Why She Buys by Bridget Brennan

household income, she wears different clothes, eats different foods, travels in a different direction on the roadways, involves other peoplein caring for her children if she has them, and has a different relationship with money. If it’s a job she likes, she may even look at herself differently, with increased confidence. In short, an outside job impacts:
    • When she shops
    • Where she shops
    • What she buys
    • What car she drives
    • When she eats
    • What she eats
    • What she wears
    • Where she lives
    • How much she is prepared to spend on any given product or service
    • How much money she invests and where she banks
    • How she uses health care providers and insurance programs
    • Where, when, and how long she goes on vacation
    And then there’s the multiplication effect: every time a woman heads off to a job, the event changes not only her own life but also the lives of everyone around her. This is especially true if she has a family. Her participation in the workforce impacts:
    • What her family eats
    • When her family eats
    • Where her children go during the day
    • How many “helpers” are employed in the household—from babysitters to housecleaners and tutors
    • When she schedules her kids’ appointments
    • Where her family lives
    • What her husband’s family responsibilities are, if she’s married
    • How much time she and her kids spend in the car
    • How and where her family spends its leisure time
    “When a mother goes off to work, the whole family hustles differently. It creates a domino effect that impacts everyone in the household,” says Eric Elder, a senior executive for Ryland Homes, one of America’s largest home builders. Ryland has redesigned a number of the floor plans of its homes around the phenomenon of working women and their families. The company has discovered that not only does working change a woman’s personal traffic patterns, it also changes the needs of her physical environment. We’ll examine exactly what Ryland has done to accommodate these changes in the next chapter.
    When Women Work, Economies Grow
    W OMEN have worked since the beginning of time, but since their efforts historically were confined to the unpaid environment of the home, their contributions had less impact on factors that drive economic growth. Not anymore. Women are the engine of the global economy. As the Economist magazine trumpeted in a widely publicized article, “Forget China, India and the Internet: economic growth is driven by women.” 7 And since service jobs continue to replace those in the manufacturing sector, the opportunitiesfor women have never been greater. Not many jobs require big muscles anymore. With so many women working outside the home these days, we not only understand their economic power, we also have a better sense of the economic contribution of stay-at-home moms, since there is now widespread awareness that quality child care is expensive, and comes with its own set of management issues.
    In the United States, the growth rate of women in the labor force has been much faster than men’s for the last twenty years. Women have filled two new jobs for every one taken by a man since 1970. 8 And according to predictions made by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women’s job growth will still be slightly higher than men’s until at least the year 2014. 9 After three decades of growth in workforce participation, one-quarter of all married women now earn more money than their husbands. 10 This is a far cry from the 1960s, when married women couldn’t get credit cards or mortgages in their own names, and female employees could be fired just for getting pregnant or old.
    Recessions notwithstanding, the size of the labor force gender gap is a good way to measure a country’s economic health. It’s no coincidence that Scandinavian countries, with their high levels of women in the workforce, are considered to have the highest standards of living in the