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I happened to find the word, “Sheconomy” in the Time magazine’s (November 22, 2010) article titled “Woman power: The rise of the sheconomy.” The author, Belinda Luscombe, writes

What these two (marketing research director of Midas International and senior VP at Best Buy) and many other businesses discovered is the Sheconomy. Everyone knows, or has long suspected, that the purse strings are held by women.

It’s oft repeated that they make 85% of the buying decisions, or are the chief purchasing officers of their households. The difference today—one that has enormous consequences across global economics—is that women are also the earners.

Obviously “she-eonomy” is the economy in the world where women have a greater control of incomes and spending of both households and society.

Although Google Ngram doesn’t show any incidence of “sheconomy/she-conomy,” Google search provides several instances of “Sheconomy.” For example:

  1. It's a She-conomy. An excerpt from the Intuit 2020 Report. Over the next decade, women around the world will enter the workforce at an unprecedented rate. Close to 1 billion women, many of whom have either never worked or worked at a ... - www.sheconomy2020.com/‎

  2. Both Time magazine and Minnesota Public Radio have taken an interest in "the Sheconomy" and consulted Marti Barletta's expertise. -www.trendsight.com/...Sheconomy.../Itemid,203/‎

  3. Sheconomy, Vestavia Hills, Alabama. 469 likes • 3 talking about this. Sheconomy is a blog developed for male marketers to better understand not only the importance of advertising to women but how to connect effectively as well. - https://www.facebook.com/Sheconomy‎

Is “Sheconomy” a just one-off ephemeral lingo invented by Time magazine et al., or is the neologism getting currency?

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    Ngram returned a flatline for all variants I could think of. Only time will tell but my thoughts are that this is a nonce word and will not go far.
    – user49727
    Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 8:27
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    I wouldn't say sheconomy is gaining traction, but I will say that the tendency to mix prefixes with roots is not all that uncommon. For example, there's the term greenconomy, which can be found readily enough. Most of these constructions rely on the reader being clever enough to figure them out, with the hopes that the reader will also appreciate the cleverness of the newly-coined termed. The rest is herstory.
    – J.R.
    Commented Sep 6, 2013 at 9:42
  • Betteridge's law of headlines
    – some user
    Commented Sep 9, 2013 at 11:40
  • For a sense of relative scale, consider the match results in plain Google searches for "me-conomy" ("about 2,220 results"), "he-conomy" ("about 2,560 results"), "she-conomy" ("about 13,800 results"), "e-conomy" ("about 141,000 results"), and "we-conomy" ("about 392,000 results"). As user49727 points out above, none of these terms have dented Ngram as yet, and I'd say that they haven't advanced much (if at all) beyond the status of silly plays on words on their path to legitimacy.
    – Sven Yargs
    Commented Sep 16, 2013 at 3:20

2 Answers 2

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I believe it is just another attempt at coining a reusable portmanteau. This isn't the first time a media entity or personality has come up with some "clever" way to describe a facet to or a description of economics. Tom Martino, a Denver radio personality, has coined the term "perceptionomics" alluding to the notion that the status of the economy as of the last 5 years has been affected by the people's perception of where the economy is (e.g. good, bad).

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  • +1 nice answer. I agree this was an attempt, but it didn't stick. No traction.
    – JTP - Apologise to Monica
    Commented Sep 16, 2013 at 3:05
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No, it is not, and neither is Heconomy. Money does not have gender or sex, & it can't get trapped into circulating only among one gender, ever. Plus it sounds GRATING to the ear.

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