Shopping. One Of Our Superpowers.

By Erica and Karen

An old, and discredited, myth holds that women are frivolous because they shop. The truth is we shop because we need to. If we did not shop our families would not be fed or clothed, or housed, or healthy. True, in pre-COVID days we sometimes shopped for fun, with friends. That was never the main focus of our shopping activities but that seems to where the myth arose.

Well, the myth is misogynistic. What if, instead of shopping, we called this activity resource allocation? And what if it were the case that, because we women do most of the resource allocation, we are actually a powerful economic force? That would make shopping a superpower.

Despite near equality in numbers, according to Bloomberg, women make more than 85% of the consumer purchases in the United States, and reputedly influence over 95% of total goods and services purchased.

How did women become the ultimate shoppers? Several ways.

First, perhaps, our brains. Women’s and men's brains are different. Yes, we know you knew that, but this article lists some specifics:

Even though both sexes are capable of equivalent intellectual performance, there are numerous physical differences between male and female brains:

• Women have a thicker corpus callosum, the bridge of nerve tissue that connects the left and right side of the brain, leading women to use both sides of their brains to solve problems. Men predominately use the left side of their brains for this purpose.

• Men have a larger brain size by about 10%, but women have substantially more nerve endings and connections (white matter) than men.

• Men and women use different areas of the brain for solving tasks. For example, women use their larger, more organized cerebral cortex to perform tasks, while men rely on the larger proportion of gray matter in the left hemisphere of their brains. As a consequence, women are generally better at identifying and controlling their emotions, while men are more task-focused.

Because of these differences, women shop differently. Men Buy, Women Shop. Men view shopping as a task, and want to get in and get out. Women regard shopping as an activity, to be accomplished skillfully. We want to make intelligent decisions, and we usually have to operate within a budget. Women as a whole are considered more sophisticated shoppers than men, taking longer to make a buying decision, Bloomberg says. Others agree.

Women tend to be more astute consumers than men, simply because they are willing to invest the time and energy necessary to research and compare products. At the same time, their two-sided brain approach to problem solving makes them more susceptible to emotional appeals than a man.

Shopping was not always the province of women. Women were, until relatively recently, not even allowed into the parts of town where shopping might occur. This fascinating article chronicles the rise of women shoppers in the nineteenth century.

Originally banned, if they had no male escort, from downtowns, and most downtown establishments, women gradually gained a foothold when retailers realized women were a new market. Retailers began to design department stores to suit them, complete with facilities like cafeterias where they could meet and dine securely with their friends. Even street design changed, to provide islands of elegance and safety, like crosswalks and lighting.

Eventually suburban shopping centers emerged, with all kinds of services for suburban women—hair salons, playgrounds, big parking lots. Women began to dominate retail buying—though only some women. Working class women, and Black women, remained largely excluded from the marketplace. Of course, as women entered the career workforce, the market began to accept that women were lucrative retail targets. More recently, Black women as well.

So we women became good shoppers, and men ceded the territory to us—and began to call shopping frivolous. A pattern we have seen before. But that’s fine. We’ll take the superpower.

Some posit that women’s advantages will be eroded by internet shopping. Online shopping may eliminate the efforts to make public spaces and amenities, like transportation, attractive to women. Indeed, we have all seen the demise of malls and department stores. But we don’t think these forces will change the fact that women control spending and, to that extent, the economy. Women adapted rapidly to online shopping, and indeed it makes the lives of working women much easier. We multi-task—engaging in complex resource allocation while we are on conference calls or baking cookies for the school bake sale or both. We’ll adapt again to whatever comes along.

Resource allocation does not make us frivolous. It makes us powerful.