If you need another reason to promote the value of women making decisions in organisations it’s this: female purchasing power.
We’re behind 75% of all retail transactions and seriously influence the remaining 25%, according to newly released data from MasterCard.
Meanwhile, it seems retailers would be wise to avoid the ‘gender sales gap’ that we wrote about yesterday – that would be the sales promotions that offer 20% off for women’s clothes and 30% off for men’s. There’s a good chance we could be buying up goods for both genders.
As Sarah Quinlan tells Fairfax papers today: “She is making the household decisions, she’s buying his clothes as well in many cases”.
Yep, we’re not just shopping for ourselves: According to Mastercard’s SpendPulse data, retail sales were up 3.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2016, mostly on children’s clothing.
According to Catalyst, women controlled 64% of household spending in 2013, worth a massive $29 trillion in consumer spending – a figure expected to increase to $40 trillion by 2018. It notes that 72% of household consumption is controlled or influenced by women in Australia, one of the highest figures in the world.
Any good business must understand its customer base.
So it’s incredible to see that women still don’t dominate the most obvious strategic decision-making segments of major retailers – their boards.
It might (thankfully) be rare to find a retail board without a woman, but it continues to be rare to find one where women are actually the majority.
Five men dominate the six-person board at The Just Group, responsible for brands including Just Jeans, Portmans, Peter Alexander, Jay Jays, dotti and Smiggle.
Three women currently serve on the seven-person Board of Directors at Pacific Brands, and two women on the seven-person board at Myer.
Back to the data, apparently Australians in general are “resilient” according to Quinlan. There’s been a drop in the oil price and in mining but we’re still managing our personal balance sheets.
Still, we’re not spending as much time in shopping centres anymore. We’re busy, visiting 20 per cent less stores, and 85 per cent of us are using mobiles for shopping.
But you probably already knew all that.
So a reminder to all organisations, women hold serious purchasing power and we can use it to push companies into operating more fairly.