WAF

The WAF Ubertrend’s modern arc traces to July 18, 1848, when reformers convened the first Women’s Rights Convention in upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region. Seneca Falls had only about 4,300 inhabitants at the time — a community of abolitionists, Quaker women, and reformers who had started businesses there in the 1830s and 1840s. The lead organizer was a 32-year-old Elizabeth Cady Stanton, joined by Lucretia Mott, Stanton’s sister Martha Wright, Jane Hunt, and Mary Ann M’Clintock.

The convention hammered out a formal list of grievances — the Declaration of Sentiments — modeled on the Declaration of Independence. It denounced inequities in property rights, education, employment, religion, marriage and family, and suffrage. The voting demand was framed as: “He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” The statement was so controversial that Mott protested it; Stanton prevailed.

On July 19, 300 attendees gathered. The decisive moment came when Frederick Douglass — escaped slave, abolitionist, and dyed-in-the-wool supporter of women’s rights — used his oratory to tip the controversial voting-rights resolution to passage. Historian Lisa Tetrault writes in The Myth of Seneca Falls that without Douglass, the resolution might have failed.

Suffrage took another seventy-two years. The movement fractured in 1869 — Susan B. Anthony and Stanton on one side, Lucy Stone on the other — before merging as the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1890. The 19th Amendment, ratified in 1920, barred US states from denying voting rights based on gender. The cultural and economic ascent that followed has been accelerating ever since.

Evidence of the financial influence of women is everywhere. NPR has reported that in many Asian countries, husbands hand their earnings to wives who then return a small allowance — codified in a saying: “A woman is a slave before marriage but a general after.”

The most-quoted statistic — that women control 80% or more of household spending — traces to Barletta’s Marketing to Women (2002), which claimed women “handle 80% to 90% of spending and purchasing for the household.” Barletta later admitted to The Wall Street Journal she had no specific source for the data — but added: “Most marketers don’t recognize the power of indirect influence.”

A 2010 Futures Co. study of nearly 4,000 Americans 16 and older did find that 37% of women said they had primary responsibility for household shopping decisions, while 85% said they had primary or shared responsibility. The figures for men were similar (31% and 84%) — but the perception gap matters. A 2008 Boston Consulting Group survey asked women what percentage of household spending they control or influence. The average answer: 73%. Men said they control or influence 61%.

The macro number is even larger. Tom Peters in Re-imagine! (2003) suggested US women control about $3.3 trillion in annual consumer spending plus $1.5 trillion more in business outlays — making American women, by Peters’s reckoning, the largest national economy on earth, larger than all of Japan’s. In 2010, then–Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent stated that “women control over $20 trillion in worldwide spending.”

The more measurable lens is wealth. McKinsey estimates women now control about one-third of retail financial assets in the U.S. and EU — up from roughly $10 trillion in 2018 to $18 trillion in 2023 — with a projected rise to $34 trillion by 2030. Whatever the precise figure, women today wield extraordinary power over spending. That influence will only grow.

The term “glass ceiling” — the invisible barrier women encounter as they climb the career ladder — dates to 1979. Two women claim authorship: Marilyn Loden, then a 31-year-old mid-level manager at New York Telephone, recalled coining it on a panel titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall” — mirrors are made of glass — and Katherine Lawrence, a former Hewlett-Packard employee, claimed it at a July 1979 conference of the Women’s Institute for the Freedom of the Press.

The metaphor went mainstream on June 7, 2008, before a packed crowd at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton — having suspended her campaign for the Democratic nomination four days earlier, after Barack Obama clinched the delegate count — delivered what would become the Glass Ceiling Speech: “Although we weren’t able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it has about 18 million cracks in it and the light is shining through like never before.” Clinton wasn’t the first female presidential candidate — that honor belongs to Victoria Woodhull, whose 1872 candidacy preceded suffrage by half a century — but she became the first female nominee of a major US party.

Clinton’s defeat catalyzed the Pink Wave: a surge of women running for and winning office. By the 119th Congress (January 2025), women held 150 voting seats — 28% of all members — including 125 in the House and 25 in the Senate. It presaged a shift in the public debate on healthcare, immigration, abortion rights, education, and gun control.

Globally, the US has lagged. India gave the world Indira Gandhi in 1966; Israel followed with Golda Meir in 1969; Argentina’s Isabel Perón became the first female president of any republic on the American continent in 1974. The 1980s accelerated the pace: Margaret Thatcher (UK, 1979), Vigdís Finnbogadóttir (Iceland, 1980 — the world’s first democratically elected female president), Corazon Aquino (Philippines, 1986), Benazir Bhutto (Pakistan, 1988). Many more followed: Angela Merkel (Germany, 2005), Michelle Bachelet (Chile, 2006), Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (Argentina, 2007), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil, 2011), Theresa May (UK, 2016). Latin America, despite machismo cultures, has elected more women to top office than its northern neighbors.

If women are to conquer the world and shatter the glass ceiling, it has to be another one of those clichéd “win-win” situations for all involved. Plenty of evidence is emerging that women in key positions will make this a much better world.

The hard data begins in healthcare. Public health researchers at Harvard combed through three years of records of US patients aged 65 and up — and discovered that the lucky ones treated by female doctors had significantly lower mortality rates than patients treated by male physicians. The finding was stark and stubbornly replicable. Yet the female–male physician salary gap stands at $51,315, and women physicians who are mothers spend 8.5 more hours per week on domestic activities than their male counterparts (after adjustment for work hours).

The pattern repeats in investment performance. Wells Fargo’s analysis of women investors attributes their edge to three traits: patience, discipline, and willingness to learn. A 2016 review of more than 8 million Fidelity client accounts confirmed women’s investment gains topped men’s by 0.4%. Single women trade 27% less frequently than single men. Vanguard reports that 73% of women contribute to employer-sponsored retirement plans versus just 66% of men.

The same pattern surfaces in business. In 2014, Credit Suisse released its CS Gender 3000 study, tracking 27,000 senior managers at more than 3,000 of the largest global corporations. The 2016 update — The CS Gender 3000: The Reward for Change — confirmed and extended the finding. The “Queen Bee” myth — that women in senior positions actively exclude other women — was empirically debunked: female CEOs are 50% more likely than male CEOs to have a female CFO, and 55% more likely to have women running business units.

Three datasets, one direction. The case for WAF is no longer moral — it’s measurable.

If WAF’s rise is uneven, its inverse is unmistakable. Across nearly every educational and professional category, men are now trailing — and the gap is widening. There is reason for sadness in this material, particularly for the boys and the mental state of the new generation. The data has only sharpened the picture since 2023.

The contrast indicators are sobering. Men make up approximately 93% of the US prison population (U.S. Sentencing Commission; Bureau of Justice Statistics). They account for 88% of identified murder offenders in 2021, 80% of arrests for violent crimes, and 63% for property crimes.

The deaths-of-despair indicators are starker still. Men die by suicide at far higher rates than women; AFSP’s 2024 statistics show white males had the highest suicide rate at 24.8 per 100,000. The Mayo Clinic notes that approximately twice as many women experience clinical depression — but the lethality of male despair is what shows up in the mortality tables.

The trajectory is not a triumph. It’s a realignment with serious indicators of male distress that institutions have been slow to address. Without conscious intervention — passion-driven education, alternatives to credential-and-debt pipelines, real engagement with the loneliness epidemic — WAF’s rise will continue against a backdrop of male decline. The Pink Wave needs a counterpart.

WAF “marches on and could provide the spark for a matriarchal society.” With women earning 65% of US master’s degrees and the pay gap among under-35s closed to 95¢ on the dollar, the trajectory toward female dominance of college-degreed labor is no longer projection — it’s arithmetic.

Expect three compounding shifts: women occupying the majority of mission-critical, professional roles; a parallel governance reset as the Pink Wave matures; and an asymmetric institutional crisis on the male side that policymakers have been slow to confront. The business case has matured into a financial one. The social case — for both genders — is the next chapter.

Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman (2017) became the highest-grossing live-action film directed by a woman in the world, earning $413 million domestically — surpassing Batman v Superman ($330M). Captain Marvel, co-directed by Anna Boden and based on a script written by five women, followed two years later. Could this signal the dawn of the age of Wonder Women? The data say yes. The chapter is being written now.