PROLOGUE


A New View of Women’s Economic Leadership


Two recent, widely read and discussed reports focus on different facets of women’s influence in today’s world. The first, “The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation,” by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress (2009) focuses on the influence of women in the workplace and as breadwinners within the home. The second, “The Female Economy,” by Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre, published by The Harvard Business Review (2009), focuses on the influence of women as consumers and how large companies that better tailor products and services to women will be positioned to win when the economy begins to recover.


Both reports present women as tacit players within businesses, societal institutions and the big mega-corporate driven consumer marketplace baring influence primarily as employees, family breadwinners, and consumers. Neither report grasps the transformative opportunity women now have to focus and leverage our clout as consumers and business owners to build our own economic resources and leadership institutions, produce our own goods and services for consumption, lead and protect our own industry positions, shape our own employer force, and to consolidate and leverage the gains we have made over the last one hundred and sixty years to shape the world in a way so as to achieve our “own true and substantial happiness.”


The Women-Led EconomyTM


Changes Everything


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