During my travels in China in the past decade, it has been heartening to see the advancement of women in the country. Access to education and business opportunities are beginning to give Chinese women their rightful place in the country's economic expansion.

Consider a few facts from a report by Ernst & Young in 2007. According to a study from Mastercard cited in the report, young, unmarried women or married women with no children will control $260 billion in purchasing power by 2015. That is up from just $180 billion in 2005. Even elderly women who live alone will have a surprising amount of spending power--$115 billion by 2015--more than double the amount in 2005.

While 74 percent of women earn less than their husbands, an estimated 78 percent of them have control over the family's money. Married women make the decisions on what the family eats and what the family wears in Chinese households.

Even when it comes to big purchases such as cars or luxury items, a significant minority of Chinese women--23 percent--indicated that they could make those purchases on their own. This is a shift from conventional wisdom as Ernst & Young's report succinctly points out: "...general assumptions were that men being the sole or main breadwinner would also therefore act as the main decision maker when it comes to financial planning on spending."

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I have been blogging lately at eBrandmarketing.com. Join me there on a regular basis for more on women, marketing and the global power of the purse. http://www.ebrandmarketing.com

Some of the eBrandmarketing.com blogs will appear in this forum over the next few months, but I am working toward creating two separate blogs...but with the same end goal in mind.

I want to start a conversation about the global power of the purse. What issues are you facing as marketers in the global market? Do you recognize women as an important part of your marketing mix when you head overseas? Do you have success stories of reaching women around the world? What obstacles have you found? What would you like to know more about in terms of research and case studies?

As we head into the Marketing to Women Conference May 8-9, 2008 in Chicago, I would like to get the conversation started about the importance of the women's market globally and the economic power of women around the world.

American women have shown the world--especially the world of business--the
power of our purses. We lead the world as the No. 1 consumers for everything from lattes at our local coffee bar to the products of global powerhouses such as Nike and Procter & Gamble.

We've also shown the rest of the world what happens when women become full-fledged participants in our country’s economy with access to education, business capital and political power.

Now we have a woman running for president and all eyes are on us--American women--again.

Over the next year, I'll explore two major topics. First, where do women stand in America? Are we moving forward or backward in pay parity? Will we or won't we vote for Hillary? How are smart marketers approaching us? I'll also be posting blogs on ebrandmarketing.com on these and other topics so look for the blog there as well as host of other great guest bloggers.

A quick aside, check out the new Volvo commercial for its sport utility. I caught it watching “Good Morning America” this morning. It shows a female cyclist powering her way up mountain passes as her family keeps her going--videotaping her ride and showing it immediately on the video screens in the car. The ad manages to show off all the options in the car, including a rear seat that folds flat so she can take a break or pile her bike and all her gear in the back, even as it makes a statement about the power of women today.

Does this ad reveal how much we’ve changed as consumers since I finished my book? For more information click on www.thepowerofthepurse.com. Or does it show that marketers are beginning to understand how to depict women--as mothers, wives, athletes--in more holistic ways even as they get their points across about their products? For Volvo, it was certainly a step forward from the brand's concept car of a few years ago with its "ponytail holder" in the headrest.

But I'm also expanding my interests and research to explore the global power of the purse. I'll be pursuing that topic in this blog and in speaking engagements this year as I pursue a new idea for a book.

Global businesses and developing countries in Asia to Africa to South America are tapping into the global power of women. This is a two-part story in my view. First, governments--particularly in developing countries--are recognizing that women can be a primary key to creating robust economies. Extensive research shows that educating a girl can lead directly to economic growth.

The other part of the story is how companies are tapping into the consumer power of women in countries such as China, India and Brazil. Indeed all around the world, companies are realizing that women--no surprise here--are the most important consumers in those countries as well. I'll start in China next week--exploring how women have become major consumers for products as diverse as cars, financial products, real estate and home improvement.

I'll look to you for ideas and suggestions--and hope to inspire all of us to catch the power in women's purses around the world.

Stop the War Between Women
As I travel to Boston for a June 20 speaking engagement I am thinking of all the young women to whom I will speak and about whom I write. This is graduation season and lives are about to change and be jump started. So I ask myself what should we give these young women as they graduate and head out into life?
I'd like to propose that the best gift we can give the young women in our lives is a good example.
First, instead of picking battles with other women, pick battles that are worth fighting for. Second, remind them that there's no better time in history to be a woman.
Right now, the example we have- if we are to believe the popular media and a growing number of books about women- is that we are at war with each other and within ourselves.
If we stay at home, we backbite at the women who work. If we work, we snipe at women who spend their days being "just moms". Women who can't have children have a tough time listening to women who can- but don't want them. Women who aren't married gaze longingly over the picket fence at married women- who are wishing fervently that they had their own quiet husband- and child-free houses.
I wonder what all this arguing and angst is doing to the girls in our lives? What impression are we leaving them with when we moan about motherhood? What do they hear when we gossip about the mother who didn't bring brownies to PTA because she was working? It certainly isn't a message of optimism and hope.
And yet, shouldn't it be? If we can't celebrate where we are as American women in the 21st century and build on the social and economic power we've gained in the past 100 years, then we really are the sad and negative lot our conversations seem to indicate.
But there is much to celebrate. More women will graduate from college then men this year and for years to come. Millions of young women will enter the workforce and receive their first paycheck. Tens of thousands will buy their own homes and sign on the dotted line for an auto loan. A significant number also will become engaged, get married and start families.
Flashback 100 years ago- even 50 for that matter- and the choices were far more limited. Women got married. If you didn't, they had words for that kind of woman; the nicest of which was spinster. Remember that 100 years ago, women didn't have the right to vote so it wouldn't have mattered if we hated the candidates as much as women supposedly "hate Hillary" today.
Courageous women and men fought battles to give us choices, including the right to dislike a political candidate and then do something about it on Election Day. Where would we be economically if half of our population still didn't have the right to an education, the right to vote, the right to own a business, the right to have a bank account? Look around the world and you'll see countries that still throw up these barriers to women's progress- and their economies suffer. Research I came across while writing my book "The Power of the Purse," revealed that the fastest way to grow an economy was to educate a woman. America is a great example of that wisdom.
So shouldn't we be celebrating- and preparing our daughters and sons for the next round of positive change? There are two issues I can think of that could do with a dose of the energy we are putting into battling each other.
The class of 2007 could take up the issue of pay parity and safe, affordable day care for all children. Both issues would make families- and I define family as everyone from single people to traditional families- stronger and more capable of meeting the demands of today's globally competitive world. Add up all the 20 cents that American women aren't making today as a result of pay disparity (women now make about 80 cents to every dollar a man makes) and millions of women and families would be stronger economically.
Equitable and safe daycare helps all of us, not only parents. It gives women- and the growing number of stay-at-home dads- yet another choice in juggling the demands of work and children. It keeps smart, creative people in the workforce instead of forcing them to make tough decisions between career and family.
Neither issue is any more challenging that the battle for the right to vote or the right to work. What may be more difficult is giving up the battle women are fighting within ourselves and against each other. We can start by celebrating that millions of our daughters are graduating this summer.

It's been a busy two weeks. It started off Friday May 5 with a speech to mark the end of ArvinMeritor's Diversity Week. If that company's name doesn't ring a bell, it may be because it's an auto parts supplier. But you probably use their products every day when you roll up a window or open your sunroof.

It was just the first in a number of encounters during the next few days that once again reminded me why we talk about women, economics, financial power and money. Even in the auto parts industry, there is growing discussion of how important women consumers are to their bottom line.

On Monday May 8, I spoke to the Marketing to Women conference about women, money and power. The audience ranged from executives at companies who are struggling to make their brands and products relevant to women all the way through to companies who get it and are looking for new ideas. It was great to see that continuum of ideas and to see and hear the conversations going on among the group.

That evening, I spoke at the Enlighten Executive Salon, a small gathering that brought together about 30 executives from Chicago businesses such as McDonald's and Northern Trust. These small groups make it easy to get into deeper conversations. And for me it was a chance to reconnect with executives at McDonald's, who I'm happy to hear continue to forge ahead with their products designed by women but sold to everyone. The conversation around our table focused on how important it is to keep the pressure on a company to support products like McDonald's premium salads. There was also discussion about how important women and their views can be inside of companies that need that extra push to do something dramatic for women consumers.

I dashed home to Michigan on Tuesday afternoon to accept the Diamond Award from the Detroit Chapter of Women in Communications. Once again, I was overwhelmed with how important it is to keep talking about the issues around women and how far we have come in the past several decades. Despite those strides, I found over those busy few days that women still don't know their own strength nor do they use it to their own advantage. I'll be blogging more about that issue in the coming weeks as well as inviting several people from my travels to join me as guests. Then in mid-June I'm off to China so look for blogs from there as well.

Two weeks ago, one of the world's most respected business magazines, The Economist, grabbed my attention with the term "womenomics" on its cover. Inside, two articles described in detail how women are the true drivers of the growth of the global economy--outpacing even the growth of China, India and yes even the Internet--during the past two decades.

The evidence for such a statement lies in straightforward economic principles. One of the best ways to increase GDP is to employ more people in a country. For centuries, women--half the population of most countries--were simply left out of that equation. Certainly, women have always worked, but very often for no pay. That meant their input and value to the economy was invisible and uncounted.

But as women have joined the ranks of paid workers in the past half century in particular, their value in the economy is finally being noticed. And that value is immense, according to The Economist. "Arguably, women are now the most powerful engine of global growth," the magazine states boldly.

For those of us that have watched as these economic trends form and then transform society, such statements don't come as a surprise. But they do come as a welcome change in a world that too often has a tough time giving women credit for being important to the economy--beyond what they consume.

We, by we I mean the media and marketers, may be to blame for this lack of serious attention when it comes to the issue of women's importance to the economy. We have focused heavily on how to get women to buy more, shop more, spend more. We also should be focusing on how women's inclusion in the world's workforce has been transformative to the global economy.

I'm urging everyone to find the article at http://www.economist.com (April 15-21, 2006 issue) and give it a good read. It will give you great soundbites that you need in that next meeting about why women are important to your company or your readers.

But even more compelling are the statistics and evidence The Economist offers that reveals women--both as producers and consumer--are driving the world's economy. The connection between the two--production and consumption--is a major strength in this article because it gives a much truer picture of women's importance to the global economy. We aren't just consumers; we are significant producers as well.

For more stats and soundbites, read on. Next Monday, May 8, I will be speaking at the Marketing to Women Conference in Chicago and introducing that audience to this revolution called "womenomics." I'll be doing a blog from the conference so feel free to join in the discussion.

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I've been struck recently by how fond men and women are of supporting the never-ending "battle of the sexes." If one gender wins, the other one must lose, or so it seems. If only we could move away from this battle and instead learn to understand and respect each other, we may find we have more in common than either gender thinks. (see Chapter 2 in my book "The Power of the Purse" for a description of how The Home Depot used this concept of similarities instead of difference to redefine its stores.)

Two readings have brought this ongoing battle to mind for me in the past few weeks. On Sunday, journalism professor Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chalt Barnett, a senior scientist, at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University took on the "boy crisis" that seems to be gripping the nation--or at least gripping the front pages of magazines and newspapers. Rivers and Barnett are the authors of "Same Difference: How Gender Myths Are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs," a great read if you need some debunking of the myths surrounding men and women.

As Rivers and Barnett point out in their Washington Post article, boys were also in "crisis" more than 100 years ago. The reason: "spending too much time in school with female teachers," a relationship that was "robbing them of their manhood," write Rivers and Barnett. Fast forward to 2006 and once again women are being blamed for today's "boy crisis." Whether it's "hostile" female teachers or the fact that boys aren't "wired" to learn in the way today's education system has been constructed. Such an education system is apparently rigged to promote girls--who are supposedly outpacing boys in this "girl-centered" education system.

Rivers and Barnett go deeper to look at the statistics only to find, no surprise, that there really isn't a "boy crisis." When girls and boys of the same race and economic class are compared, there is hardly any gap in education advancement. There is a crisis in education and advancement, but it has nothing to do with gender, write Rivers and Barnett. It has everything to do with being poor and not-white. "Race and class completely swamp gender," they write. Instead of focusing on boys in crisis, we be addressing how our education system fails blacks and poor children, especially from rural areas.

This effort to go deeper beneath the surface of "facts" brings me to my other recent reading: "The Self-Made Man" by Norah Vincent, the journalist who went "undercover" as a man in hopes of better understanding them.

While by no means the perfect book, it's a worthwhile read if just for the first chapter. Vincent joins a men's-only bowling league and comes to understand these men in a way that few women would have ever been willing or able to understand men. Women (I am broadly generalizing, I know) instead like too more often harp that men don't understand us.

But women don't seem to understand men either. Moreover, it feels as if women are far less interested in understanding men and are happier being smugly superior about how well women express emotions. In giving us insight and trying to understand men is where Vincent's experiment is most useful. While by no means scientific, Vincent does get far deeper with these men as a man than she would as a woman. The bowling-league chapter shows how these men take care of each other, how they express their feelings in ways that are as individual as the men themselves, and how women miss all this because we are too busy asking why men don't understand us.

If you've read the book, I'd love to hear your thoughts--pro or con. I'll be finishing it next week and would like to have a conversation about whether Vincent's book does anything to stop the battle of the sexes.