Women’s Buying Power

Ask my mother’s generation about menopause and they’ll downplay it. Ask them about perimenopause and they’ll look bewildered. Their generation wouldn’t even have heard about the latter, and had little to navigate the former. But now, partly thanks to a new awakening towards women-led health needs, my generation knows how to tackle perimenopause and menopause when the day comes. It’s incredible that for decades, innovations in health, engineering, and design have almost completely left out the female perspective. Machines were built keeping the male anatomy in mind, clinical trials were done mostly on men, and female participation in everything was limited and/or absent. Even basic innovations improved male lives first, before years later, realising that hey, women are right there too, asking for ease of living.

That half of the world’s population that’s revered and abused, deified and demonised, used to start wars or end one — has shockingly been overlooked in modern innovation. Therein lies the most critical element of contemporary arguments that favour enhanced participation of women in the workforce. It’s only by getting more women into the room that we can ensure that the female eye is on things, that the female voice gets heard, and female requirements are eventually reflected in upcoming trends. At long last, we are finally hearing conversations that are focused on women, and offerings slowly abound that are adapted to our needs.

The advent of women-focused consumerism has taken over the product market. If you just look around, there has been sudden progress made in perimenopause or female mid-life related products and treatments, even before it did for periods. The sales market has realised an ignored truth — women are the decision-makers in almost 85 per cent of household spends, more and more financially independent women have superfluous incomes, women are more amenable to spending on health, education, family welfare, over 25 per cent of investors are women, and there’s a growing brood of single women who are focussed on health and wellness. And that’s about enough to have hormone-balancing gummies, an oversupply of protein supplements, hair, skin, longevity pills — you name it, and we suddenly have access to it all. Some reports even suggest that urban Indian women have more purchasing capacity than their male counterparts, and therefore, are playing pivotal roles in major buys such as residential real estate as well. And today, even though it comes at the cost of consumerism, women in India have ample options to deal with women-specific matters that have been historically ignored by male innovators. More importantly, erstwhile taboo topics have shed their garb of secrecy with growing awareness and literacy being created around them.

Marketing reports have often highlighted that about 72 per cent of women have felt unseen by brands. Looking back, how can one forget the numerous washing powders, cooking oils, and pressure cooker advertisements targeting women buyers! Assuming that only women were the cleaners, cooks, and housekeepers, and not men. But those were the times then, and now, the winds are changing. The current shift has meant great business as well by selling to younger and older women with strong buying power. A Flipkart report noted an annual uptick of 34 per cent among female shoppers; a majority of them being Gen Z. Forbes has called women over-50 “super consumers” predicted to control 75 per cent of global discretionary spending by 2028. So whether it’s driven by capitalism or social awakening, or maybe a bit of both — I’ll take it. The ladies have arrived on the product platforms, and there’s no looking back.

Views expressed are personal. The writer is an author and media entrepreneur