Pale portrait of women as powerchicks

The book on my bedside locker this week is called Powerchicks. It's subtitled How Women Will Dominate America and was written by Matt Towery - quite obviouslynot a powerchick, especially when you look at the photograph on the jacket.

Matt Towery is, in fact, a former Georgia state legislator and chairman of a printing company. Why he wanted to write a book about women dominating the US is not entirely clear, although he seems to give some credit towards his I interest in the women's movement to his grandmother who was a powerchick of her own time.

Obviously the title is meant to grab your attention, and it does. But I rather feel that a powerchick sounds more like Pamela Anderson Lee with a pneumatic drill than a woman trying to take her place in the world of business, which is what I thought the book was supposed to be about.

After all, it does show a silhouette of a woman on the front cover in a fairly powerful - I've got a briefcase, don't mess with me stance. (She also has very straight shoulders. Could she be wearing shoulder-pads, the powerchick emblem of the 1980s?)

According to the blurb, women are responsible for more than 80 per cent of consumer spending in the US. (No wonder Fed chairman, Mr Alan Greenspan, is having sleepless nights about the strength of the economy! All those pairs of tights!)

Women outnumber men at the voting booths. Women obtain more college degrees than men. Women are taking greatest advantage of technological advances so that they can combine work and home life. (Women have to do this, for heaven's sake, otherwise we'd be gibbering wrecks.)

The beginning of Towery's book concentrates on women in sports and entertainment. He includes Billie Jean King who certainly wouldn't have called herself a powerchick.

But I admire her greatly. On court, she was a fierce competitor and when she moved into the business end of sport she was equally fierce. She complained about unfairness and then did something about it.

And, in the face of personal traumas, she just got out there and worked to pay her bills. Possibly, too, she led the way for many women to move into the realm of sports business where, as expected, they're doing fine, thank you.

I'm not mad on the women in entertainment side of things, mainly because I feel that a lot of women have done a disservice to others in this area.

In the US entertainment and media industries there's so much emphasis on looking like you're still about 21 while working on some show that has you up at four in the morning the day after you've just given birth that it's demeaning.

However, if women are beginning to dominate US entertainment and media, it'll be interesting to see if they'll eventually get rid of those craggy-faced male television newscasters with their overwhelming sense of self-importanceand replace them with cute little guys like the bloke in the Diet Coke advertisement.

Apparently, in the US, the number of women in the workforce increased twice as fast as the number of men between 1979 and 1992. Those women want jobs. Good jobs.

And they're getting them. Also, they're not afraid to be what they call "female bachelors" who work hard, have money to spend and don't mind spending it. Which is why Alan Greenspan should really worry.

At times this book reads like a roll call of well-known women, and that's inevitable, I suppose. It's also a touch blase about telling you how to become a powerchick - Powerpoint Number One - "Be Proud to be a Woman" - oh, please.

But it's interesting as a study of the demography of the US as much as anything else.

However, I have to report that things don't always work out, even when you're talking to a powerchick. Last week, almost collapsing from hunger having gone out directly from work and having nothing to eat, I decided to pitstop at our local McDonald's.

People will say it's my own fault for choosing a junk food restaurant, but it was fast food I was after. Regretfully, though, our McDonald's hasn't quite grasped the concept of fast in the "drive-thru" (why does it insist on this awful spelling?).

I gave my order, was commanded to wait in the parking lot, and sat there for more than 15 minutes while my stomach complained bitterly. When the food eventually arrived and I brought it home, they'd given me the wrong order.

I complained - most times I wouldn't bother but I was really mad by now - and the female manager was very apologetic, offered me a free meal there and then if I called back straight away (which I declined as nothing was going to drag me back outside again) and then offered to send some vouchers for a meal.

I accepted the vouchers (I have nephews who'll kill for them) but they still haven't arrived. Please don't tell me I've been placated by a powerchick manager who just wanted to get me off the phone.

Despite my misgivings about the Irish franchise, though, McDonald's Corporation is doing well this year. It's outperforming the industry average and has reported record profits. It has done spectacularly well in Japan but that's on the back of a campaign it ran during the summer where it slashed the price of a burger from Y103 to Y63 - 63 yen (47 cents)!

It was swamped with buyers which will, no doubt, cheer up the denizens of the Bank of Japan who are struggling, really struggling, to get the economy up and moving again.

Last week, interest rates in Japan were at zero per cent. This is an almost surreal concept as the Bank of Japan pours liquidity into the market in an effort to drive investors further out the yield curve.

It's certainly having an effect, although for how long is anyone's guess. Longer dated bonds have also been helped by the decision of the Trust Fund Bureau to buy them during February and March while the Ministry of Finance curbs the issuance of new bonds.

This is aimed at getting Japan into the new fiscal year in one piece but there's still a huge amount of work to be done.

Meanwhile, in the US, those employment numbers are still strong. The bond market almost had a heart attack when the payroll figures came in, but the Dow loved it. All those power-mad, powerhungry, powerchicks getting jobs.

And if the next chairman of the Fed is a woman, well, she'll certainly understand the concept of consumer spending.

My next piece of reading is The Whole Woman by Germaine Greer. I'll keep you posted.

Sheila O'Flanagan is a fixed-income specialist at NCB Stockbrokers