Even if it wasn't the right thing to work towards...

In a previous life I worked on documentation for a company that made personal finance software. Unlike a lot of other programs that branched out into other sectors they'd focused almost exclusively on checkbook balancing and so their percentage market share was actually *behind* a decimal point. A new team lead proposed that maybe since there was a dot-com boom underway and everything a lot of people might just want to track their investments. Since the idea was much overdue pretty much the whole development team threw themselves into researching investing and portfolio management.

Reflecting the extremely common tendency to think the whole world is pretty much like one's local peer group we started with the assumption that most individual investors were under-40 yuppies and DINKs (double-income no kids) types. That illusion was almost instantly shattered. What we learned instead was that the majority of individually owned stocks, bonds, a stunning amount of real estate, and even controlling interest in an awful lot of companies was owned by women. Mostly older -- sometimes very much older. Usually widows.

At the time there were very, very few elderly women or men using computers, and since research suggested that older people relied almost entirely on brokers anyway we decided not to cater to that demographic. But that little tidbit has really stuck with me.

Zoom forward 20 years to a tidbit of trivia in this month's Men's Health magazine:

Facts of life™

86
Number of single men age 18 and older for every 100 single women in the United States.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

Not terribly useful since there's so little context but it's not hard to guess that since there are roughly equal numbers of younger men and women the extra 14 women per hundred men have probably outlived their male contemporaries.

So...

We know that in broad demographic terms women are roughly 51% of the adult population. We know the variance skews quickly towards women past roughly age 60. And we know a couple of other things as well: older people are far more inclined to vote *and* through inheritance (from previous generations) and enterprise (increasing rapidly) older women directly or indirectly control a more than half of the nation's wealth.

Even though these basic demographic truths have been with us, in the U.S. anyway, for at least a century this really hasn't had much impact on society.

So far!

But let's look at a couple of other little tidbits. Women weren't even allowed to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1919. According to Prof. Stephanie Coontz, in the 1930s 37 states had laws on the books *forbidding* women to work in certain professions and those laws were reflected in numerous Federal policies. (The motivation at the time was to prevent the "emasculation" of out-of-work men during the Great Depression when it was believed that a working woman unfairly displaced a working man.) Coontz also documents (and marvels at) the aggressive zeal with which women ditched their wartime "Rosie the Riveter" jobs and plunged into the male-breadwinner/female-homemaker social experiment of the "long decade" of the 1950s. So we've looked at those tidbits, now let's add them up.

An 89-year-old woman today would have been born before women had the right to vote. A 79-year-old woman would remember when it was against the law (and social propriety) to do "men's work." Even a 69-year-old woman would have come of age right smack in the middle of the Ozzie and Harriet era, when 90% of women were marrying husbands and very intentionally submerging themselves into what was then deemed "grown-up" women's work: greeting her working husband a the door with pipe, slippers, and a hot, home-cooked supper.

In other words, the women most in a position to tip both the electoral and economic balance in America today came of age thoroughly indoctrinated in a world where men *and women* didn't just actively but aggressively supported an exaggeratedly patriarchal ideology. Or, with the aid of "mother's little helpers," heavily medicating themselves when they couldn't stand the contradictions.

Now let's zoom forward another 20 years, to, say 2030. Yeah, there'll still be some women in their late 80's and beyond who actively participated in the "Father Knows Best" era, but even if millions of them spent their lives claiming "I'm not a feminist but..." pretty much everyone else will have come of age aware, at the very least, of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, if not also Gloria Steinem, Billie Jean King, Holly Near, Our Bodies, Ourselves, the ERA, the glass ceiling, the infamous and shockingly durable 69% pay gap, Andrea Dworkin, and even pseudo-feminist events such as the Virginia Slims "you've come a long way, baby" ad campaigns and the anti-feminist Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man" with its suspiciously subversive lyric "'Cause after all he's just a man..."

Add all *that* up and ask whether the women who demographically speaking still be able to outvote and out-wealth men will still be as inclined to let men do all the driving?

And after adding all that up if you're an anti-feminist man or one of his "Men's Rights Activist" you might want to rethink whether, even if it wasn't the right thing to do, supporting gender equality in general, and an equal rights amendment to the Constitution might not be in your best interest?

86 to 100. Think about it.

I'm just sayin'