The First Puzzle

Here's a fun puzzle for you. What will you deduce from the following information?

Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases, including everything from autos to health care:
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91% of New Homes
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66% PCs
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92% Vacations
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80% Healthcare
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65% New Cars
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89% Bank Accounts
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93% Food
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93% OTC Pharmaceuticals

The anti-feminists answer: Women eat 93% of all food, consume 92% of vacations and so on. I'm not kidding. I have been reading on Those Sites again (bad Echidne, bad!), and found to my great surprise that the above data is used as a counterargument for the gender gap in wages:

Who cares if women earn less? They consume most everything!

I don't think so, simply because men wouldn't survive on only 7% of all food, for instance. What these data tell us is that women are the designated shoppers in many families. This does NOT mean that women consume everything they buy. Just that they do most of the grocery shopping and so on. For the whole family.

After reading about those astonishingly big female eaters I spent eons trying to find the original research from which those numbers came, but without luck. The references I found went around in circles. This matters, because I really, really want to know who answered the questions and how those questions were formulated.

For instance, were the respondents asked whether they determined some purchases all by themselves or whether they participated in such purchases? My guess is the latter, simply because it is extremely unlikely that women alone purchased 91% of new houses.