By Nancy Mandell, guest blogger

If you’re a woman, you probably know most of this already: No matter where in the world they live, women are overworked, over-extended, over-stressed and—despite currently controlling some $12 trillion in global spending—under-served by businesses.

Lest we be accused of whining, however, it helps to see the facts in writing. So let’s thank the Boston Consulting Group, which recently released findings from a 120-question survey of more than 12,000 women in 22 countries—talk about stats! The survey was initiated in conjunction with a book co-authored by Michael J. Silverstein, a senior partner and executive committee member at BCG. The title of the book - published in September by Harper Business - deserves a sentence of its own: Women Want More: How to Capture Your Share of the World’s Fastest-Growing Market. It’s a bit opportunistic, but then we have to remember that consulting groups are usually paid by businesses to improve the bottom line - in this case by the additional $5 trillion women are expected to earn over the next five years.

No wonder we’re over-stressed! We have that burden of expectations while spending over 70 percent of consumer dollars worldwide! In order to survive the current global recession, one billion of us are in the workforce - many of us not by “choice,” says Silverstein, but because “they must work for their families to have success. And as women earn more, he adds, the balance of power shifts, “and their incremental earnings become critical for affluence.”

On top of that, when we get home from our high-paying, high-powered jobs, 88 percent of us say they do the grocery shopping, 85 percent prepare meals, and 84 percent of us are still doing the laundry. Read More…