By Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
Sunday, July 12, 2009
While the pinstripe crowd fixates on troubled assets, a stalled stimulus and mortgage remedies, it turns out that a more sure-fire financial fix is within our grasp – and has been for years. New research says a healthy dose of estrogen may be the key not only to our fiscal recovery, but also to economic strength worldwide.
The sexy new discussion in policy circles around the world, thanks to the recession, is whether a significant shift of power from men to women is underway – or whether it should be. Accounting giant Ernst & Young pulled out charts and graphs at a recent power lunch in Washington with female lawmakers to argue a provocative bottom line: Companies with more women in senior management roles make more money. The latest issue of Foreign Policy magazine sweepingly predicts the “death of macho.” Economists at Davos this year speculated that the presence of more women on Wall Street might have averted the downturn. Adding to this debate is the fact that the laid-off victims of this recession are overwhelmingly men.
All those right-brain skills disparaged as soft in the roaring ‘90s are suddenly 21st-century-hot, while cocky is experiencing a slow fizzle.
The numbers make a compelling case. The studies Ernst & Young rounded up show that women can make the difference between economic success and failure in the developing world, between good and bad decision-making in the industrialized world, and between profit and loss in the corporate world. Their conclusion: American companies would do well with more senior women.
And it’s not only one study, but at least half a dozen, from a broad spectrum of organizations such as Columbia University, McKinsey & Co., Goldman Sachs and Pepperdine University, that document a clear relationship between women in senior management and corporate financial success. By all measures, more women in your company means better performance.
Pepperdine found that the Fortune 500 firms with the best records of putting women at the top were 18 to 69 percent more profitable than the median companies in their industries. McKinsey looked at the top-listed European companies and found that greater gender diversity in management led to higher-than-average stock performance.
Is there a magic number of women? In some cases, it’s just three. Catalyst, a research firm focused on women and business, found that Fortune 500 companies with three or more women in senior management positions score higher on top measures of organizational excellence. In addition, companies with three or more women on their boards outperformed the competition on all measures by at least 40 percent.
It’s time to admit the obvious. Men and women are different, and our management styles are different. Research by the University of Pittsburgh and Cambridge University, among others, finds that some of those differences are intrinsic, thanks to hormones.
Gender stereotypes aren’t politically correct, but the research broadly finds that testosterone can make men more prone to competition and risk-taking. Women, on the other hand, seem to be wired for collaboration, caution and long-term results.
According to a 30-year study of fund managers released last month by the National Council for Research on Women, female investors and professional money managers used more measured strategies. They didn’t take huge risks, but they also didn’t lose big. Their returns were consistent. Men took larger risks and wound up with results that varied more widely. A study by the French Fund association found that funds managed by women had more consistent results over one-year, three-year and five-year measurements. Female-managed funds weren’t usually top performers, but they were never at the bottom.
Whatever the future, we hardly need to explain why, after all the trouble the testosterone-infused Wall Street culture brought us, a bit of that caution would be a healthy ingredient in our financial mix.
If that all seems too touchy-feely for left-brainers, here’s more hard math. The “diversity prediction theorem” is part of the most cutting-edge thinking about best business practices. Scott Page, an economist at the University of Michigan, uses mathematical models to demonstrate that a diverse group will solve a complicated business problem better than a homogeneous group. In fact, diversity is even more important than expertise. In other words, a bunch of white male brainiacs won’t usually reach the best conclusions.
There’s a sound business reason why Norway now mandates that corporate boards be 40 percent female. Why Iceland, after its embarrassing financial mess, put major banks and its government in female hands. And why Hermes, the only French company to outperform expectations during the recession, also has, you guessed it, a management structure dominated by women.
Americans aren’t so enamored of social engineering, of course, so how do we get to that profitable mix? To us, the answer is clear. Professional women have been leaving the workplace in droves, and we need to stop the brain drain. Recent studies show that almost a third of professional women opt out at some point in their careers and, strikingly, that MBAs are more likely than lawyers or doctors to choose to stay home with their children.
Beyond a certain point, many women find that the costs to family of a high-octane career are just too great. We need to recognize that the glass ceiling is in part a self-imposed, defensive perimeter. But we can’t afford to have women take themselves out of the running for top slots. And the only way to prevent that is changing the workplace to allow us the freedom to fit in our personal lives.
Luckily, that freedom makes economic sense, too. That’s why companies such as Wal-Mart, Capital One, Best Buy, Sun Microsystems and Sara Lee, to name just a few, say they have glimpsed the future of work and have decided it’s an extremely manageable place. They’ve discovered that allowing people to work the way they want – from home; at night; from the sidelines of the soccer field – actually increases productivity. Best Buy found that changing the work rules boosted productivity by an average of 40 percent.
And though progress is slow, women are negotiating nontraditional paths to senior management. Witness Sara Lee’s chief executive, Brenda Barnes. As a PepsiCo executive vice president, she left corporate America for seven years to raise her children. Her return is a singular achievement, but it suggests a future in which careers can move in waves, not straight up, or straight off of, a ladder.
Corporate America, take the first step toward economic recovery. Open your minds and offices to new ways of working and succeeding. Not because you are nice guys – but because it will help the economy and your bottom line.
This just in, Bo Obama (or at least some of his relatives) may very well cure cancer, kind of.
(via squashed)
The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.
Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.
I feel old and sad. Is there really no longer room for a show that teaches kids to love books?
There will be no butterfly in the sky. LeVar Burton will not go twice as high. George Bush killed Reading Rainbow.
I ordered a sandwich from Specialty’s online today. When I got back to my desk and opened my brown bag I found an plain white envelope. Today is my birthday so I got a little excited thinking, “so sweet of you to give a coupon or whatever for my birthday.”
I opened the envelope and pulled out a green card that read, “something special for you”. “Yes,” I think, “clearly a freebie." The hand-written note inside said:
Dear valued customer,
We apologize for the inconvenience but our food supplier is unable to deliver alfalfa sprouts at this time. We are receiving a shipment soon, Thank you for your understanding and we look forward to serving you again soon.
- Specialty’s
So, no free cookie after all. This is a bummer because the wheat germ chocolate chip cookie is pretty amazing. I was, however, impressed Specialty’s took the time to not only write a note but also put it in a sealed envelope.
To return the favor I intend to write them a post card:
Dear valued lunch provider,
Please don’t worry about the sprouts. Really, it’s no bigs. I hate to see you looking so glum.
Sincerely,
valued customer
Melody Miller, long-time Kennedy aide - The Last Brother (via apsies)
RIP
This word makes my skin crawl. I don’t know what it is about it precisely but it truly unnerves me. Usually this wouldn’t be a big issue, but my company was recently acquired by a business giant and this word is getting kicked around like a hacky sack at hemp-fest.
Join me in my one women movement to stop the undeserved proliferation of this business school hold out.
Please and thank you.
For me this is a season of hope — new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few — new hope.
And this is the cause of my life — new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.
”—Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Aug. 25, 2008
Let it be so.
(via robotheartpolitics)
Three years ago in B.C., Canada, a woman woke up in the bed of the man in the image to the left. She was bleeding and bruised, and though she remembered going out for a night on town, she didn’t remember how she got in this bed, or what had happened to her. Medical examinations determined that a man had vaginally penetrated her, and also found sedatives in her system.
The man’s name is Fernando Manuel Alves, and he pleaded guilty to sexual assault in the rape of this woman. He was initially charged with sexually assaulting three other women, and administering a noxious substance, though those charges were eventually dropped.
Despite pleading guilty, though, to the rape of a woman who has described since feeling the loss of both her will to live and ability to feel safe, Alves is not going to spend a single day in jail. No, instead, he received a 9 month conditional sentence, and placement on the sex offender registry.
Why, exactly, is Alves not being sent to jail for his violent crime, when non-violent criminals are sent there all the time? Well, that would be the point of particular interest:
In sentencing, the B.C. provincial court judge said Alves was not pathologically dangerous but had committed a crime of opportunity.
The judge ordered that Alves be placed on the sex-offender registry for the next 20 years but that he not spend time in jail.
Yes. Seemingly, since the judge felt the need to express as much during sentencing, Alves is not going to jail because he is believed to be not pathologically dangerous. And the way we know he is not dangerous is because his crime, his rape, was one of of opportunity.
One can only assume that when a rape is called a “crime of opportunity,” the “opportunity” in question is a woman being in the rapist’s presence.
And this would be true even if there wasn’t good reason to believe that Alves had deliberately set out to impair is victim for the purposes of assaulting her. Because you know what? Drunk women are everywhere — and this is especially so when you own a pub, as Alves does. Sleeping women are everywhere. Unconscious women are everywhere. Women out by themselves are everywhere. Women in “vulnerable situations,” that would not be vulnerable at all if there weren’t men out there looking to attack us, are everywhere. We, women, are everywhere.
And our bodies are not walking opportunities for violence.
Our autonomy and right to safety does not lose value, and the violation of that autonomy and safety has no lesser significance, just because a misogynistic man saw them as such.
Saying that Alves raped his victim as a crime of opportunity is not only greatly absolving him of full responsibility for his heinous, life-altering actions. It’s also saying that the victim is partially to blame. It’s saying that by existing, whether it be existing alone, or existing while drinking, or existing in public, or simply existing as a woman at all, she created an opportunity for a rapist. Not giving Alves jail time for this reason says that if a woman presents such an “opportunity” — again, by existing — that it mitigates her rapist’s actions. Frankly, the judge, whether man or woman, is aligning themselves with the rapist by presenting a rape as understandable when an “opportunity” presents itself.
And a culture that says “well, come on, can you blame him? She was there!” is a culture where men rape with few consequences and many excuses.
Paul Krugman - Obama’s Trust Problem - NYTimes.com (via apsies)
Right again, Mr. Krugman.
If one is trying to do the right thing, the thing the people sent one to office to do, and the opposition throws a fit, listen. Work on smoothing the rift and even making some concessions where possible to get more people on board.
However, when the opposition refuses to let the supporters finish a sentence before contorting it, walk away. If they can’t play nice, pick up your things, Mr. President, and move on. You’ve got a long list of complex problems to resolve and you simply don’t have time for these playground antics.
(Excerpt from The New York Times)
There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.
“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations. Then when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a harsh, blunt woman named Sharifa Bibi, raised the stakes.
“She’s not going to have a son,” Sharifa told Saima’s husband, in front of her. “So you should marry again. Take a second wife.” Saima was shattered and ran off sobbing. Another wife would leave even less money to feed and educate the children. And Saima herself would be marginalized in the household, cast off like an old sock. For days Saima walked around in a daze, her eyes red; the slightest incident would send her collapsing into hysterical tears.
It was at that point that Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.
Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so. Saima took her elder daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt.
When merchants requested more embroidery than Saima could produce, she paid neighbors to assist her. Eventually 30 families were working for her, and she put her husband to work as well — “under my direction,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye. Saima became the tycoon of the neighborhood, and she was able to pay off her husband’s entire debt, keep her daughters in school, renovate the house, connect running water and buy a television.
“Now everyone comes to me to borrow money, the same ones who used to criticize me,” Saima said, beaming in satisfaction. “And the children of those who used to criticize me now come to my house to watch TV.”
Be a part of it! Go to Kiva.org and make your own micro loan.
The government’s previous filing in the case angered gay rights activists who supported Obama’s candidacy in part because of his pledge to move forward on repealing the law and the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that prevents gays from serving openly in the military.
“The administration believes the Defense of Marriage Act is discriminatory and should be repealed,” said Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler, because it prevents equal rights and benefits.
The department is obligated “to defend federal statutes when they are challenged in court. The Justice Department cannot pick and choose which federal laws it will defend based on any one administration’s policy preferences,” Schmaler added.
The law, often called DOMA, denies federal recognition of gay marriage and gives states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states.
“DOMA reflects a cautiously limited response to society’s still-evolving understanding of the institution of marriage,” according to the filing by Assistant Attorney General Tony West.
The administration also disavowed past arguments made by conservatives that DOMA protects children by defining marriage as between a man and a woman.
“The United States does not believe that DOMA is rationally related to any legitimate government interests in procreation and child-rearing and is therefore not relying upon any such interests to defend DOMA’s constitutionality,” lawyers argued in the filing.
Obama has pledged to work to repeal the law.
(via notthatkindagay)
The American Civil Liberties Union announced today that they have settled out of court with two Tennessee school districts sued on behalf of local students for blocking classroom access to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Web sites. The lawsuit, as we reported last May, alleged that Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Schools violated the rights of three students by denying them access to LGBT sites, yet continued to allow access to sites that advocated “reparative therapy” programs that attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation.
Thank you, ACLU!
My Alma Mater just made #55 on Forbes list of Best Colleges. This is pretty impressive considering most people under 40 have never heard of it.
So it seems that we aren’t going to have a second Great Depression after all. What saved us? The answer, basically, is Big Government.
Just to be clear: the economic situation remains terrible, indeed worse than almost anyone thought possible not long ago. The nation has lost 6.7 million jobs since the recession began. Once you take into account the need to find employment for a growing working-age population, we’re probably around nine million jobs short of where we should be.
And the job market still hasn’t turned around — that slight dip in the measured unemployment rate last month was probably a statistical fluke. We haven’t yet reached the point at which things are actually improving; for now, all we have to celebrate are indications that things are getting worse more slowly.
For all that, however, the latest flurry of economic reports suggests that the economy has backed up several paces from the edge of the abyss.
A few months ago the possibility of falling into the abyss seemed all too real. The financial panic of late 2008 was as severe, in some ways, as the banking panic of the early 1930s, and for a while key economic indicators — world trade, world industrial production, even stock prices — were falling as fast as or faster than they did in 1929-30.
But in the 1930s the trend lines just kept heading down. This time, the plunge appears to be ending after just one terrible year.
So what saved us from a full replay of the Great Depression? The answer, almost surely, lies in the very different role played by government.
Probably the most important aspect of the government’s role in this crisis isn’t what it has done, but what it hasn’t done: unlike the private sector, the federal government hasn’t slashed spending as its income has fallen. (State and local governments are a different story.) Tax receipts are way down, but Social Security checks are still going out; Medicare is still covering hospital bills; federal employees, from judges to park rangers to soldiers, are still being paid.
All of this has helped support the economy in its time of need, in a way that didn’t happen back in 1930, when federal spending was a much smaller percentage of G.D.P. And yes, this means that budget deficits — which are a bad thing in normal times — are actually a good thing right now.
In addition to having this “automatic” stabilizing effect, the government has stepped in to rescue the financial sector. You can argue (and I would) that the bailouts of financial firms could and should have been handled better, that taxpayers have paid too much and received too little. Yet it’s possible to be dissatisfied, even angry, about the way the financial bailouts have worked while acknowledging that without these bailouts things would have been much worse.
The point is that this time, unlike in the 1930s, the government didn’t take a hands-off attitude while much of the banking system collapsed. And that’s another reason we’re not living through Great Depression II.
Last and probably least, but by no means trivial, have been the deliberate efforts of the government to pump up the economy. From the beginning, I argued that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a k a the Obama stimulus plan, was too small. Nonetheless, reasonable estimates suggest that around a million more Americans are working now than would have been employed without that plan — a number that will grow over time — and that the stimulus has played a significant role in pulling the economy out of its free fall.
All in all, then, the government has played a crucial stabilizing role in this economic crisis. Ronald Reagan was wrong: sometimes the private sector is the problem, and government is the solution.
And aren’t you glad that right now the government is being run by people who don’t hate government?
We don’t know what the economic policies of a McCain-Palin administration would have been. We do know, however, what Republicans in opposition have been saying — and it boils down to demanding that the government stop standing in the way of a possible depression.
I’m not just talking about opposition to the stimulus. Leading Republicans want to do away with automatic stabilizers, too. Back in March, John Boehner, the House minority leader, declared that since families were suffering, “it’s time for government to tighten their belts and show the American people that we ‘get’ it.” Fortunately, his advice was ignored.
I’m still very worried about the economy. There’s still, I fear, a substantial chance that unemployment will remain high for a very long time. But we appear to have averted the worst: utter catastrophe no longer seems likely.
And Big Government, run by people who understand its virtues, is the reason why.
I came across the page randomly today and I am worried about this stanger.
“I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much for me to handle. One can only break down so much. I thought I was strong enough but no. Okay so here it goes, last resort. Goodbye. & I’m gathering whatever that is let in me to do this. 8/10/2009”
PLEASE take a moment go to her page and leave a note for her. She seems to have reached the edge of all she can take.
Thanks everyone for leaving the notes. See untouched’s response below:
It’s tough having to struggle each day, trying to find hope and keep faith under all the failed expectations and disappointments.
I cracked one too many times under the pressure. Everything simply fell apart and I guess I lost it for a while but I feel so much better now after reading the comments.
To know that there are people out there who care, people who struggled and made it through the shit, people who are still fighting to keep it together… to know all that… it really changes everything.
I’m honestly grateful and touched by the encouragements, wasn’t anticipating any form of response. Every single one of them is beautiful and it means so much to me. You guys are really awesome for renewing my hope and strength.
I came across the page randomly today and I am worried about this stanger.
“I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much for me to handle. One can only break down so much. I thought I was strong enough but no. Okay so here it goes, last resort. Goodbye. & I’m gathering whatever that is let in me to do this. 8/10/2009”
PLEASE take a moment go to her page and leave a note for her. She seems to have reached the edge of all she can take.
Dear Name Callers,
Please stop calling President Obama a Nazi. First of all, it deminishes the weight of a word that connotes genocide of millions of minorities and the violent manifestation of radical intolerance. Secondly, I doubt that Obama would be friends with a man and a party that would want him dead. In the future, when you are upset with the President’s policies, please state your criticisms in complete sentences rather than resorting to name-calling. This will help your credibility immensely.
Thank you.
Molly Ringwald, Sixteen Candles
RIP John Hughes
thisiswhy:
“With no weapon visible, Nicholson called the robber’s bluff and with a single rule-breaking leap chased away and then tackled the would-be robber. Two days after Nicholson chose not to hand over the bank’s cash, he was fired for violating the bank’s security policies.”
Damn.
The only thing that could make this better would be if he was wearing a cape and got written up for being out of uniform.
The upswing is that this is going to make a great story for his future employers. I can see it now, “I was fired for over dedication to the job and the relentless pursuit of justice." I hope I never have to go up against this guy for a job. Seriously, how does one compete with that?