Reddit Reddit reviews The Power of the Purse (paperback): How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers-Women

We found 4 Reddit comments about The Power of the Purse (paperback): How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers-Women. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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The Power of the Purse (paperback): How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers-Women
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4 Reddit comments about The Power of the Purse (paperback): How Smart Businesses Are Adapting to the World's Most Important Consumers-Women:

u/Milskidasith · 19 pointsr/changemyview

I tried to track down the "women control X% of spending" stat in another post about it, and was unable to find it. Here is an edited version of my post detailing the digging (the post I was responding to claimed 60% of spending):

>Not really. Saying "control" 60% of the wealth does not appear to have an actual source anywhere.

> First, "women control 60% of the wealth" does not have an obvious meaning; "control" is not the same as "own", and without a clear definition it is hard to know what "control" means in the context of married couples. And I dug and dug but couldn't find a primary source for that claim. A business news article discussing the 60% figure cites "Virginia Tech" as a source, but it doesn't link to a research paper; it links to a nonfunctional landing page for a "Women in Leadership and Philanthropy" council. This council does not do research and none of the links on their landing page have any citations to any research. They link out to another dead link that is intended to go to The Woman's Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University.

> This group does appear to do research, but primarily on philanthropy and charitable giving; I can find nothing that is direct research showing how "women control 60% of the wealth" is defined.

> Searching elsewhere, I find a similar-ish 50% stat that cites the BMO Wealth Institute, which links to this white paper.. This paper is a summary of various stats and achievements of women, and does mention the "controls 50% of the wealth" statistic alongside noting many of the concerns typically brought up in these discussions, like women's relatively lower income, or lack of advancement etc. The citation for women controlling 50% of the wealth is yet another dead link to the Family Wealth Advisors Council. Searching the article title, though, I found the actual link to Women of Wealth, which uses the same stat for women's control of wealth and cites Power of the Purse by Fara Warner, a book from 2005.

> Now, I don't have access to the book in full and have to rely on Amazon's preview feature, but from that preview the only mentions of women controlling wealth are in the foreward, which the statistics appear pulled from, and early in Chapter one, which predicts women will gain 85% of the wealth generated between 1995 and 2010. This statistic is said to come from Conde Nast, but is not cited; the statement before and after from different sources are. I cannot access the full set of citations for Chapter One, but nothing else in the book I can find mentions Conde Nast so it doesn't seem likely it was cited prior to page four. Further googling for Conde Nast claiming such a figure was not fruitful, although to be fair a prediction of growth between 1995 and 2010 would have been made prior to 1995 and is unlikely to show up on the internet. And it is important to note that Conde Nast is a media company, and as such their useful definition of "control wealth" would skew towards, say, who makes spending decisions in married couples even if that wealth is dependent on the other partner.

> So what's the point of all this, exactly? Well, it's to say that the 60% figure, in addition to being extremely unclear, doesn't appear to have any obvious primary source; the closest thing I can find is a 2005 book that mentions the wealth control stat and a wealth control projection without clear citation. I did find plenty of examples of people citing the BMO report, which was ultimately sourced from Power of the Purse through the forward of a more respectable sounding report.

> I suspect, but cannot ultimately confirm, that the 60% control statistic ultimately exists either due to marketing projections from the early 90s (which would explain how, with no sources earlier than 2005, it has updated from 50% control to 60% control), or that its based partially on marketing projections and partially on ????? from the foreward of Power of the Purse. This stat does not appear to have been actually confirmed independently, but it has been given more and more legitimacy as it jumped from a book to a (relatively) smaller wealth group to a major bank to being mentioned on a landing page for a university group to being represented (falsely) as research from a major university.

So what's the point of all this, then? Well, it's to point out that your article citing female spending power is also unsourced and claims even higher numbers for female spending, and falls into the same trap about not actually defining what spending power means. There's simply no good reason to believe such a huge claim without any real citations. E: Additionally, as noted in the WSJ article linked in another post, most every source or potential source for this statistic appears to originate within marketing groups trying to push marketing aimed at women. That casts some doubt on how meaningful these terms are, given it may simply be marketing groups realizing that you can't market primarily to men for household products both genders use.

u/GreenAscent · 9 pointsr/AskFeminists

So I've been trying to track down the source for this claim for almost an hour now, because I'm a sucker for econometrics and I would love to see a breakdown by asset class. Business Insider cites this report, which cites this presentation, which in turn cites this book. I can't track down an online copy, so if anyone can tell me where the author got the information from, do let me know. I couldn't find any source for the suggestion that the percentage of wealth held by women is expected to rise to a much higher percentage in the coming years -- Warner only claims that the total amount held by women will rise, but so will the total for men (meaning that the percentages could stay the same, or change in either direction).

With that said, I'd be cautious with an analysis that looks purely at wealth without any accompanying explanation. About half of all wealth is home equity, which is jointly owned and as such most likely counted under both genders. Moreover, women live on average four years longer, meaning that four additional years of compound interest on pensions and home equity. On the other hand, women earn less than men on average and as such end up with fewer assets to earn interest on. However, there is a fairly well-documented effect by which male pensioners deplete their savings much faster than female pensioners. As such, it is not at all clear where we should expect the distribution of asset ownership to end up resting, and we don't really know what a 51% split even tells us.

u/edwardlleandre · 2 pointsr/changemyview

The actual 'study' is a BMO fluffpiece that starts by talking about the history of superheroes. It links to this as its source, which in turn finally links us to the source of the statistic that the first two were misusing, which comes from this book. The book does not cite its sources, and just looking at the data I can see in the 'look inside' section, it seems like the author is cherry picking stats to try and make women feel empowered. This is fine, just not very scientific.

But, what we can do is look at her claims.

In the foreword of the book (presumably written by someone else, though I can't find who), the author makes a claim that women in the US control half of all private wealth at $14 trillion. A cursory google check shows that in 2005, when the book was written, private wealth in the US was about $60 trillion. Now I'm not a mathematician by any means, but I do believe that is closer to a quarter, not half.

In the first chapter, the author claims the number is $13 trillion, jumping to $20 trillion in the next 15 years. Given that we passed $93 trillion in 2016, $20 trillion by 2020 is sure as hell not going to be 'half'.

The short version of what I'm saying, I guess, is that you need to stop believing everything you read on the internet without actually checking your sources. Especially when the claim is fairly ridiculous on its face.

u/abaxeron · 1 pointr/PurplePillDebate

> You do realize personal income includes stocks right?

Most working-class men don't have any stocks; I don't see how this is relevant.

>And capital gains are taxed differently than payroll is.

Most working-class men don't have any capital gains; I don't see how this is relevant. I said "social taxation" meaning "payroll taxation" (since in many non-US nations, these terms are interchangeable). Do you understand what "an average male employee" means?

> More so women in the US own the majority of the wealth in the US.

Seems to be not supported by either 2014 annual BMO report, nor by 2015 one. It comes from a BMO presentation titled "Financial concerns of women", which references a PDF presentation by a counceling company that hosts its site on Wordpress platform, which references a publicistic, non-scientific book that is believed to be an originator of "women control 80% of spending" myth that is being widely criticized.

It has nothing to do with women being the primary taxable income recipients.