Gentlemen, We Have Gathered Here Today to Predict What Women Will Want in the Year 2000

Predicting the future is hard. Predicting the future of a demographic you have never seriously consulted is, it turns out, even harder — though the people doing it rarely seemed to notice the gap.

In the mid-to-late 1960s, American futurism was enjoying something of a golden age. Think tanks were flush. Corporations were hiring consultants to peer decades forward. Glossy magazines ran special issues about life in the year 2000. And a significant portion of this predictive energy was directed, with tremendous confidence and essentially zero input from its subject, at the American woman.

What would she want? What would she buy? How would she spend her days? How would technology liberate her from the kitchen so she could... be in a slightly more modern kitchen?

We have the predictions. We will let them speak, mostly for themselves.

The Household of Tomorrow (As Imagined by People Who Had Never Done Laundry)

The dominant theme in mid-century predictions about women's futures was the automated home — a gleaming, push-button domestic paradise where technology would handle the drudgery and leave the American woman free to pursue... more refined domestic activities.

A 1967 industry report aimed at consumer goods manufacturers predicted that by 2000, the "household manager" — a term deployed with apparent sincerity — would oversee a fully automated home requiring "perhaps two hours of supervisory attention per day." The remaining hours, the report suggested, would be spent on "personal enrichment, social engagement, and family-centered leisure."

This prediction was made by people who apparently believed that once the dishwasher got smarter, the primary aspiration of half the American population was a better-organized Tuesday.

What actually happened by 2000: women entered the workforce in numbers that would have been unthinkable to the report's authors, pursued careers across every sector the futurists had not mentioned, and still largely did more housework than men, automated or otherwise. The dishwasher did get smarter. Nobody got two hours of supervisory serenity.

The Beauty Industrial Complex, Circa 2000 (As Predicted in 1967)

Consumer product forecasters of the era were particularly interested in what the woman of 2000 would do with her appearance. Several predictions in this space deserve to be quoted at length, because summarizing them would only soften the impact.

One widely-cited 1968 marketing forecast predicted that by the millennium, the American female consumer would spend "a greater proportion of discretionary income on personalized cosmetic technology" and that "beauty maintenance will become increasingly scientific, moving the woman away from intuitive choices toward expert-guided regimens."

This was, accidentally, somewhat correct — the skincare industry did indeed become enormously scientific and enormously profitable. However, the same forecast predicted this would manifest primarily as "professionally administered home beauty systems" sold through department stores, guided by male dermatologists, and oriented around a fairly narrow definition of what "beauty" meant.

What actually happened: women built a multi-hundred-billion-dollar global beauty industry substantially on their own terms, including a thriving online community of female creators, reviewers, and entrepreneurs who did not require expert male guidance to decide what to put on their faces. The prediction got the spending right and the power dynamics completely backwards.

The Career Question (Handled With Remarkable Delicacy and Almost No Information)

To be fair to the futurists of 1967, some of them did predict that women would work outside the home in greater numbers by 2000. Credit where it's due.

The caveats, however, are where things get instructive.

A prominent futurist — whose name we will omit because his descendants are presumably on the internet — predicted in a 1967 conference presentation that by 2000, "a significant minority of women, perhaps as many as 40 percent, will maintain some form of professional activity outside the home, particularly in the years before children arrive or after children have grown."

By 2000, women made up approximately 47 percent of the US labor force. They were not limiting their professional activity to the years around children. They were doctors, lawyers, executives, engineers, and — in a development the futurist did not model — increasingly the primary breadwinners in American households.

The prediction treated female professional ambition as a phase. History treated it as a structural transformation of the American economy.

The Shopping Predictions (A Masterclass in Missing the Point)

Perhaps the richest vein of wrongness lies in the retail and consumer behavior predictions, which tended to treat female consumers as a relatively simple system requiring only modest technical upgrades.

A 1969 marketing study predicted that the female consumer of 2000 would be "highly responsive to in-store guidance systems" and would "welcome expert curation of purchasing decisions" because the "abundance of choice" would otherwise be "overwhelming to the average homemaker."

By 2000, the average American woman was navigating the early internet, comparison shopping across multiple retailers, reading consumer reviews, and making purchasing decisions of considerable sophistication without any apparent need for a guidance system to prevent her from being overwhelmed by options.

The same study predicted that female consumers would show "limited interest" in technology products unless those products were "clearly connected to household or family applications." In 2000, women were buying cell phones, computers, and digital cameras at rates that made this prediction look like it had been written on another planet.

What the Predictions Reveal (Besides the Obvious)

It would be easy — and not entirely wrong — to read these predictions purely as artifacts of sexism, products of a era when the people doing the forecasting had not thought carefully about whose perspective they were representing.

But there is something more specifically instructive here for anyone interested in how predictions fail.

These forecasters were not, by the standards of their time, unusually careless. Many were considered rigorous. They had data. They had methodology. What they did not have was any serious engagement with the people they were predicting about. No substantive surveys of women's own stated ambitions. No consideration that the "household manager" framing might be a constraint rather than a destiny. No apparent curiosity about what women might want if you simply asked them.

Prediction without consultation is not forecasting. It's projection. And what these men projected, with tremendous confidence and impressive production values, was mostly themselves.

The Verdict

By the year 2000, the American woman was running companies, raising children on her own terms or not at all, building businesses, voting in higher proportions than men, pursuing education at rates that had surpassed male enrollment, and spending her money in ways that no 1967 marketing report had successfully modeled.

The futurists were not wrong about everything. Technology did transform the household. Consumer spending did grow. Women did enter professional life in large numbers.

They were just wrong about why, how, and — most importantly — on whose terms.

The prophets were wrong. Mostly. And they would have been considerably less wrong if they had simply asked.