Why Millennial Women Will Likely Be Your Clients

Economy’s Influence

As the economy improves there will probably be a recovery in birth rates, though such an increase will prove temporary as more women take advantage of the benefits that work and education can bring, said Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. “What we’re seeing is women adjusting their plans deliberately to have children later,” and have fewer offspring, he said.

There may be downsides to that, said Dean Maki, chief U.S. economist at Barclays Plc in New York. All else being equal, “declining fertility rates signal slower economic growth,” he said. “One of the inputs in economic growth is labor-supply growth, and if you have fewer people being born over the longer term, that’s going to be fewer workers and less growth.”

Even that is manageable, Cohen said. If policy makers “are willing to allow more immigration, we can fix the problem,” he said.

Women’s Education

Women’s gains in education are already beginning to outpace those of men. By the age of 27, 32 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24 percent of men, according to a March report outlining the results of a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of people born in the early 1980s.

That boosts their potential earnings power, as young adults with a bachelor’s degree earned $46,900 in 2012, 57 percent more than those who completed high school, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show.

“The fact that millennial women’s college attainment has increased both in absolute terms and relative to men suggests that future trends for human-capital development, income growth and ultimately consumer spending are positive,” William Emmons, senior economic adviser at the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, wrote in an e-mail.

As households become increasingly dependent on female employment and earnings, U.S. fertility rates will probably continue to decline, said Mark Mather, associate vice president of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau in Washington. Employed married women’s earnings are now 44 percent of their families’ total, up from 37 percent in the 1970s, according to a presentation earlier this year from President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“We’re seeing this big increase in women going to college and getting pretty good jobs and increasingly earning more than their husbands,” Mather said. “Along with that trend, there’s a bigger cost for women to have kids than there was in the past.”