International Women's Day: Hidden Women

Women Are Already Deciding the Next Decade for Brands

International Women’s Day tends to prompt a familiar set of questions inside organizations: Are women represented in our campaigns? Do we have female leadership? Are we visible enough on March 8th?

The data I’ve been working with this year suggests those questions are missing something more consequential. Women aren’t just evaluating brands. They are forecasting them. And they are doing it with a level of consistency and conviction that insight professionals should find impossible to ignore.

A note on the research

Over the past three months, I’ve been analyzing the findings from Hidden Women, which surveyed 2,700 women across North America, ages 16 to 74 in December 2025. Quotas were set to ensure a nationally representative sample by age, income and ethnicity. The research examined major brands and measured how well they understand women’s lives, consider their needs and deliver value. 

The 110 brands spanned technology, finance, sport, automotive, travel and beverages. Beauty, personal care and fashion were excluded as these categories already centre women by design. Including them would have skewed the analysis away from the categories where the gap between women's expectations and brand reality is most consequential.

Women as growth forecasters 

When asked which brands they expect to thrive over the next ten years, women named:

• Apple
• ChatGPT
• Google Gemini
• Visa
• Nike
• Samsung
• Apple Pay
• PayPal
• Alo
• Microsoft Copilot

At the other end were brands in automotive, finance, sports and energy drinks, frequently described as anchored in older authority codes.

These are not obscure brands. Many in the declining column have scale, history and strong awareness. The divide is not about size or reach. It is about something harder to measure but easier to feel: whether a brand still belongs in the life a woman is actually living.

Look at the thriving list and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with gender positioning. These brands are not winning because they run women-focused campaigns or appoint female spokespeople. They win because they are useful. They remove friction, enable capability, and fit into lives that are increasingly nonlinear, independently managed and digitally native. They don’t make assumptions about who is using them or why.

The declining brands share a different characteristic. In qualitative responses, women described them as anchored in older assumptions — bravado-driven, authority-coded, designed around a version of the consumer that feels dated. The issue was rarely product performance in isolation. It was trajectory. Women could feel which direction these brands were moving.

Women Feel Spoken At, Not Spoken To

One finding helps explain the separation between the brands thriving and declining.

57% of women say most brands speak to them as if they are men.

Not masculine in tone. Not unaware of women’s existence. But built from a male-default perspective. One that wasn’t designed with women’s lives in mind and hasn’t been redesigned since.

"Some brands still talk to women like we need things simplified or explained to us. I'm not as dumb as they think I am. I'm paying attention." — Woman, 45–54

Across the 110 brands studied, the relationship between seeing women and expected future use is strong and linear. The higher a brand scores on understanding women’s realities, the higher its expected likelihood of continued use. The lower the score, the stronger the association with decline. This is not abstract sentiment. It is predictive signal and it is measurable before it shows up in sales.

Understanding as a Competitive Variable 

The separation between thriving and declining brands is not explained by awareness or scale. It is explained by depth of understanding.

82% of women in the study believe they are actively redefining what it means to be a woman today. Brands that reflect this shift in their positioning, communications and products score higher. And are more likely to be expected to grow.

Visa, PayPal and Apple Pay don’t win because they target women explicitly. They resonate because they function as infrastructure for independence: reliable, judgement-free, present when needed. They enable financial agency without making assumptions about lifestyle, household structure or decision-making.

In contrast, brands perceived as declining were often described as operating from older authority codes or simplified user assumptions. The gap is not surface representation. It is whether women feel fully imagined in the logic of the brand.

Momentum Shifts Before Revenue Does

The most significant finding is not the brand rankings themselves. It is the mechanism by which brands lose women.

Women don’t announce when a brand stops fitting their life. They adapt, find workarounds, and eventually find something that actually fits. When a brand’s assumptions stop matching a woman’s reality, revenue doesn’t immediately collapse. 

Women stop feeling seen before they stop purchasing. By the time the erosion registers in tracking data, the decision has already been made.

This is why the forecast data matters as a strategic tool. Women's expectations of brand trajectory correlate strongly with how well those brands understand their lives. The signal is available now, before the behavior shift makes it unavoidable. The brands that act on it earliest have the clearest advantage.

The Question Worth asking this International Women's Day

Women already know which brands belong in their future and which don't. The more uncomfortable question for anyone in brand strategy or insight is this: is your brand seen or is it a blind spot?

The Hidden Women report and SEEN Score rankings are available here.