What he didn't know was that she was the personnel director of a large Swedish company, directly responsible for buying 40 cars, who was taking part in an experiment to discover why car showrooms do not appeal to women. Here was the answer.

Gunnila Masrelicz Steen, who recounts the incident, runs Kontura, a Stockholm-based consultancy that advises companies on working with women. She heard about that showroom scene ten years ago, in the course of a consultancy project for a car company. These days, she beckons, the salesman might be more diplomatic.

Car companies are beginning to wake up to the fact that more than half of all car purchases are decided by women. When GMdiscovered that women found it difficult to get into its latest sports-utility vehicle, it modified the design. Women in car advertisements used to to be draped across the bonnet in various states of undress. Now they are more likely to be shown impeccably attired, driving the car to work. But female customers still say they hate buying cars more than anything else.

The corporate world has been surprisingly slow to adjust to women's new economic firepower, but the word is getting around. One recent convert to the cause is a management guru, Tom Peters, who points out that women buy more than men of almost everything: healthcare, financial services, homes, furnishings, computers, telecoms, holidays, you name it. Women have traditionally done most of the shopping, but now that so many of them are working, they have more money and less time to spend it in.

That means they are also buying different things, particularly goods and services that make life easier. A British insurance company once calculated thevalue of all the services rendered by a typical housewife, as cook, nanny, transport manager, administrator, hostess and so on, and concluded that her services were worth the same as those of a middle manager. Now that most women are too busy with their jobs to provide many of those services themselves, they are buying them in, whic in turn creates paid employment - for example, in child care, cleaning and catering - for lots of other women.

One such woman has already spotted a big business opportunity. Melissa Moss is the founder of the Women's Consumer Network, a new Washington-based organisation that promises to save its members time by doing comparative shopping on their behalf. Ms Moss plans to offer discounts on everyday items like tights, cosmetics and contraceptive pills, and provide best-buy advice on things like buying cars, investing in mutual funds, tracking down good child care -- or indeed finding a collection agency for alimony. She reckons she's on to a winner: working women, she says, are"right out of time".

Combining work with family

Many women like part-time work because they make it possible to combine work and family and command lower pay, and because part-timers can be pushed harder while they are at work. New variations on the theme are popping up all the time. The latest is the "contingent" worker: in essence, anyone whose job is not expected to last. Such people work in a wide range of industries, doing temporary or contract work or being on call. In America, recent estimates by the Department of Labour put their number at perhaps 5 1/2 m, over half of whom are women and nearly half part-timers. They are paid less than their non-contingent counterparts, and usually get no health insurance or other fringe benefits from their employers.

The German version is called "minor employment", and many economists reckon it is growing by leaps and bounds. It replies on a legal concession that exempts people earning less than DM 620 ($ 340) a month from contributing to thecomprehensive (and highly expensive) German social security system, but also excludes them from pension rights and unemployment benefit. One estimate puts the total number of people employed only in such "minor" jobs at over 4m, about half of whom are women.

Most people now accept that the traditional model of a job for life is on its way out, and that in future workers should expect to change employers more frequently and be prepared for bouts of unemployment. That may be a good thing for women, who are already used to working flexibly, and who also seem better than men at putting up with intervals of unemployment. But only a minority of working women are home-centred "grateful slaves" -- the label invented by Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics for the uncommitted group of women workers who pick up part-time work when it suits them, then drop out again. Next in Ms Hakim's typology of working women comes a much larger group, the "adaptives", who want to work but do not give their careerabsolute priority. Beyond that, a smaller group of committed, "work-centred" women are determined to fight their way to the top.

SOURCE -- The Economist