Womenomics.

n. The theory that women play a primary role in economic growth.

You won’t find this word in any dictionaries yet but that is only a matter of time. The definition above is courtesy of Word Spy, The Word Lovers Guide to New Words but Womenomics is already being discussed in serious publications.

A recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post called Fixing the Economy? It’s Women’s Work discusses the role that women can and perhaps should play in terms of business and the economy. The argument is simple and compelling:

“Companies with more women in senior management roles make more money.”

Hard to argue with success.Admittedly the op-ed piece was written by the authors of a book called Womenomics but there also seems to be a growing consensus that we could have avoided the current financial crisis if there were more women in senior roles. One of the interesting points in the article indicates that we shouldn’t be looking to replace men with women in these senior roles but that the addition of women will result in improved performance.

“By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.”

A BBC article written by Robert Preston, the BBC’s business editor and former financial editor of the Financial Times, refers to the crisis as ‘Men Behaving Badly’.

“The reckless chief executives of banks who went on a borrowing and lending binge: all men.

The financial engineers who packaged up poisonous subprime debt and mis-sold it as AAA solid gold: they were long of Y chromosomes.

The central bankers and regulators who slept while the dangerous financial party was in full swing: blokes.

The finance ministers who didn’t want to recognize that the surge in house prices was perilous, for fear of alienating voters: yup, it’s my gender [men] again.”

A recent article in Foreign Policy magazine predicts the Death of Macho. The opening line states that

“The era of male dominance is coming to an end.”

The article also talks about the impact that the recession is having on men.

“Consider, to start, the almost unbelievably disproportionate impact that the current crisis is having on men—so much so that the recession is now known to some economists and the more plugged-in corners of the blogosphere as the ‘he-cession.’ “

In an article in the NY Times entitled After the Great Recession U.S. President Barack Obama is quoted as saying that

“…what we have to do is to recognize that women are just as likely to be the primary bread earner, if not more likely, than men are today. “

There are some extremely interesting and thought provoking discussions around the roles of men and women in these articles, not just in North America but their impacts worldwide in countries like Russia, China, and Western and Eastern Europe. I encourage you to take the time to read them.

In my novel, The Gender Divide, I postulate a world where women live four times as long as men and have taken control of the business and political world. I didn’t focus on the effects of this, apart from the impact that it had on men. However I’ve been considering a sequel and you can be sure that I’ll incorporate elements of this into it.

In the meantime, let’s hope that women are given the chance to prove themselves on the world stage. Certainly they can’t do any worse then men have done so far and all indications are that they will do better.