The largest buyer group on earth. The worst-treated by the system they fund.
Women make or influence roughly four out of every five consumer decisions on the planet. They are the dominant customer of nearly every industry. In return, suppliers pay them less, promote them less, fund them less, and quietly transfer the costs of running the household onto them. This is not a coincidence. It is what happens when the largest customer in the room has no procurement-grade tools.
Of global consumer spending is controlled or directly influenced by women. Roughly half the world's consumer economy. The figure is projected to exceed $40 trillion by 2030.
Women are projected to control 75% of all discretionary spending by 2028.¹
In aggregate: women are directly or indirectly responsible for 70 to 85 percent of all consumer purchasing decisions worldwide.³ The customer is, overwhelmingly, a woman.
What women earn for every dollar earned by men globally, for work of equal value.
In the United States, the gap worsened in 2024: women earned 80.9 cents on the dollar, the lowest ratio since 2016.⁶ For Black women, 66.5 cents. For Latinas and Native women, 58 cents. The disparity widens with intersection.⁶
Of Fortune 500 companies are led by women. Fifty-five of five hundred. After seventy-one years of the list.
On the Global Fortune 500, the figure is 6.6%. Thirty-three out of five hundred.⁸ Female-only founding teams received just 2.3% of global venture capital in 2024.⁹
For every 100 men promoted from entry-level to manager, only 81 women are promoted to the same role. The ratio for women of colour is 100 to 74.
The result compounds. Women are 49% of entry-level employees and 29% of the C-suite. The pipeline does not narrow because women are not in it. It narrows because of who gets promoted out of it.¹⁰
As much unpaid household and caregiving labour is performed by women as by men, globally. Hours not counted in any economic statistic, not compensated, and not optional.
Only 28% of women employed worldwide are entitled to paid maternity leave.⁵ In the health and care sector, where the workforce is majority female, the pay gap reaches 24%.⁵
Less retirement income that women receive than men, on average, across OECD countries. A lifetime of underpaid labour and unpaid caregiving compounds into old-age inequality.
The pattern is consistent. Women's pension access globally is 30 to 40% lower than men's. The same suppliers that women funded for sixty years do not fund women equally in return.
Of consumer decisions made or influenced by women.
Of Fortune 500 companies run by women.
The largest customer in the room has no seat at the table that sets the terms.
The pay gap, the opportunity gap, the broken rung, the retirement gap, the unpaid labour: these are all costs that suppliers have transferred onto women while continuing to take their money. The structural fix is the same as it is for climate, privacy, and corruption. The customer sets terms. The supplier complies or loses the customer.
Adult women globally, making or influencing the overwhelming majority of consumer purchases on Earth.
A buyer group with annual spending power larger than the GDP of the United States. Acting on shared terms, this group could re-write the conditions of work, pay, promotion, and care in every industry it touches. The economic mass already exists. The procurement mechanism does not.
Pay equity is not a moral request. It is a refusal to absorb a contingent liability that the supplier has offloaded. The same is true of every other gap on this page. Suppliers have been pricing women's labour and care below market while collecting women's spending at market. The accounts do not balance. They have never balanced.
Supplierism completes the equation. Women, as the largest customer block on the planet, can require their suppliers to disclose, qualify, and compensate. They have always had the leverage. They have never had the tools. The tools are now possible.
The publication explains how, one case at a time.
Generate the procurement terms that put pay equity, supply-chain treatment, and political alignment at the centre of your relationships with the companies you buy from. The selections that follow are pre-set for a household focused on women's equity and labour conditions in the supply chain. Adjust freely.
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