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The global marketplace: The third billion are entering the mainstream
If China and India each represent 1 billion emerging participants in the global marketplace, the “third billion” is made up of a growing number of women in developing and industrialized nations who are entering the economic mainstream for the first time. This population of women will create vast markets, increase size and quality of the talent pool, and have a profound effect on global business, write DeAnne Aguirre and Karim Sabbagh from Booz & Company's strategy + business.
A huge and fast-growing group of people are poised to take their place in the economic mainstream over the next decade, as producers, consumers, employees, and entrepreneurs: this group’s impact on the global economy will be as significant as that of China and India’s billion-plus populations. But its members have not yet attracted the level of attention they deserve.
If China and India each represent 1 billion emerging participants in the global marketplace, this “third billion” is made up of women, in both developing and industrialized nations, whose economic lives have previously been stunted, underleveraged, or suppressed.
Entering the mainstream
These women, who have been living or contributing at a subsistence level, are now entering the mainstream for the first time.
"We estimate that about 870 million of them will do so by 2020, with the number conceivably passing 1 billion during the following decade. Their presence as economic actors will be widely felt, because they have long been overrepresented in the ranks of subsistence agriculture and other resource-based forms of work. As they move into knowledge work, in domains ranging from manufacturing to medicine to education to information technology, their sheer numbers will hasten the integration of the regions where they live into the larger economy," write DeAnne Aguirre and Karim Sabbagh from Booz & Company's strategy + business.
A new middle class
As the constraints are alleviated — through increased migration to cities, the expansion of educational opportunities, changes in local laws and cultural norms, and investments in infrastructures that support greater workforce participation — the Third Billion’s movement into the middle class will accelerate. The pattern of this emergence will probably shift from a graduated incline to a graph that looks more like a hockey stick.
"We derived the Third Billion figure by combining the estimated number of “not prepared” and “not enabled” women between the ages of 20 and 65 in 2020. Most of these women, about 822 million, live in emerging and developing nations; about 47 million live in North America, western Europe, and Japan."
A billion or more women are clearly about to participate more fully in the mainstream economy. This represents a significant force in such regions as Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Rim, the Middle East, eastern and central Europe, and Africa.
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