By Carl Bialik
A longstanding marketing adage makes clear who holds most American households' purse strings: Women control 80% or more of spending.
For at least two decades, this number has been a fixture of news articles, marketing websites and books about consumer behavior. And as with many oft-repeated statistics, no one is sure where it originated.
"It's very hard to get to the bottom of the numbers," says Maddy Dychtwald, co-author of "Influence: How Women's Soaring Economic Power Will Transform Our World for the Better," published last year with the claim that "women are responsible for 83 percent of consumer purchases in the United States." Ms. Dychtwald adds, "This is muddy terrain."
In addition to having murky origins, the number appear to be wrong. Several recent surveys suggest that men have nearly equal say on spending, and that when men and women live together, both participate in spending decisions. In a survey conducted last year of nearly 4,000 Americans 16 and older by Futures Co., a London consulting firm, just 37% of women said they have primary responsibility for shopping decisions in their household, while 85% said they have primary or shared responsibility. The respective figures for men were similar: 31% and 84%.
"These data tell a different story" than the statistics suggesting women control at least 80% of spending, says Futures Co.'s director of marketing Emily Parenti.
Yet those statistics are ubiquitous, appearing in the past few months in major publications. Generally, news stories claiming women make the lion's share of spending don't attribute the information, or if they do, the sources themselves say they aren't sure where the numbers come from.
"There is never any sourcing of the number," says Ira Mayer, publisher of the newsletter Marketing to Women, which in 2009 tried and failed to find its origin. "It's become accepted folklore."
Many marketing gurus who rely on the 80% figure cite the work of Marti Barletta, a longtime marketing consultant focusing on women. Ms. Barletta's 2002 book "Marketing to Women" claims that women "handle 80% to 90% of spending and purchasing for the household."
Ms. Barletta concedes that she has no specific source for the figure. "It is sadly one of those rules-of-thumb numbers that everyone in the industry uses," she says. But she believes the statistic is reasonable, based on her work consulting with various industries. "I'm still pretty comfortable with the 80% number," she wrote in an email. "Even being conservative, I wouldn't go below 75%."
Perhaps the closest anyone has come to studying directly the breakdown of overall spending by men and women is a 2008 survey conducted by the Boston Consulting Group. It asked women to complete an online questionnaire that asked what percentage of household spending they control or influence. Their average answer in the U.S. was 73%. While that number was the one made public, the researchers also conducted an unpublished survey of men, who on average said they control or influence 61% of spending.
In other words, both men and women are claiming to control the majority of spending decisions. That is partly explained by the millions of adults who don't live with another adult and who presumably make all their own spending decisions. But it also shows that two or more people can influence a purchasing decision, or think that they can.
Another clue that the 80% or 85% figures are too high is that, at least in several major categories, men spend more than women.
Ms. Barletta's book and other material claim that women spend more than men on cars and consumer electronics, but data from industry sources contradict this. In a survey last year conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association, the average man said he spent $3 on consumer electronics for every $2 the average woman said she spent. And auto analysts CNW Marketing Research and J.D. Power and Associates say that less than 40% of spending on new cars last year was done by women.
What gave rise to the 80% figure, marketing consultants note, was an effort to draw attention to the importance of women's preferences and purchasing power, which for decades was often overlooked by product designers and advertisers.
Ms. Barletta says that many companies have paid too much attention to "who pulls out the credit card or whose name is first on a contract," parts of the buying process where men are more visible. "In other stages, women tend to take the lead," she adds.
Researchers say so many judgments and emotions go into consumer purchases that it likely isn't possible to measure who makes which household spending decisions.
"[80%] is not a credible figure," says Esther Duflo, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies consumer behavior. "There just is not one. How would you possibly estimate it?"
