Women's economic influence through a Taylor Swift lens

Taylor Swift connects with millions of loyal fans, or Swifties, through lyrics that explore universal experiences of love, heartbreak, friendship and misogyny. In many of her songs, we hear a battle cry demanding women’s complex contributions — and the societal pressures they face — not go unnoticed. 

Misty L. Heggeness, a professor at the University of Kansas and proud Swift fan, examines these themes and their economic impacts in her new book, Swiftynomics: How Women Mastermind and Redefine Our Economy.

What does the ‘Swift Effect’ tell us about how women build influence in systems that weren’t designed for them? The way that I talk about this in the book is by thinking about three main components. The first is reinvention. Essentially, if you're in a system that wasn't designed with you in mind and you experience some sort of pushback or wall or something gets in your way of you being able to move forward, the way lots of women progress or survive is to move over to the side, or move around the wall, or go over or under the rock. And they do that by reinventing themselves.

The second is masterminding. Part of that has to do with this whole idea of reinvention and moving into a new era or into a new job or into a new relationship, whatever it might be. But this idea of masterminding is you have a goal: From five years from now, you envision yourself as X. And if you don't think that where you currently are is in a space that's going to help you get to that five-year goal, again, you do the reinvention.

The third major piece is really being authentic to yourself. That's the one thing that I think Taylor really nails — knowing what she wants, being determined, going for it, facing roadblocks. And maybe in the short term, she's not able to successfully move those roadblocks. But when she can't, then she's strategizing for the longer term: How is she going to get to where she wants to go?

You write, “If economic statistics included both paid and unpaid work, we would know that women are more economically active than men… one extra hour a day adds up to one extra month of economic activity each year, implying that men have one extra month of leisure every year relative to their female counterparts who also work full-time year-round.” What are some of the consequences that come with ignoring women’s true economic influence? When we look at economic statistics, it's really focused on paid labor and what we do outside of our homes, so we have this image in our head of, oh, men are always working, men are always active in the labor market, women come and go. It really underestimates and undervalues the economic contributions of women every single time we do that. We need to move away from that perspective, and we need better statistics to do it.

Women today who have minor children and who work a paid job are so incredibly exhausted. It's impossible to do those two jobs in a 24-hour cycle. You look at social media and the blogs that have popped up and see exhausted women who are speaking out because that is their reality. But we as a society have no ability to really fully comprehend what that means because we don't produce any statistics around it. Are moms today more exhausted? Do moms today have less free time than moms of two or three generations ago? We have no idea because we are ignoring a major component of moms’ economic activity. 

You also see it in social welfare policies. If moms are sitting at home taking care of their kids, then they're being lazy. It's just this continual, habitual, persistent underestimation of women's contributions to society. It really has put us in a bind. and it's unfair, not only to women, but it's unfair to men and our entire society, because we know we're short-changing ourselves every single day when we don't really understand the root of the problem.

What would that look like? Would the Federal Labor Bureau need to start quantifying unpaid labor and caregiving in the home? For me, that's the start. When I took this position at the University of Kansas, I started a project called the Care Board and essentially revamped economic statistics to incorporate the economic lives of women. We calculate the amount of time men and women, moms and dads, spend in both paid labor focused on caregiving, but also all the unpaid labor. It is possible to quantify this. 

We need more statistics to inform us on how we need to construct society, what type of social policies we need that are really going to help families balance work life, and help us all thrive and be healthy, and have communities with high levels of well-being. If we're not measuring this stuff, we won't even know where to start.