I have something to say

Posted by: Joe D. User on April 6, 2010

There, I said it.

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This is a post with a longer title

Posted by: Alexander Sapountzis on April 6, 2010

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A Working Parent Stops Working

Posted by: on March 15, 2010

I wrote my first entry for this blog four years ago. Titled The Kids Are NOT Alright!, it was the first of many similarly themed posts on this blog -- the obesity crisis facing our families, how we can find the time and energy to feed our families healthy meals, and a recipe (braised chicken with mushrooms, from the Mayo Clinic cookbook. Very tasty). I and my fellow bloggers have written hundreds of entries since, about work issues, childcare issues, education issues, behavior, vacation tips, even the decisions we've wrestled with around having one child, three of the same sex, and adoption. And of course, the one that can never get too many comments, Yes or No to Homework. We've also had guest bloggers, the most loyal being Savita Iyer, who gave us the fascinating perspective of a stranger in strange lands.

And now its ending. BusinessWeek is going through some wrenching changes as Bloomberg, its new owner, overhauls and improves it. Most of this blog's writers have left over the years, and today I'm going as well. After 17 years at BusinessWeek I decided it was time to take my buyout and consider new opportunities. Scary? Totally. As a single parent, I don't have another income to fall back on, so I will not be spending the next few months lolling on exotic beaches. But I hope my daughter will see my choice as an inspiration. I never want her to be afraid to try new things, shake up her life, set out on new adventures.
I will miss this blog a lot though, and our many readers. Your comments have been insightful, funny, sad, and yes, hostile at times, but I loved the dialogue.

So, off I go. I urge you to look through our archives and read some of the many great posts over the past four years. Amy Dunkin, our founding editor, put together a wonderful team in 2006, including former colleagues Toddi Gutner and James Mehring. Anne Tergesen and then Lauren Young kept it going after Amy left, and then they moved on. Savita, Minette, Anne Newman and Mauro have all made valuable contributions in the past year. I hope other working parents from Bloomberg step up. Meanwhile, I leave you with two more recipes, below, just to keep the tradition going. The first, a beef, mushroom and onion tart, is from the March issue of Better Homes and Gardens, and it couldn't be simpler, or more delicious. The second is a killer cookie, cashew butterscotch bars, that no one, I mean no one, can resist. I know, I know, neither one is all that healthy, but hey, I'm leaving. Let's break out the treats.

Continue reading "A Working Parent Stops Working"

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Girls' Sports Build More Than Strong Bodies

Posted by: on February 17, 2010

Since I'm a skier, I love watching the Winter Olympics. All those amazing athletes performing amazing feats, on snow and ice no less! This year my 11-year-old daughter is just as engaged, in part because she has so many exceptional women to root for. Downhill racer Lindsey Vonn and the other women starring in Vancouver (how about that Jenny Potter and her three goals against Russia in women's ice hockey!) are surely an inspiration to girls everywhere.

Let's hope so anyway, because a new study from the Wharton School of Business finds that girls' participation in sports makes them more successful in all kinds of endeavors. The author discovered that Title IX, the 1972 law ending gender discrimination in funding of high school and college sports, opened a lot more doors for women than the gates to arenas.

Thanks to Title IX, girls' participation in school sports shot up from one in 27 in 1972 to one in four in 1978. It is now one in three. But their rate of sports participation is not uniform in every state, for a variety of reasons. Wharton professor Betsey Stevenson studied the variations in girls' sports participation state-by-state, and after controlling for a number of other variables was able to correlate those results with their success later in life.

Stevenson found that a 10-point rise in the percentage of girls that participate in high school sports leads to a one percentage point rise in female college attendance and a one to two point rise in labor-force participation. She also found that the advent of Title IX is connected to 20% of the increase in female attainments in higher education in the years since, and 40% of the rise in employment.

“It’s not just that the people who are going to do well in life play sports, but that sports help people do better in life,” Stevenson told the New York Times. “While I only show this for girls, it’s reasonable to believe it’s true for boys as well.”

Stevenson doesn't explain why sports participation confers such benefits, but I have a feeling the lessons learned from sports -- a competitive spirit, the value of team work, the self-confidence conferred by physical abilities -- are critical to success in most fields of endeavor later in life. Anyone have any other theories?

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Are Working Women Too Nice?

Posted by: on February 7, 2010

A blog post titled A Rant about Women has gotten some attention in the blogosphere for asking whether women are at least partly to blame for their inability to break through the glass ceiling. Written by New York University professor Clay Shirky, a well-known expert on the Internet, it starts out thus:

So I get an email from a good former student, applying for a job and asking for a recommendation. “Sure”, I say, “Tell me what you think I should say.” I then get a draft letter back in which the student has described their work and fitness for the job in terms so superlative it would make an Assistant Brand Manager blush. So I write my letter, looking over the student’s self-assessment and toning it down so that it sounds like it’s coming from a person and not a PR department, and send it off. And then, as I get over my annoyance, I realize that, by overstating their abilities, the student has probably gotten the best letter out of me they could have gotten. Now, can you guess the gender of the student involved? Of course you can.

I imagine most of you can guess. It was a man of course, and Shirky goes on to say he's worried that most of the women he's taught, past or present, couldn't write such a letter.

This worry isn’t about psychology; I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.

And that, says Shirky, is what it takes to get ahead. Is he right? Probably (By the way, over 400 commenters so far have responded to his post—he clearly hit a hot button).

We all know and hate self-aggrandizing jerks in the workplace (unless, of course, you are one of them), and one of the reasons we hate them is because they are usually the ones who get the raises, the promotions and the best assignments. In journalism, at least as I've observed, I have to admit that the majority of those types are men. Sure, we all know women that are just as boastful and cutthroat, but they are inevitably categorized as pushy, or worse. When was the last time you heard a man described as pushy? For some reason, the fear of those kinds of labels seems to keep a lot of women under a bushel.

There have been several studies backing up Shirky's observations. In April 2007 the American Association of University Women released a study of college graduates that found that, even after controlling for the number of hours worked and other factors, 10 years after college graduation women earned 12% less than their male peers. The researchers gave several reasons for the differential, including this one: “Women expect less and negotiate less pay for themselves than do men.”

This past July, a study was released in Britain titled Does It Pay To Be Nice? Personality and Earnings in the UK. Analyzing the earnings and personality ratings of some 5,600 men and women, the researcher found that women who adopt a masculine, alpha-female approach in the office earn up to 4% more than than their more passive female colleagues. Women deemed to be anxious or moody -- i.e. neurotic -- earned 3% less.

Incidentally, the study found that, although personality traits were just as important as intelligence in determining a woman's salary, they barely affected a man's earning potential.

From a Daily Mail story on the research:

Researcher Guido Heineck, from the Institute for Employment Research in Nuremberg, Germany, said it showed that personality traits such as 'agreeableness' were not beneficial in the workplace. "Our statistics show that being nice does not pay for women...This is probably, in part, because agreeable people are too passive in conflict situations and are poorer wage negotiators. Traditionally, women are more passive and likeable at work. This shows that to be successful in the workplace, women have to adapt to more alpha male-like behaviour.'

I wonder if the recession will change all this. Men have had it much harder during this recession , absorbing 78% of the layoffs, mainly because they are in higher-paying jobs. As a result, almost half the workforce is now female. A Pew Research Center released in January titled The New Economics of Marriage found that, in 2007, 22% of men were married to women who earned more than them, compared with just 4% in 1970. That percentage may be even higher after the past grueling year.

As women become increasingly responsible for the financial well-being of their families, will they also become more alpha-like, demanding higher salaries and more promotions? What do you think? Should we be raising our daughters to be jerks?

Women may hold half the nation's jobs, but they still have a long way to go to reach the top. Only 20% of top management positions in the U.S. are held by women, as I wrote about in Women in Leadership: The 20% Rule.

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