Is All Fair For The Fairer Sex?

In my new April '08 issue of Fast Company magazine a particular statistic jumped out at me and sparked some questions. It was: "Women make over 80% of all purchasing decisions across every brand category."

Now I'm familiar with laws of the cosmos like women love to shop, dogs chase cats, socialism is unsustainable, etc. but an 80-20 split between the sexes far exceeds what would have been my estimate (probably 60-40). So anyways a few questions it raised for me were:

1."Can women really be considered disadvantaged or submissive yet still control the vast majority of consumption?"

2. "Though the 'women make 78 cents for every dollar men make' claim is terribly misleading, wouldn't that even further widen the 80-20 gap between spouses in terms of an input vs. consumption ratio? (For instance a couple with yearly budget expenditures of $40,000 would hypothetically have roughly $22,470 of that contributed by the man and $17,530 contributed by the woman? The 80-20 split would dictate that she decides how $32,000 is spent while he only decides on $8,000. So she controls 183% of the amount she contributes while he controls only 36% of what he contributes. It ends up working out then to a 84-16 split.)

3.How can "gender equity feminists" sleep at night?

I realize there's a ton of factors to consider here and my point isn't to argue that women have it made or anything. I will however, argue that these statistics suggest at the very least that women today aren't victims of society in any general sense despite what many a liberal will have you believe. This isn't an unimportant point to make considering that women are covered under affirmative action and therefore entitled to preferential treatment. Just saying....

UPDATE: Check out this great article somewhat on the subject.