Women and the New Economic Revolution

By Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, Jossey-Bass/Wiley. Posted June 9, 2008.

The following is adapted from Why Women Mean Business (Jossey-Bass, 2008).

There has never before been such a confluence of international attention given to the economic importance of women and the need to enable them to fulfill their potential. The position of women - in companies, countries and governments - is seen as a measure of health, maturity and economic viability.

The World Economic Forum, organizer of the influential Davos conference, created a Global Gender Gap Report in 2005, ranking 115 countries on how they score for women's education, health, and participation in the economy and the political process. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has declared that 'gender equality strengthens long-term economic development'. In 2007, it set up a gender website to focus on 'the implications of [gender] inequalities for economic development and what can be done to develop policies for parity'. In a similar vein, the World Bank launched a Gender Action Plan in 2007.

Goldman Sachs, the leading investment bank, is one of those now using the term 'womenomics' to sum up the force that women represent as guarantors of growth. It points to the huge implications that closing the gap between male and female employment rates would have for the global economy, giving a powerful boost to GDP in Europe, the US and Japan ...

Reducing gender inequality further could play a key role in addressing the twin problems of population ageing and pension sustainability. Crucially, Goldman notes, female employment and fertility both tend to be higher in countries where it is relatively easy for women to work and have children.

Governments are looking anxiously for solutions to the persistent undervaluing of women's skills. Vladimír _pidla, the European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, points out that women have filled 6 million of the 8 million jobs created in the European Union since 2000, and that 59 percent of university graduates are female. 'Women are driving job growth in Europe and helping us reach our economic targets,' he says. 'But they still face too many barriers to realizing their full potential.'...

Why Women Mean Business takes these powerful economic arguments for change to the heart of the corporate world. We analyze the opportunities open to companies that really understand what motivates women in the workplace and the marketplace. We explain the impact of national cultures on women's participation in the labor force and examine why many of the current approaches to gender have not worked and why we need a new perspective: one that sees women not as a problem but as a solution - and that treats them not as a mythical minority but as full partners in leadership. With the new perspective, we offer companies and managers a step-by-step guide on how to integrate women successfully into their growth strategies.

For most of the last century, the issue of women was promoted mostly by women. More generally, women's debate on gender has largely been a conversation among women ... From the lightning rod of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique or Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to the more recent "women are better" books like Sally Helgesen's The Female Advantage and Helen Fisher's The First Sex, it has been an important and empowering discussion.

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