Single, educated women have become one of the most powerful driving forces in the global economy.

According to a Telegraph report, which quoted a study by market research company Datamonitor, modern women have more earning potential than their mothers and grandmothers.

With their own pensions, mortgages, life policies and investments, they now wield huge economic clout.

The paper said that politicians largely ignored this new demographic group, dubbed Sex and the City voters, while advertisers were failing to recognise their strength.

These were the conclusions of consumer and political analysts who suggested that advertisers and politicians 'alter the focus of their key messages'.

In its study, Trends in Women's Lives, Datamonitor said: 'The marketing industry has always acknowledged women to be a powerful consumer force. But this has been due to their role as purchasers for an entire household.

'Women are now independent and confident consumers.'

There were more British women than men training as accountants and lawyers, attracted by the high earning power, it said.

Across the European Union as a whole, more women than men were taking up tertiary education to boost their earning potential.

This had been accompanied by a 52 per cent increase in single female homebuyers in the past decade, with single women now buying one in seven properties and accounting for nearly a fifth of new mortgage lending.

Britain's divorce rate, the highest in Europe, and a narrowing of the male-female pay divide was helping to fuel a rapid growth in the number of single women with liquid assets of more than ￡25,000 (S$70,000).

Around 195,000 single women in Britain had such assets - cash and easy-to-sell investments - worth a total of ￡10.2 billion.

While some had inherited their money or acquired it through a divorce settlement, many others had built up their wealth because of a devotion to their career.

Datamonitor said that last year, single females helped to push women's spending power in Europe and America as a whole to ￡2,000 billion, a figure which will rise to ￡2,500 billion in the next five years.

In Britain, the figure is set to rise from ￡125 billion to ￡138 billion.

In voting terms, single people were overwhelmingly ignored at the polls.

Ms Bella DePaulo, chairman of the board of academic advisers of the American Association for Single People, said: 'They aren't considered a voting block and no one panders to them but politicians must pay attention.'

In the United States, Democratic Party pollsters, who work closely with Britain's Labour Party, had identified single women as the key demographic group that it must galvanise if it was to recover the White House next year.

President George W. Bush had a 1 per cent lead among married women in 2000 while single women went for the Democrats by 31 per cent.

Previously, party pollsters had concentrated on the gap between men, who tended to vote Republican, and women, who tended to vote Democrat.

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