Monique Woodard
Contributor
Monique Woodard is the founder and managing director of Cake Ventures.
As girls have gained financial energy, their financial affect has expanded. Ladies lengthy held major buying accountability for on a regular basis home goods, however as we speak, they management or affect 85% of shopper spending.
I based Cake Ventures as a enterprise capital agency that invests in expertise corporations that tackle our world’s quickly altering demographics.
My thesis is made up of three layers of demographic change: growing older and longevity; the shift to ‘majority-minority’ the place the web is pushed by a inhabitants of tech adopters from Asian, Black and Latino backgrounds; and womens’ elevated incomes and spending energy.
Many buyers consider alternatives to put money into girls completely by way of the lens of feminine founders (and we will’t discuss in regards to the alternative in feminine shoppers with out acknowledging the dismal funding numbers for feminine founders), however there’s a parallel alternative within the feminine financial system — investing in expertise that solves the issues and meets the wants of feminine shoppers.
Ladies ought to now not be regarded as a distinct segment. Actually, they’re one of the vital development markets we’ve ever seen.
This cohort is already driving corporations to multi-billion-dollar outcomes in girls’s well being, e-commerce, the care financial system and different classes. The decacorn valuation of SHEIN and the billion-dollar (or extra) valuations of Maven Well being, Faire, and Unbelievable Well being are just some examples of the enduring energy of the feminine greenback.
How did girls develop into a development market?
In the present day, girls make up roughly half of the U.S. working inhabitants and, when adjusted for self-employment, are the brand new workforce majority. A lot of this development was pushed by features within the retail and healthcare sectors, industries that make use of extra girls and are closely influenced by feminine spending energy.
The rise in feminine employment can be inextricably linked to training: As of 2019, nearly half of the employed feminine inhabitants ages 25-64 held a bachelor’s diploma or increased – representing a quadrupling of ladies with levels since 1970.
In the present day, girls make up 59.5% of school college students and whilst enrollment in U.S. universities is declining, males account for 71% of that decline. If this development continues, quickly two girls will earn a school diploma for each one earned by a person.
Even with a persistent wage hole, these components have led to a dramatic improve in girls’s monetary energy. American girls management greater than $10 trillion in property (an quantity anticipated to triple over the subsequent decade), pushed by a gradual upswing in workforce participation, training and wage development.
Ladies are more and more more likely to be the first bread-winner, monetary contributor, and head of family, making 85% of day-to-day spending choices and 80% of healthcare spending choices for the household.
4 key funding themes
The tempo of ladies’s financial exercise has elevated throughout each class. This impacts not simply shopper classes like magnificence, attire, and family items, however can be altering who turns into major purchasers of housing, customers of monetary merchandise like bank cards and mortgages, and decision-makers within the office.
There are 4 main classes wherein the wants of ladies have pushed the acceleration of their shopper {dollars}:
The “tremendous shopper”
Ladies have lengthy been a goal buyer for retail and e-commerce, however the trendy feminine shopper – a “tremendous shopper” – exerts way more affect over the financial system than ever earlier than. Plenty of privately held unicorns and multi-billion-dollar market cap public corporations can attribute their development to a robust and engaged feminine shopper base.
Many would place billion-dollar magnificence and trend manufacturers like Skims, SHEIN, and Savage x Fenty into the class of corporations pushed by feminine consumption. Dig deeper, and also you’ll see the feminine shopper greenback drives each the acceleration of recent shopper manufacturers and related exercise round creators and influencers, e-commerce enablement, and provide chain.
The affect of the feminine greenback could be felt in consumer-facing classes like training, healthcare, meals, and monetary expertise. When desirous about the feminine shopper, it’s extra acceptable to ask, ‘which industries will not be influenced by the feminine greenback?’
Ladies’s well being and wellness
Ladies are the largest shoppers of healthcare based mostly on each their very own well being wants in addition to their function as major healthcare decision-makers for his or her households. “Femtech” is now a widely known class of healthcare innovation, reaching $16 billion in funding as of Q3 2022, and is estimated to be an almost $1.2 trillion business by 2027. Corporations like Tia Well being and Kindbody have modified the consumer expertise of healthcare for girls and others like Alife and Gameto are fusing science with AI and knowledge to modernize in vitro fertilization, ovarian illness, and menopause.
The alternatives prolong to maternal well being, psychological well being, and at-home diagnostics – all areas that may see accelerated innovation within the coming years. In a post-Roe world and one wherein girls need to take extra management over their healthcare, girls’s well being is poised to be one of the energetic areas of innovation.
The care financial system
As girls have taken on extra skilled obligations exterior the house, their caregiving obligations haven’t decreased. Dismissing caregiving as “girls’s work” has allowed the class to go ignored and under-invested even within the wake of rising numbers of male caregivers and the flood of growing older dad and mom who will make new caregivers of many people.
Caregiving turned a political speaking level in the course of the 2020 election and the Biden Administration put forth a 2024 finances proposing $750 billion in federal help for caregiving. Alongside this federal focus, there’s vital market alternative for expertise that makes this care extra accessible and reasonably priced.
Corporations like Mirza are serving to employers help working dad and mom with caregiving subsidies that lower childcare-related absences. There’s a huge alternative to construct options that alleviate the monetary burden of caregiving, help each skilled and household caregivers, and make care extra accessible and reasonably priced for everybody. As girls develop into our most extremely educated workforce, we’ve got to determine how each care and work get completed.
Ladies at work
In the course of the pandemic, girls in skilled careers took up the instruments of hybrid and distant work which have since reshaped the fashionable office. It’s these skilled girls who’ve been driving the demand for rising applied sciences and platforms essentially shifting the return to work. The way forward for non-white collar work is especially related to girls in classes like training, service jobs, healthcare, {and professional} caregiving. Labor marketplaces like ShiftMed and Vivian Well being emerged to fill healthcare job shortages, specializing in completely different facets of the expert clinician job market. As applied sciences like synthetic intelligence pressure the evolution of white-collar work, the non-white collar jobs the place girls are concentrated will discover AI to develop into an accelerant to coaching and the elimination of a few of the extra tedious duties and reporting necessities in these jobs.
Trying forward: Investing in girls
In the present day, girls are extra educated, energetic within the workforce, and extra more likely to begin corporations than ever earlier than. Nonetheless, there’s a lot progress to be made in harnessing their financial energy. This hole is the alpha alternative for buyers.Investing in each women-led corporations and industrial areas the place girls’s wants have but to be met has the potential to unlock billions of {dollars}.
Ladies ought to now not be regarded as a distinct segment. Actually, they’re one of the vital development markets we’ve ever seen.
This white paper comprises extra of Cake Ventures’ analysis on demographic change.