The "womenomics" trope emphasizes the potential economic benefits of women's participation in the workforce, but it perpetuates contradictions by both essentializing women's investment styles and claiming that financial markets are gender neutral.

Among the many contributions that women can make to a company, it turns out that share price may be the most significant of all.55 The third trope of “womenomics” has been perpetuated by a growing number of financial and accounting firms in recent years. While its usage may overlap with the other two tropes, this line of argument is even more firmly rooted in the idea that women are good for business. The term “womenomics” was first used by Kathy Matsui in an investment report produced for Goldman Sachs. Matsui, who was looking at the prospects for growth in Japan at the turn of the millennium, argued that the growing number of women who were entering the workforce (out of both necessity and choice) were also becoming an important source of income and consumption growth. In the context of Japan’s declining birth rate, it was believed that women were key to offsetting the negative impact of a shrinking labour pool over the long term.56 Within this framework, womenomics was used to refer to the process of figuring out the economic implications of shifting market trends, which included the identification of those companies most likely to benefit from these trends. Following on from Matsui’s original report, Goldman Sachs published a series of additional forecasts based on the wome- nomics approach.57 Following on from this, in 2006, The Economist magazine pub- lished “A Guide to Womenomics”, emphasising the enormous potential of women as a vast “untapped market”.58 A second and related catchphrase that has recently emerged is the “gender divi- dend”. In 2011, the financial consulting firm Deloitte released a report entitled The Gender Dividend: Making the Business Case for Investing in Women, which emphasised the “steady benefit that is earned by making wise, balanced investments in devel- oping women as workers and potential leaders as well as understanding women as consumers and their impact on the economy and the bottom line”.59 In a related piece, Anne Weisberg, Deloitte’s “Director of Talent”, reiterated the two main arguments in favour of hiring a greater number of female workers. The first argument is that companies must be driven by “talent” and that underu- tilising or ignoring women decreases a firm’s potential competitive advantage. Implicitly drawing on work famously carried out by Gary Becker in the 1950s, the message here is that it is not women per se who make good investors, but rather that discrimination is based on an irrational preoccupation with individual bodily markers of difference that creates a competitive disadvantage since it obstructs the natural workings of supply and demand.60 The second argument is that women are needed to better understand the power of women as consumers. “The bottom line—and that is what this is all about—is that there is a Gender Divi- dend to be reaped by any company or country that invests in women”.61 Echoing these private sector views, in that same year, the newly formed UN Women released a report with an almost identical title: The Gender Dividend: The Business Case for Investing in Women. This report further develops the notion that countries are like businesses and that the economic, legal and cultural barriers to women’s participation in the economic and political spheres ultimately harm a country’s national competitiveness. While the report cites the same handful of sources as the private sector report, it diverges from many of these reports in emphasising gender equality an important goal in itself. However, in stressing the need to “liberate the world’s greatest untapped development resource”,62 the report also reinforces the essentialisation of women found in the “women as saviours” discourses and frames women’s bodies as commodities in need of unleashing (or exploitation) by market forces. From the perspective of the body, an interesting contradiction emerges within the “womenomics” approach, as it both assumes the existence of a universal female investor who brings certain feminised talents to bear on investment decisions while simultaneously reproducing the ideas that men and women are ultimately equal, success in the field of finance is based on merit and financial markets are gender-blind. That is, even when viewed on its own terms, the business case for gender equality in finance raises irresolvable questions about how financial markets can be conceptualised as both responding well to women’s unique (and embo- died) investment styles while also being fundamentally gender-neutral. Two studies are useful for further evidencing this contradiction, which is perpe- tuated by many of the same people most vociferously advocating the broader TBF agenda. The first is Micky Lee’s analysis of all of the investment guides for women published in the US between 2002 and 2011. Lee found that all of these investment guides share a conception of the “Universal Investor Women” who is heterosexual, does not receive any support from her community (with the exception of one book targeting African American women) and is a natural investor, despite lacking financial literacy and ultimately being socialised to think otherwise.63 According to Lee, these books acknowledge the multiple roles played by women as workers, mothers, wives, and so on. They also naturalise women’s place in the domestic sphere, using analogies about trips to the grocery store and efforts to lose weight, and suggest ways that this experience can be used to help women succeed in the masculinised realm of finance (i.e., “women tend to nurture their investments”).64 For some of the authors, this is linked to biological explanations (i.e., “women’s relative lack of testosterone compared to men means they may actu- ally be hard-wired to be calmer, more disciplined investors”).65 Yet, despite appealing to women’s unique talents as investors, these books ulti- mately claim that their investment advice applies to both men and women, as the market is fundamentally gender-neutral: ‘gender is not a factor on any level in mastering the nuts and bolts of smart financial management’ (Orman 2007, 1); ‘the basic principles of investing are the same, no matter what your gender or station in life’ (Morris and Morris 2003, 6); ‘whether stocks, bonds, or real estate, investments do not care if it is a man or a woman’ (Kiyosaki 2006, 7); ‘money is gender- neutral’ (Bodnar 2006, 1); ‘discrimination in financial matters is not the barrier it once was. “Green is green”’ (Bridgforth and Perry-Mason 2003, xxv).66 Statements such as these contradict the earlier claim that markets are masculinised as well as the broader claim that women’s biology and their naturalised positioning in social reproduction renders them uniquely capable investors. A second work that has identified a similar contradiction is Melissa Fisher’s eth- nography of the first generation of women working on Wall Street. Drawing on interviews conducted throughout the 1990s and 2000s with the first generation of women to establish themselves as professionals on Wall Street, Fisher empha- sises the extent to which women themselves worked to create the image that their femininity offered them particular advantages in finance. In the 1980s and 1990s, this was especially the case for women working in research and brokerage, where women “invoked and reframed the figure of the financial ‘consumer’ in order to sell themselves as professional subjects of economic expertise”.67 Accord- ing to Fisher, this performance of femininity worked well for some of the “Wall Street women”, who were able to conform to acceptable standards of womanhood while simultaneously drawing on gendered stereotypes in order to suggest that they could act as guardians of the interests of their clients and their firms.68 Fisher offers a number of criticisms of this gender performance, not least of which is the role that it has played—and is currently playing with renewed vigour—in using women’s positioning as mothers and carers as a means of legiti- mising the power of financial elites.69 However, of immediate interest here is her finding that insofar as the women she interviewed were keenly aware of the ways in which their gender affected their career trajectories on Wall Street, they consistently returned to a narrative of gender neutrality in markets and a “complete faith in the objectivity and transparency of numbers within the world of finance”.70 I draw attention to these contradictions not to suggest a resolution, but rather to emphasise that even on its own terms, the “womenomics” trope cannot resolve the underlying contradiction that stems from a neoclassical view of markets as objec- tive, neutral and natural systems and the everyday gendered experiences of women in finance. Rather, womenomics is helping to reproduce the myth of homo oeconomicus and to externalise the operation of gender power relations to the operation of financial markets in ways that legitimise the ongoing deepening of finance. As noted in the first theoretical premise, this is not simply a discursive move since the andocentrism of this model has direct material and distributional implications for the allocation of resources.