Tag Archives: Women

What A Woman Wants

There has been lot’s of play on the book written by Sheryl Sandberg and her view on why women are not making more progress in top positions in the corporate world.  I have my ideas, but I came across this today via Mark Perry:

Isn’t it odd that people who exhort us to increase the numbers of women in powerful, high-paying jobs on the speculative grounds that this will be good for the world, discount the roles of women as mothers, which are (usually) of undeniable benefit to their kids? Many women have figured this out. One put it this way: “The world will not be affected one way or another if it has one more accountant during the next decade. But my kids will be profoundly affected by having me raise them.”

Many women also find that devoting their time to raising happy, ethical, and responsible children is more rewarding than spending 60 hours a week at the office. Why should they be made to feel that they are letting down the team?

 

Men Are Better Than Women At Everything Except —

Well, virtually everything.  This includes making money.

And now for the latest in 21st century news, women are even better at getting elected than men:

AMERICAN politics has a glass ceiling that keeps women down. This is a wisdom so conventional that Hillary Clinton, in conceding to Barack Obama in 2008, could safely earn cheers and tears by thanking her supporters for those “18m cracks in it.”

The only trouble is that empirical analysis has not found a bias against female candidates. In fact, a new study in California suggests that voters are, if anything, biased in favour of women. That glass thing in American politics, in other words, might be an elevator, not a ceiling.

In the Democratic races, women fared much better than men. This might be expected, because voters seem to associate women with more “liberal” issues (starting with, well, women’s issues), and Democratic primary voters tend to be liberal. More surprising, perhaps, were the results of the Republican primaries. Conservative voters tend to be more concerned with allegedly manly issues such as law and order and defence. This should put female candidates at a disadvantage. But it didn’t. Even among Republicans, a male name carried no advantage.

In half of the political races, women had an advantage.  In the other half, there was no advantage to be had; for men OR for women.

It might be time to put the bras back on ladies.

Economics of Romance

It would appear that Economics is not limited to matters of the wallet.

To begin, let’s review the definition of Economics:

The study of the use of scare resources which have alternative uses.

This definition is as true for money as it is for matter of the heart.

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The Glass Ceiling: Equal Pay for Equal Work

For as long as I can remember I’ve been told that men earn more money than women do.  There are National Women’s organizations like The National Organization for Women and  Business and Professional Women and Feminists for Life.   These groups tell us the cold hard facts; women aren’t paid as well as men:

  • In 2007, women’s median annual paychecks reflected only 78 cents for every $1.00 earned by men.
  • Women’s median pay was less than men’s in each and every one of the 20 industries and 25 occupation groups surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 2007.
  • When The WAGE Project looked exclusively at full-time workers, they estimated that women with a high school diploma lose as much as $700,000 over a lifetime of work, women with a college degree lose $1.2 million and professional school graduates may lose up to $2 million.

Is this true?

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