Why?

Is imposing quotas for women in the boardroom a bad idea? It is according to a recent article in The Economist. The article, as is normal for that August Journal, is reasonably balanced. I say reasonably as it does acknowledge many verities relating to women and work. Some excerpts follow:

There is a powerful business case for hiring more women to run companies. They are more likely to understand the tastes and aspirations of the largest group of consumers in the world, namely women. They represent an underfished pool of talent. And there is evidence that companies with more women in top jobs perform better than those run by men only.

McKinsey, a consultancy, recently looked at 89 listed companies in Europe with a very high proportion of women in senior management posts and compared their financial performance with the average for firms in the same industry. It found that these firms enjoyed a higher return on equity, fatter operating profits and a more buoyant share price. The authors described the correlation between promoting women and doing well as “striking”, though they admitted that they could not prove what was causing what. It is possible that firms that are already doing well tend to hire more female directors.

The evidence from Norway, the first European country to impose strict quotas, suggests that compulsion has been bad for business.

To obey the law, Norwegian firms promoted many women who were less experienced than the directors they had before.

A study found that firms that were forced to increase the share of women on their boards by more than ten percentage points saw one measure of corporate value fall by 18%.

Men do persistently underestimate women, argues Herminia Ibarra of INSEAD, a business school in France. Ms Ibarra looked at more than 20,000 assessments of INSEAD’s executive students. Male work colleagues of the women judged them to be just as capable as the men (or more so) in most areas, but thought that they lacked strategic vision. No such lack was seen when their female work colleagues judged the students.

The way patronage and promotion work within the corporate world may count against women. Nearly all the executives who rise to the top have had a powerful backer.

In all societies, at least for now, women shoulder most of the burden of looking after children and ageing parents. European women devote twice as much time as men to domestic tasks, according to McKinsey. It varies from country to country. Latin men are slacker than Nordics. Italian men spend only 1.3 hours a day on domestic chores, whereas Italian women spend 5.2 hours. In Sweden, the ratio is a somewhat fairer 2.3 hours to 3.4.

Partly because it is so tricky to juggle kids and a career, many highly able women opt for jobs with predictable hours, such as human resources or accounting. They also gravitate towards fields where their skills are less likely to become obsolete if they take a career break, which is perhaps one reason why nearly two-thirds of new American law graduates are female but only 18% of engineers.

Deutsche Telekom, a German media behemoth, has declared that 30% of its middle and upper management jobs will be filled by women by 2015. “We have tried mentoring, coaching and networks, but nothing worked,” says Anne Wenders, a spokeswoman for the company.

The fact remains that promotion and advocating women is in its early years. I am reminded of Kim Campbell the former prime minister of Canada she offers a possible solution to the perceived increase in ethics within corporations – female leaders – in several studies results show that when you have a critical mass of women in an organisation, you have less corruption...lest you think that all we aspire to for the world can be accomplished by male dominated organisations I have only to say to you: Enron, Taliban, Roman Catholic Church.

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Finance and Investments

The acceptable face of Facebook. Few corporate types can charm hardened hacks so effectively. Sheryl Sandberg, the number two at Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, has been glad-handing reporters with spectacular results. The New Yorker says she may “upend Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture”. New York magazine puts her in line for Secretary of the Treasury. Bloomberg Businessweek speculates that she might one day be the president of the United States.

Her sudden lionisation is well-timed. Facebook is expected to go public soon, perhaps this year. It may be the biggest internet flotation ever, with a market capitalisation of more than $100 billion. Investors might be less bullish if the 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, the founder, were in sole charge. Many consider him somewhat socially awkward.

Ms Sandberg, a 42-year-old former Google executive, joined Facebook in 2008; without her, insiders say, it would not have grown from a cash-bleeding start-up to a titan with estimated sales of $2 billion last year. She complements Mr Zuckerberg well. He is technologically brilliant and knows it. She is a good listener with a keen financial brain (she was once an aide to Larry Summers, the then treasury secretary). She provides adult supervision and a professional face to a firm growing so powerful and so quickly that it is bound to clash with governments. Were Mr Zuckerberg to be grilled by senators who have not yet grasped the concept of e-mail, he might let his irritation show. Ms Sandberg would not have that problem.

Since Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman left HP and eBay, female bosses of big Silicon Valley firms have been rare. Ms Sandberg is doing her part to change this by encouraging women to be more assertive and by building an “old girls’ network”. Thanks to her efforts Facebook has more female executives than the average technology firm.

It is to be hoped she succeeds in forming a powerful “old girls network.”

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Everyday Money

We all know that coping with everyday money in our relationships can be like climbing Everest without oxygen but in Japan it appears that before partners are united in wedded bliss, financial status is the yardstick.

It appears that the most widely cited reason for stalling on getting married for men, and second-highest among women, was anxiety over whether the wedded couple would be economically comfortable enough: It seems 3 million yen in annual income is the magic number.

The marriage rate among men sharply diverges between those who bring home at least 3 million yen per year and those whose income comes in under the bar. The marriage rate soared more than two-fold among men both in their 20s and 30s once they made more than 3 million yen or more. Roughly just 9% of men both in their 20s and 30s who make less than that were married. Meanwhile, 25% to 40% of men whose income exceeds that stratum were coupled up.

It may however be that some men are just not that into the idea of getting married. In 2010, the average monthly salary of men up to 34 years old was 313,980 yen, which would be about 3.7 million yen a year, according to the communications ministry.

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Womenomics

Early this past spring, the White House Council on Women and Girls released a much-anticipated report called Women in America. One of its conclusions struck a familiar note: today, as President Obama said in describing the document, “women still earn on average only about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. That’s a huge discrepancy.”

And it’s the same discrepancy existing ever since women started earning money – it’s well documented through 16th, 17th centuries and beyond.

The facts are that women work fewer hours, choose less demanding jobs, and then earn less than men do? The reason for this is obvious: kids. A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.

The most compelling research into the impact of children on women’s careers and earnings—one that also casts light on why women are a rarity at the highest levels of the corporate and financial world—comes from a 2010 article in the American Economic Journal by Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard. The authors selected nearly 2,500 MBAs who graduated between 1990 and 2006 from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and followed them as they made their way through the early stages of their careers. If there were discrimination to be found here, Goldin would be your woman. She is co-author of a renowned 2000 study showing that blind auditions significantly increased the likelihood that an orchestra would hire female musicians.

Here’s what the authors found: right after graduation, men and women had nearly identical earnings and working hours. Over the next ten years, however, women fell way behind. Survey questions revealed three reasons for this. First and least important, men had taken more finance courses and received better grades in those courses, while women had taken more marketing classes. Second, women had more career interruptions. Third and most important, mothers worked fewer hours. In other words, these female MBAs bought tickets for what is commonly called the “mommy track.”

In fact, women choose fewer hours—despite the resulting gap in earnings—all over the world. That includes countries with generous family leave and child-care policies. Look at Iceland, recently crowned the world’s most egalitarian nation by the World Economic Forum. The country boasts a female prime minister, a law requiring that the boards of midsize and larger businesses be at least 40 percent female, excellent public child care, and a family leave policy that would make NOW members swoon. Yet despite successful efforts to get men to take paternity leave, Icelandic women still take considerably more time off than men do. They also are far more likely to work part-time. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this queen of women-friendly countries has a bigger wage gap—women make 62 percent of what men do—than the United States does.

That doesn’t mean that the mommy track doesn’t present a problem, particularly in a culture in which close to half of all marriages break down. A woman can have a baby, decide to reduce her hours and her pay, forgo a pension, and then, ten years later, watch her husband run off with the Pilates instructor. The problem isn’t what it used to be when women had fewer degrees and less work experience during their childless years; women today are in better shape to jump-start their careers if need be. The risk remains, however.

In summary the risk to women’s earnings is what we intuitively know: kids! And in a situation where marriage breaks down that earnings gap is further exacerbated.

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Who's Counting?

A recent Wall Street Journal article reports on male selection. Since the late 1970’s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons.

Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. In "Unnatural Selection," Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that's as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.

Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121—though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China's and India's populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion. If the male number in the sex ratio is above 106, it means that couples are having abortions when they find out the mother is carrying a girl.

High sex ratios mean that a society is going to have "surplus men"—that is, men with no hope of marrying because there are not enough women. Such men accumulate in the lower classes, where risks of violence are already elevated. And unmarried men with limited incomes tend to make trouble. In Chinese provinces where the sex ratio has spiked, a crime wave has followed. Today in India, the best predictor of violence and crime for any given area is not income but sex ratio.

A high level of male births has other, far-reaching, effects. It becomes harder to secure a bride, and men can find themselves buying or bidding for them.

Sex determination has been against the law in both China and India for years, to no effect.

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Musings and Amusings

One of my favourite writers Kay S. Hymowitz suggests that the conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain.

In the struggle for equality between the sexes, it keeps coming down to motherhood, doesn’t it?

If there’s one part of evolutionary thinking that spells bad news for the feminist worldview, it is parental-investment theory, an idea originally proposed by Harvard professor Robert Trivers. Trivers was attempting to clarify Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which went something like this: females of most species are more particular about their mates than males are. That means males must compete for female attention; hence the colourful tails of peacocks and the lovely songs of many male birds.

But why should females be pickier than males? It is also mostly females who feed and guard the kids. In fact, females do nearly everything that increases the survival, and eventual reproductive success, of their offspring. Trivers concluded that females, as he put it, “invest” more than males—and that includes being cautious about their sexual partners, the fathers of their offspring.

In fact, as neuroscientists and geneticists piece together the human brain’s evolution, it’s becoming clear that, if it’s natural for a woman to go crazy over her babies, it’s also natural for a woman to run the State Department. The same human female brain that’s primed with oxytocin is, like the male brain, a fantastically complex machine, capable of reasoning, innovative problem solving, and manoeuvring through hugely varied social environments.

And so in the twentieth century, the big-brained female—Femina sapiens, ready to use her brain in new ways, coincidentally at a time when the intellectually gratifying jobs of an advanced economy were becoming more plentiful. Men invented the antibiotic and the washing machine; today, women in economics departments calculate the benefits of these discoveries for their sex. Better yet, they themselves can make future discoveries in labs and R&D departments.

If human society can sometimes reconfigure biology—by curing polio and increasing athletic stamina, for example—could it reconfigure sexual selection so that fathers and mothers made equal investments in their young children? We don’t have much evidence for thinking so. Until the mid-1990s, Swedish parents got nine months of leave after the birth of a child. By 2004, only 20 percent of fathers were taking the two months. By contrast, a large majority of mothers made full use of their leave. Iceland launched a similar effort to equalize parental investment; fathers there are doing more, but nowhere near as much as mothers.

How do we make it easier for working women who want more time to invest in their young children to work part time, or to return to their jobs after an extended leave? What is the proper role of government in all this?

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Womenomics

A fascinating article in the Sunday Times recently highlighted readers on how to predict a divorce. It appears that credit card statements tell their own story.

So what are the alarm signals that suggest divorce might be in the offing? "There are many transactional signs," explains Professor Ben Fletcher, head of psychology at Hertfordshire University. "Spending on extra lunches or staying in hotels more frequently may indicate an affair. Perhaps the couple shared one weekly food shop and now buy separately. You'll see people preparing for a split by changing their wardrobe or taking on new financial responsibilities."

Welcome to the brave new world of super-crunching, in which large retailers, credit companies, governments and health providers store tens of billions of our financial transactions in huge data warehouses and send computer programmes scuttling through them like electronic spiders, looking for patterns that might mark individuals out as a health risk, debt risk or even terrorist risk.

It's a multibillion-dollar industry and, appropriately for a nation of net-curtain twitchers, the Brits are market leaders.

For example, the Canadian credit company Tire established that customers who went to sports bars were most likely to miss a payment, while buyers of carbon monoxide detectors and premium birdseed were a safer bet.

Each time you call your credit card firm, a computer rush-analyses every transaction you've made over the past 12 months and displays its assessment to the call centre operator answering the phone. And that's just the start.

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Finance and Investments

The biggest investment we make, emotionally and financially is in marriage. Figures vary but almost half of marriages end in divorce. It therefore makes a lot of sense to sort out financial issues prior to marriage - it should in fact be a priority. Here are four areas that should be at the top of the discussion list.

ANCESTRY
How did your parents deal with money, how does that impact how you deal with it, and how might that impact a couple's relationship?

Because so many of our money behaviours are learned, couples should share their earliest money memories - whether their father hid money from their mother or how either parent fretted over the funds available.

CREDIT
While it's about the least romantic subject imaginable, your credit history holds a chunk of your permanent financial record.
Full disclosure on the credit front is useful for two reasons. It is a good starting point for a discussion about what you've learned (or still need to learn) about handling money.

CONTROL
Figuring out who will pay the bills each month may not seem to be an important conversation or assignment. But it gets tricky when both people want to take it on.

AFFLUENCE
Here's another question that tends not to come up during courtship: Just how rich do we want to be one day?

There is no right or wrong answer, it's just about understanding, going into a marriage, what that would really mean.

More on these sorts of discussions can be found in my book "Girls Just Want to Have Fund$."

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Who's Counting?

"I've done the calculation and your chances of winning the lottery are identical whether you play or not." Fran Lebowitz

Victoria University statistical consultant Dalice Sim crunched the numbers yesterday and revealed the odds of winning the big one where rather long. Per line, the chance of picking all six balls plus the Powerball is 0.000000026064, or one in 38,367,096.

With a $12 Powerball ticket, the odds shorten to a paltry one in 6,394,516.

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Everyday Money

When you analyse a mortgage, there are three components which determine the true cost to you: the principal, the rate of the interest you pay and the total amount of interest paid. The principal is the initial amount you borrow, an amount obviously decided by the borrower in conjunction with the lender.

For a $230,000 mortgage, assuming an average interest rate of 7.5 per cent (based on the average interest rates of the past 10 years), the borrower will pay $348,950 over a 30-year term and $279,940 over a 25 year term.

Combine this with the principal amount and you have your total repayments: $509,940 for 25 years, or $578,950 for 30 years.

At the end of the day, you cannot influence the interest rate. At best you might be able to negotiate a discount. But a discount does not have a major impact, if you could secure a lifetime discount of 0.2 per cent (so average 7.3 per cent instead of 7.5 per cent), you will save $11,297 in interest.

What you can influence is the total amount of interest you are paying. Channelling your income through your loan to offset the interest cost, reducing your term, and making extra repayments will all have a substantial impact on the total interest you will pay.

Simply channelling your income can save 12 years' interest worth $147,194 on $230,000 borrowed on a 30-year term at 7.5 per cent interest. This translates to a real interest rate discount of 2.75 per cent, giving an effective real rate of 4.75 per cent.

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Why?

Why is nothing in this world constant? Earthquakes, revolutions, and now the news that the lipstick effect isn't working any more. What? You mean you don't follow the lipstick index? Leonard Lauder will be horrified.

The idea of the lipstick index was conceived by Lauder, from that rather famous family, after the September 11 attacks in 2001. The theory is simple - in times of economic and political uncertainty, people don't spend up big on clothes and accessories, but still want to splurge on a little something for that feel-good factor.

Hence lipstick sales go through the roof while other retailers are hurting. This has been correlated from data during the Great Depression as well as early this century.

The problem is, in our current climate of financial and natural disasters, the lipstick slope seems to be stuck at the bottom, and is refusing to rise.

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Musings and Amusings

It was not amusing to read of Saudi Arabia’s decision to ban voting for women – it’s outrageous.

It did however cause me to muse upon the flagrant disregard not just for women’s “rights” but the failure to see women as beings with intelligence, the ability to think, and to be at least equal to men.

I suppose that here in the West at least chauvinism is fairly covert and some effort is made to allow women to join the ranks of voters and workers. Still, women at the top as a matter of course seem to be a couple of decades away.

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Who's Counting?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the health system could save $1.9 billion if tobacco had never existed. That’s what the Ministry of Health says smoking costs the public system. But you’d be wrong. The ministry’s latest estimate of the cost of smoking has nothing to do with the costs that smokers impose on taxpayers or the costs that could be avoided if smoking were to disappear.

After sorting the population by age, gender, income, ethnicity and smoking status, they compared the costs of providing health services to smokers as compared to non-smokers for each group.

But there are two very big problems with this way of estimating costs.

Everybody dies sometime and most of us will incur end-of-life costs that will be paid for by the public health system.

Suppose that a smoker will die at age 65 and a non smoker will die at 75. Comparing 65-year-old smokers to 65-year-old non-smokers and calling the difference the cost of smoking than rather biases upwards the measured costs of smoking.

We ought to be comparing the health costs of a non-smoker dying at age 75.

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Finance and Investments

Money illusion feeds into the kiwi obsession with property but as a recent Sunday Star Times article points out, many factors should be considered when weighing up the rent-or-buy options. The article quotes economist Shamubeel Eaqub from the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research who says the case for "active" renting instead of buying a home is stronger than ever.

"I think house prices are completely unsustainable on pretty much every valuation methodology," he said. "It seems very expensive not only from the perspective of buying an investment, but also from the perspective of an owner-occupier."
There may be no bubble bursting, and it may take a number of years of zero house price growth, but Eaqub has a "strong view" that prices will fall in real terms.
The Retirement Commission’s David Kneebone gives two scenarios:

1. The home buyer
To buy a median-priced home in July 2010, a median-wage earning buyer would have had to pay $350,147 and have a deposit of around 20%, some $70,029.
At a 6% mortgage rate, the annual repayments over 30 years would take $20,153 or about 32% of household income. At an 8% mortgage rate, closer to the norm, it would cost $24,665, or 39% of income.

That leaves the buyer with $756 a week (out of $1231) for everything else a household needs: food, electricity, phone, petrol, clothes, healthcare and so forth.
Plus, homeowners have to pay for rates, insurance for the house and maintenance that goes with it. If nothing goes horribly wrong, then budgeting $4000 a year provides a reasonable estimate.

2. The renter
Median rent in New Zealand is $300 a week, making the annual cost $15,600 – about $9000-$13,000 less than what the homeowner has to come up with for mortgage repayments, maintenance, insurance and rates.

If the renter invested that $9000 that the homeowner is spending every year at 7% (as per sorted.org.nz), he or she would have $50,000 saved in five years.
If house prices are stagnant in the period, the homeowner would be $100,000 behind the renter (that is, the $50,000 that the renter has gained and the $50,000 the owner paid in extra costs).

If the renter then bought a house, he or she would be buying at a lower "real" price, given inflation over the five years, and the price of the home would have fallen in proportion to the median wage.

Ultimately of course each householder must make their own decision. Generally speaking though renting is the most fiscally sensible option.

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Womenomics

As the number of women participating in the workforce grows, their potential influence on business is becoming ever more important. Seventy-two percent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey believe there is a direct connection between a company’s gender diversity and its financial success.

Yet companies have not so far successfully bridged the gap between men and women in the top levels of management. This is not surprising, since the survey shows that diversity isn’t a high priority at most companies and that there’s great variability in the number of gender-diversity policies that companies, have pursued. For both of these factors, the results suggest that more is better: at companies where gender diversity is higher on the strategic agenda and more related policies are implemented, executives say that company leadership is also the most diverse.

Among respondents at the companies that include gender diversity as a top-three agenda item and those at all companies, there is a 32 percentage-point difference between those who say women fill more than 15 percent of their C-level positions. The degree of support from CEOs and other top managers is another important factor influencing a company’s performance on diversity, respondents say, so it is notable that few companies; top management teams currently monitor relevant programs. The differences executives report at the most diverse companies suggest some ways all companies can improve their gender diversity and, eventually, financial performance.

Looking forward to seeing some action in NZ businesses and boardrooms.

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Musings & Amusings

Marriage is a “public, formal, lifelong commitment to share your life with another person,” as Andrew J. Cherlin defines it in The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today. In the American view, marriage remains the ideal state: only 10 percent of Americans endorse the idea that the institution is outdated, compared to, say, in France, where a third of people think it is. On the contrary, America is seeing a sort of Marriage Renaissance, the impetus for which comes in part from the gay marriage movement, which in itself reflects our reverence for weddings. All the usual explanations for the marrying nature of Americans seem good enough: marriage is seen as a haven in a rough world, an antidote to rootlessness. Marriage says Cherlin is unneeded by people in smaller, more comfortable societies, it developed in response to other historical factors including patterns of life and religion in Colonial America and on the frontier; if is not an innate biological impulse but a socially determined convenience for raising children.

By the time they’re forty, 84 percent of American women have been married, a higher percentage than in other Western nations; and more than half (54 percent) of marriages will have broken up within fifteen years. About the same percentage of “cohabiting relationships” will have broken up even sooner. Americans divorce more often than others do and have more partners, more children out of wedlock, and more abortions.

Along the way, a total of 90 percent of women, almost all of them, will have one partner or more during their lives, and some many, many more. If hypocrisy, as some suspect, is our most salient national quality, Cherlin finds lots of examples in the inconsistency of American religion and law, the one urging us with increasing shrillness to fidelity in sickness and health, the other extending legislation for no-fault divorce.

Cherlin believes that the fragility of the American family is the result of an evolution—an “upheaval”—since the late 1950s, from earlier traditions governing property, progeny, prestige, duty, and God, to a new view that marriage is a “right” on the path to personal fulfilment.

While this an American survey it certainly mimics the Kiwi experience.

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Why?

It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders – of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the "honour" of their families – are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years, but which now spans half the globe.

Consider the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, "honour" killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn's torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body.

Why does this continue?

Just in case you think this is restricted to a foreign country, in NZ, it is feared a woman, Ranjeeta Sharma, 28, was the victim of an honour killing. Her charred body was found on a rural road, near Huntly in the Waikato. Her husband is at the centre of an international manhunt.

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Everyday Money

How do we teach our teenage children how to handle money? The use of money involves logic, facts, and a healthy dose of discipline. These have no place in teenage brains.

If as parents you are over indulging by being the bank of Mum and Dad you certainly won’t inculcate good financial habits so here are some suggestions:

•Give your teenager an allowance after they have completed their appropriate duties, I define these as a contribution to the bottomless well of domestic duties.

•Send your teenager to the supermarket with your shopping list and cash – thus giving them a sharp dose of financial reality.

•Sit down with your teenager and show him or her your budget.

•Suggest that they draft up their own budget – much support will be needed at this point!

•Take your teenager to an advisor and get them started on a KiwiSaver which will give them a kickstart for retirement savings and access to housing finance.

And finally...the best of luck!

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