Women’s Fashion Ad Indicator: New bull 2013

Why are women upbeat, optimistic, positive thinkers, betting on a solid economic recovery, bull rally even with fiscal cliffs? Or are they? What is going on?

The stock market has a new bull-bear indication, the “Women’s Fashion Mag Ads Indicator.” Yes, the fashion industry is betting megabucks on the future of America’s economy and stock market. But when I saw all these ads, my first reaction was: “Warning, crash dead ahead!”

Why? Remember the dot-com insanity? Back at the peak of the 1990s mania I wrote about a similar trend in tech magazines, also bloated with hundreds of pages of ads. Then the market crashed, stocks lost $8 trillion, a painful 30-month recession, ad revenue dried up, tech mags folded.

We know ad pages signal economic health, that’s not new. But what is new are gender differences.

Flash forward: Recently Barnes & Noble’s racks were filled with women’s fashion magazines, all bloated with holiday shopping ads: Vogue, Glamour, W, Harper’s Bazaar, InStyle, plus the holiday fashion specials of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. A whopping total of 3,550 pages, mostly ads. Just like the 1999 tech magazines at the peak of the dot-com mania.

Women see a bull charging? Men see a bear falling off fiscal cliffs?

Listen closely, this is crucial to your investment strategy in 2013. Flash back: Research on gender issues in behavioral economics confirm that women do see the world differently, in their investment strategies, in what they value most in the economy. They think longer term.

My psychotherapist wife sure does, three decades of sessions with male clients give her a keen sense of how men think. Gender differences have been summarized in many popular books, such as “Men Are From Mars, Women From Venus” ... although the differences still baffle most men.

So maybe this indicator needs reversing: If women are so different, could this new Women’s Fashion Mag Ads Indicator actually be flashing a new bull? One our male-dominated patriarchy can’t see? Signaling a bull market, not a dot-com crash repeat? A bull not a bear?

If that’s true, if the thinking of women and men are so different, maybe women really do see something that men are missing or misinterpret? Maybe this is not just a stock market blip but a longer-term trend?

All this got me thinking: Maybe this Women’s Fashion Mag Ads Indicator is actually a brief snapshot into a far bigger cultural and historical trend, one with huge global macroeconomic and behavioral-economic implications. Not merely another short-term stock market indicator signalling a new bull or bear like the old “Hemline Indicator.”

So I decided to explore what is now the single biggest global trend, one that will define the 21st Century: Women leading America and the world. Here’s a summary of seven key elements in this rapidly emerging trend:

1. New Economy’s job skills empower women, level the playing field

Men raised in macho cultures with traditional values feel even more threatened as women gain equality and more power. Why? New York Times reviewer Jennifer Homans writes of Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men, and Rise of Women:” “The end of men is really the end of a manufacturing-based economy.” Six million lost jobs since 2000, mostly men, many “now unemployed, depressed, increasingly dependent on the state and women.”

As a result, “a new matriarchy is emerging: For the first time in history, the global economy is becoming a place where women are finding more success than men ... run by young, ambitious, capable women ... taking matters into their own hands.” Forget politics, this is the “new service economy, which doesn’t care about physical strength,” demands skills that “come easily to women.”

Plus our educational system is preparing a new generation of women leaders: “Today 50% more women get college degrees, so even if fewer women are at the top, they are beginning to dominate professions like accounting, financial management, optometry, dermatology, forensic pathology and veterinary practices.”

2. More women gaining power positions across Corporate America

Don’t miss Fortune magazine’s 15th annual list of “The 50 Most Powerful Women.” Back when the List was launched in 1998 there were only two women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Today, 19 women CEOs, at giants like IBM, Pepsico, Xerox, Kraft and DuPont.

Fortune also tells us “more women wield more power than at any point in history,” including many “guiding the future of the global economy,” like IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff.

3. More women elected to legislatures all across America

Males hang onto power by running government. That hold is weakening. According to the National Foundation for Women Legislators: “The greatest rising force in American politics today is not a political party, nor is it a lobbying community, it is women.”

In the early 1980s “women held a mere 10% of all state legislative seats in the country, today they hold 24% of 7,382 seats nationwide. Currently 17 women serve in the U.S. Senate and 73 serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.” Plus six women are state governors. By 2050, women could be the majority.

4. More and more women legislators everywhere in the world

This trend is spreading across the planet. In “The Case for Optimism,” President Bill Clinton’s recent Time magazine article, he says the “world is getting better all the time:” In five ways including technology, health care, green energy. His fourth key is: “Women Rule.” Worldwide, women now make up 20% of elected legislators, almost double 15 years ago: “This is good news, not only for the individuals themselves but also for entire societies.”

Why? “It’s been proved that women tend to reinvest economic gains back into their families and communities more than men do.” Yes, women not only think different from men, they’re better thinkers.

5. Women are the new leaders in the Fight for The Future

While many men still resist, many are teaming up with women, as equals working together. Listen to Clinton’s fifth reason for optimism: “Justice, The Fight for the Future.” He knows “the future has never had a big enough constituency.” But things are changing rapidly, because the survival of the planet requires new thinking, new strategies. And women know it, because they are taking charge.

Clinton says we must “create a whole different mind-set. We are in a pitched battle between the present array of resources and attitudes and the future struggling to be born.” Today’s women are stepping up to the plate, creating a new world.

6. Women’s brains are naturally wired with long-term strategic vision

Money manager Jeremy Grantham says our male-dominated patriarchal culture has created “an army of left-brained immediate doers.” Wall Street and Corporate America focus on millisecond trades, daily quotes, quarterly earnings and annual bonuses, discounting to zero the longer-term social costs.

Grantham predicted a global crash two years before 2008. Few listened. He has also warned that the planet cannot feed the 10 billion global population predicted by the United Nations by 2050. Again, few listen.

Earlier this year he warned that our male-dominated capitalism has an “absolute inability to process the finiteness of resources and the mathematical impossibility of maintaining rapid growth in physical output.” Get it? The short-term thinking male brain is not wired to solve the world’s biggest problems.

But as more women leaders rise in the ranks of business and government, strategic thinking at the top will be more essential and we’ll see a rapid shift to the long-term mind-set natural in women, and away from the short-term thinking male brains. As the shift continues, America will need more women leaders, their different-thinking brains, their long-range strategic vision.

7. Men are handicapping their future by defending the old patriarchy

This cultural war tells us men are their own worst enemy, sabotaging their future. Look beyond the so-called “war on women” rhetoric in the political arena where we see men fighting to control women’s issues. Statistically they’re out of touch with the majority of Americans.

But look deeper into the souls of these male politicians. They also feel threatened. So they react, double down, fight hard to go back to an old familiar power structure. But we can’t go backward. Why? Because a huge cultural tidal wave is sweeping both men and women in its path.

“Men are losing their grip,” writes Homans about “The End of Men” ... “Patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era in which women, and womanly skills and traits, are on the rise.”

Yes, we are seeing the last gasp of the world’s ancient male-dominated patriarchy. Resistance is futile, no one can stop this historic shift, the New Economy just keeps empowering more women, preparing them for the future ... while men stay trapped longer than necessary in the past... endlessly puzzling over what the Women’s Fashion Magazine Ads Indicator really means ... a bull, a bear, or something else.