make up 45 percent of all managers, and that number continues to rise.
Using nearly every measure, women – to use a sexual metaphor – are on top.
Countless studies prove female managers, when rated by everyone from underlings to colleagues to bosses, outperform their male counterparts in nearly every way.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the renowned Harvard Business School professor who has written 16 books on management and leadership including the classic “Men and Women of the Corporation,” says women are adept at skills needed in a global information age: teamwork, partnership and nurturing.
By many accounts – labor economists, college projections, spending trends – seismic shifts are occurring in the power paradigm, though many Americans are unaware of it.
In short, women are on the verge of ruling America.
Michael J. Silverstein, a national expert on consumerism, said it succinctly in a recent Sunday New York Times article: “We are perhaps on the first step to a matriarchal society; women will earn more money than men if current trends continue by 2028.”
Silverstein describes the trend as a gradual erosion of the “power balance in the family.”
Of course, the definition of family has changed too, as women now head 27 percent of U.S. households.
The most telling shift is that women represent 57 percent of college undergraduates and 58 percent of graduate students, according to the American Council on Education.
Education alone will not be the great equalizer, though. In a consumer culture, those who have more earning power control what is manufactured and how it’s marketed.
Women already make decisions on 80 percent of all household purchases. They also outspend men on items that once were thought of as the “man’s domain:” consumer electronics and automobiles.
As manufacturers wake up to that realization, expect more products geared specifically to women: more self-help books, yoga classes, spas, day-care centers, and even foreign adoptions for career women who put off marriage and childbearing.
And if the market doesn’t respond quickly enough, the slack will be taken up by women-owned businesses.
Patricia Barela-Rivera, Denver district director of the Small Business Administration, told me women-owned businesses are the fastest growing segment in the state and in the country.
But women aren’t just focused on profits.
“Women do have a different take on how we view workplaces. It’s a more thoughtful, more caring dynamic,” she said. “Women entrepreneurs also tend to be more involved in the community.”
Historians have described matriarchal societies – the legendary Amazons of Greek mythology, for instance – of being marked by equality of both sexes, not domination of one gender over another.
Equality is a scary thing for those in power. If there is true equality of the sexes, might it spur other groups that have been long marginalized – used for labor but not financially able to properly educate their young – to seek a path to the middle class?
And capitalism won’t work without poor laborers, whether they are living in the U.S. or working in a sweatshop in the Philippines. But in a truly democratic society, we’d find a way for everyone to have a healthy standard of living.
Women have come a long way, from being considered property to owning property. What has helped women succeed are open-minded parents who have pushed their sons and daughters equally only to watch their daughters leap far ahead. It’s true in poor and rich families alike.
As this shift continues, I won’t be rooting for either gender to become dominant. In a modern society, anything short of equality of both sexes, and of all people, will hold us back.
