Avoiding stereotypes and conventional thinking—that was the big challenge in planning a Women and Markets theme for Power Shift 2015.
A few years back, the Harvard Business Review published “The Female Economy.” The authors focused exclusively on how much women consume. Nothing about women and the capital markets. No nod to the historic entry of female workers into the formal labour market. Nothing about how gender affects global supply chains. Yet announcing that women are shoppers is hardly newsworthy. Marketing companies have known for decades that women are the world’s consumer engine.
Academic economists treat markets as something that exist only in an abstract landscape, where gender is an irrelevant triviality. Yet this blinkered way of thinking has led to a global information structure that knew nothing of the economic lives of women until recently—and still struggles to understand.
We skirted these two chasms of conventional thinking as we planned Power Shift 2015. And, happily, some of the most respected institutions in the world, including some of the most powerful marketing companies, stepped up to help us put together an extraordinary agenda.
To read more about the exciting two days, please visit Professor Linda Scott’s post, “A Force of Feminists”, on The Double X Economy blog.