How Far Have Women Really Come?
In the last ten years, women have pushed hard against the glass ceiling. Strides have been made, but the stats paint a story still in mid-motion, as evidenced by data on women working in market research and data analytics.
We’ve come a loooooong way, baby — or have we?
As much as awareness around women’s rights has grown, from the Passage of the 19th Amendment to the Women’s March, have women made significant inroads towards a more egalitarian workplace?
Truth is, it’s a mixed bag. Along with the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Suriname, and Tonga, we are the only industrialized nation not to have a mandated paid maternal leave. And labor policies that hamper working adults’ ability to balance work and caregiving have an outsize impact on women, who often are the ones to step out of the workforce if too many conflicts between family and work-life arise.
But on the other hand, women have successfully made some inroads into what once were male-dominated fields, particularly as it relates to market research insights, perhaps less so with regards to advanced analytics.
As data-driven insights have become a more prominent part of marketing, women have comprised a growing segment of this field.
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2011, there were 117,875 female market research analysts, but that number leapfrogged to 256,668 in 2020. Here’s why this matters so much: Women now drive the world economy. Globally, they controlled about $24 trillion in consumer spending in 2020, up from $20 trillion in 2018. To paint a more vivid picture, in aggregate, women represent a growth market bigger than China and India combined—actually more than twice as big. Given the numbers, it’s clear that ignoring women comes at a costly peril. And yet, many companies do just that.
Part of the challenge comes from who is doing the research. When experts examine what a market needs and wants, the researchers must reflect those they are studying, lest unconscious biases creep in and distort the data.
Despite remarkable strides in market power and social position in the last 100 years, women are routinely undervalued in the marketplace and underestimated in the workplace. The data suggests that it is critical to continue to expand not just the number of women who run the underlying market research, but in advanced data analytics as well — as these professionals are identifying the trends in the data, and storytelling the intelligence that shapes which products make it to market – which directly correlates with the on-target consumer insights marketing is leveraging.
The dollars don’t make sense.
Also, while the number of women working in market research and analytics (more so in market research) is trending in the right direction, other aspects are mired in imbalance and inequality. According to data based on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women market research analysts made only 73 cents for every dollar men earned in 2019. Ouch. The gap adds up: $460 out of each weekly paycheck, amounting to an aggregate $23,920 less a year. The math minces no words—and speaks to the overall state of things in the United States where women routinely earn significantly less than their male counterparts.
Another systemic challenge is the motherhood penalty/fatherhood bonus. When it comes to children, moms lose 4 percent of their hourly earnings on average for every kid they have, while men make 6 percent more. As you might imagine, this kind of wage gap leads to significant income loss for women—especially since, as of 2017, 41 percent of mothers were the sole or primary breadwinner for their families.
We can do it!
The importance of women in market research insights and advanced analytics is growing, as well, the critical importance of brands to understand, and deliver to women who once again, represent a consumer growth market larger than China + India combined, is essential to their survival and success. According to the 2020 Global Gender Gap Report, an annual report released by the World Economic Forum, it will take another 99.5 years to close the gender gap globally. For women, and frankly, the overall success of business and culture, change needs to happen, and fast.