No valid source for "women own/control/influence" x% of wealth.

[lumberjack_jeff]

14. The irony of this statistic is that it was uncontroversial when being used in a "girl power" sense

as in "Rush Limbaugh! Sense the power of our collective anger!"

Then you begin to see it used (apparently seriously) in contexts like this: "Women control 60% of the wealth? When will men stop oppressing us?"

I think it's reasonable for readers to see that and have a bit of a "hold up there" reaction. At that point it apparently became "MRA bullshit".

I don't know where 60%, 70% or 80% come from. My guess is they were pulled out of various ad executive's asses to justify an ad campaign for products like chick beer.

So, based on a link provided by Hfojvt to the census bureau, I crunched the numbers they collected (number of male, female and married households, the percentage of which are within various tiers of wealth and the average wealth within that tier), and it indicates that, rounded to three significant digits, women control 51.9% of the wealth.

There are probably a bunch of ways of computing a result. The census bureau is the one I used.

So, 60% is wrong. "Most" is not.

Does that shoot a large enough hole in marketing executives arguments to get them to stop selling trucks painted "mango tango pearl"? I hope so.