Sheconomy reaches 6.5 million people in its first month
Card selfies, creators and a 14-week challenge: Invest for Better’s campaign for women’s money reached 6.5 million people in four weeks.
The World Economic Forum says women won’t be equal in the economy for another 100 years.1 So we asked an AI to skip the wait: go back a century, make women equal overnight, and show us the history we missed. Today Invest for Better opens the doors to that alternate world, the Sheconomy, with a coalition of 74 organizations behind it and a 100-day challenge to start making it real.
Launch day
- 74organizations in the coalitionWomen’s investing groups, banks, advisers and funds that signed on before launch.
- 100days of action, to International Women’s DayA challenge of simple money moves, one at a time, from launch to March 8.
- 100years to equality at today’s paceThe World Economic Forum’s estimate of how long it will take women to become equal in the economy.
- $34Tin US wealth women will control by 2030Projected wealth in women’s hands, and the reason even small shifts matter.
Women control trillions, and still defer the decisions
The numbers behind this campaign are old news, which is the problem. Women hold one in four C-suite seats. They make up 28% of investors. Female founders get about 2% of venture capital. People have seen statistics like these for years, and scroll past them.
And yet by 2030 women are expected to control more than $34 trillion in American wealth. Too often, they hand the decisions about that money to someone else, in a financial industry built by men for men, who invest it in ways that don’t reflect what women care about.
Invest for Better, a nonprofit that helps women put their money to work for what they care about, came to us with that gap and a big goal. It wanted to move millions of women to step into their financial power. The brief began with a coalition of about 100 women-and-money organizations, and three facts: the investing gap is three times the size of the pay gap, women invest with more impact, and it has only been 50 years since an American woman could open a credit account without a man.
We sent an AI back 100 years
Instead of repeating the stats, we asked what they cost. We gathered thousands of pages of research on women’s economic impact, from banks, consultancies, researchers and international bodies like the International Labour Organization, and trained an AI model on it. Then we gave it one instruction: go back 100 years, make women equal, and redo history.
What came back reads like the news from a better parallel world. The gender pay gap closed by 1965. Teachers make more than lawyers. Mental healthcare has been free for decades. Ocean plastics almost vanished by 2005. Women never had to carry pepper spray. Every headline links to a “See the math” page, so anyone can check the research behind it.1
Under the hood, the model works like a panel of specialists. Separate AI agents carry expertise in history, investing, startups, healthcare, education and social causes, and they work together to build the simulated century in detail. The result is not wishful thinking with a nice font. It is a documented chain of what-ifs, grounded in what women already do with money when they have it.
What if, 100 years ago, women had become equal in our economy?
The headlines go on cards, shirts and a front page
The alternate headlines are the campaign’s rally cries, and we put them everywhere people could hold them. Green cards with a single line on each are made for selfies: hold up the headline you want to see become real, and post it. The same lines run across T-shirts, hoodies and tote bags in the new merch store, under a green Sheconomy brand with its own S pattern.
There is a film, too. Yesterday we shot the launch film in Canby, Oregon, with women holding their headline cards and saying what their lives would look like in the Sheconomy. Director Kristopher Wente coached more participants remotely, so women from across the country could record their part from home. The cut, built around 13 participants, goes out with the campaign as it grows.
A coalition with a ground game
Sheconomy launches with the people who already work on women and money every day. Seventy-four organizations, from women’s angel networks and impact funds to banks and financial advisers, along with about 100 women leaders, signed on before today. Each gets a toolkit of posts, graphics and video prompts to share with its own community.
It has a ground game, too. In New York, organizer Kim Macharia is recruiting a team of volunteer captains, with a goal of 50 captains and 1,000 participants, so the challenge shows up in living rooms and offices, not just feeds. Hana Miloslavic leads outreach to partner communities.
What happens next
Today is a soft launch: the site, the social channels and the merch store open, and the coalition starts to share. The bigger public push will build toward International Women’s Day, with more voices, more films and more headlines from the world we could have had.
The soft launch gives the coalition a head start on the bigger push: weeks to share the headlines with their own communities, see which ones people pick up first, and bring new members into the challenge.
The AI did its part. It showed that a better world was a hundred years of equal choices away. The challenge asks women to make the first of those choices now.
