© Michael Woodhouse

The 21st century is not going to be entirely the age of technology and information: it's also going to be about women.

After three hundred years of conscious social struggle and often unheralded progress, the coup de grace for automatic male supremacy will be delivered by women in business. Your business. Either as managers, owners or customers.

This is not idle futurism; this is now.

Some 35% of small business operators are women, according to ABS figures. Compare that with the world your parents grew up in.

More significantly, the number of female small business operators is growing more than three times as fast as the number of male operators. In WA, my home state, the growth in female operators is twelve times the national male figure.

These days 16% of all new small business startups are mainly owned or controlled by women, while a further 40% have equal proportions of male and female operators.

Within current lifetimes women will be near enough half of all small business operators.

The process is in place

The process of women taking control is being aided by governments which need women to earn more so they can own more superannuation, in order to reduce welfare costs.

It's being helped by businesses which have discovered the value of outsourcing, but in so doing have enabled an explosion in the small business opportunities women can succeed at.

There's no glass ceiling in your own business.

Ambitious women and talented women are starting businesses to create career opportunities – to overcome exclusion.

Attitudinal change

The mechanics of the transition are inexorably in place. As usual, the final changes will be attitudinal.

Women control the majority of consumer expenditure. Currently, consciously or not, they direct their purchasing power primarily towards businesses owned by men.

When they give an attitudinal sanction to female owned businesses, the game's over boys.

What will this mean?

There will be more businesses doing new things, simply because women are, well – different. Some of these new things will take off, ratcheting up the pressure of competition one more notch.

You'll have to do more to keep your female customers: somewhere there will be a competitor run by a woman, trying to poach them with a better targeted service.

Your male customers aren't going to be loyal to you either. As they always did, they're going to follow the best deal. Customers love new, they love classy, they love service and most of all they love lower prices.

If you can't beat them...

My idea is that a merger is the way to go. Give some women a go in your organisation, all the way to the top.

So that when they take control, you'll be on the right side of the great divide.

I could say this is philosophical, but it's economic too.

Women are cheaper. Because most employers still secretly prefer men, especially for top jobs, you can buy what you need in a female for less than you would have to pay a male, and she'll probably work harder for the money too.

Once upon a time this might have summed this up as "more bang for your buck". The demise of sexist jokes won't be the only change though.

Women do business differently.

They have a different style.

They place more emphasis on people and teams, on interpersonal functioning. And on networking.

What am I describing here? The wired business. E-commerce. New economy. The systems approach. It's not just Californian, it's female.

Women can also be far more ruthless than the rules of the boys club allow. Don't expect your female boss to cover your drinking problem just because you barrack for the same team. And that's good for the organisation.

Women as consumers

The flip side of women taking control and getting more of the wealth is women as consumers. The fastest growing group on the net.

Time to learn about them.

We seem to think we know a lot about how they feel about soap powders, but somehow I suspect I'm being humoured here, like a wilful child. The people writing those soap powder ads, well, they're all men.

Actually, I don't think we have learned much at all.

The female-hostile retailer

Let's take an imaginary walk around, say, a computer store.

First thing, it's stand up. Fine by me, I spend all day sitting so I don't mind standing when I duck out for a computer. But what about that woman who has been on her feet all day?

Second thing, the place is like a china shop. A six year old on the loose could do a thousand dollars worth of damage in a blink. How's a woman with kids in tow going to spare enough attention to make a purchase decision?

Now, about those computers. Maybe you've never noticed but actually they are really ugly boxes. Well, they're meant to be functional. I understand that. But is it important to women what a new home appliance looks like? How do they feel about that tangle of cords at crawl level? I can make assumptions but I don't actually know, and that's the point.

Putting all these impediments aside, let's get to the purchase situation. There's this nineteen year old nerd serving. Actually, I don't like that either, but I concede he may know more than me about e-widgets and I go with it. At least he pays attention to me.

After me, he pays attention to women of datable age and appearance.

Last, if there is no choice, he serves women as old as his mother, with kids in tow. When he finds them e-ignorant, he can't help talking down to them: he gets frustrated because they lack even the basic concepts required for sensible communication and they just aren't impressed by the facts that blow him away.

The thing is, mum has ignored computers (boy toys) until now. Only she's just discovered the dangers her children might be exposed to on the internet. Or she's seen that a home computer is a vital educational asset for her daughter. So she's here, ready to spend whatever parental duty requires.

What she really wants is to talk to a woman her own age who will start from the beginning and empathise. Or, if that kind of service is too expensive, maybe an invite to a seminar run by a woman like her, where she can feel comfortable asking any dumb question.

What she doesn't want is to be talked down to by some boy just out of short pants who has spent the entire five minutes of his adult life on-line, while she's committed herself utterly to the raising of a new generation, a task by anyone's definition rather more important.

At least, that's my guess. I may be wrong, because we (male marketing people) don't actually know.

Whatever it is that she wants, she'll most likely end up getting it from a female influenced business.

An alliance, remember?

The women's market

That's one mighty dumb title.

There is no such thing as a women's market.

An 80 year old woman (rapidly growing market segment, ever rising disposable income) is probably as different from a teenager with tattoos and body piercings as any two members of the same species possibly can be.

Is not just about age either. There are women rebuilding moral values once abandoned and there are women the same age working at kicking all the underpinning of our society out from under us. There are women who read fashion magazines and long to get married and women who run companies and don't give a damn what anyone thinks what they look like.

The point is, there are lots of women's markets, and it's time we learned a bit more about them.

An alliance seems sensible and certainly the better part of valour.

ABS figures from Characteristics of Small Business, ABD publication 8127.0, 1998