CSI stands for much more than the television crime thriller. It represents a fundamental trilogy of economic choices available to every individual actor on the marketplace stage. And it applies to women, too.

You choose what you want to do with the resources available to you. Consume means the short-term satisfaction of perceived needs or wants. Investment means the placement of resources in the hands of some better, probably longer-term, alternative with a probability of giving you back your outlay sometime in the future plus a premium to compensate you for the risky use of your resources. Savings is a deferral of the decision where you have a high security of getting your outlay back and a lesser premium for the wait and risk.

There it is -- CSI: Consume, Invest or Save. Choose one.

Women understand consumption really really REALLY well. They do not understand investment or savings as well. As a result, we see more evidence of the economic indicators of women’s prolific consumption behavior and far fewer indicators of either investment or savings economic choices. And women pay the expected price for their decisions.

Women spend or control 80% or more of our consumer dollars as a nation. We hear a great deal about women’s alleged aversion to risk, yet probably the riskiest resource allocation strategy one could ever chose would be a persistent practice of only consumption.

Women-owned businesses are dominantly sole proprietorships: earning pittance revenues, but consuming ravenously. Women-owned businesses tend not to be employer firms, thus limiting the potential investment in the labor of others. When women-owned businesses do hire workers, they tend to have a lower average number of employees per firm.

Women need to learn they have alternative choices to consider; measure the risks and rewards of all the possible choices; evaluate the potential stream of benefits; and choose the next best opportunity compared simply to “eating the crop seed.”

That expression came from our agricultural heritage and describes vividly the choice families face. They can defer some consumption and preserve some seeds for the next planting season where the potential for a larger crop exists, offering a future where there could be more seed to eat AND more seed to plant for the future after that. But, somebody has to plant the seed: somebody has to be willing to invest in the ground, manage the terrain, and test themselves with nature.

Is there anybody who really believes women could NOT cut back a little on their consumption and divert something toward either effective savings or investment? What are women afraid of -- that Wal-Mart of Pet Stores revenues might dip? If our economic house is built only upon a flimsy ring-tone house of cards, the sooner we learn this reality the shorter the fall we inevitably will experience.

The sooner 51% of the decision-makers in the marketplace begin to value the returns from longer-term investments and savings, the sooner we as a nation will reap the benefits of wiser choices about the risks-rewards of viable women-owned businesses. It makes no sense for half the market (women) to continue to spend mindlessly on short-term personal preferences AND at the same time demand that the other half of the market (men) provide them with jobs or mentors or family-friendly programs or flexible work hours or entitlements and advancement and executive positions. Why? Is it simply so that women can continue to support their ravenous short-term consumption behavior? That just doesn't compute.