Thursday 9 November 2017
Musings and Amusings
15:17
Book Review, Bubbles, Debt, Education, Environment, Everyday Money, Finance and Investments, Investing, Money, Small Business, Wealth, Who's counting?
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Manifestoes
for working women, much like working women themselves, are often held to an impossibly
high standard. Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In
was a best-seller, but critics – male and female – tore it apart because it
asked women alone to fix their broken work environment. The criticism is valid;
Sandberg has since admitted that it would be hard for a single mother to follow
her advice. And yet male-authored advice books hardly get torn apart for
failing to address intersectionality, privilege, and structural racism and
sexism along with tips on how to climb the corporate ladder.
Sallie
Krawcheck wants us to know, even before we open Own It: The Power of Women at Work, that she excels in the face of
such impossible standards – in heels, no less. The cover features Krawcheck,
the co-founder and chief executive officer of Ellevest, an online investment
service for women, perched atop a stepladder in black stilettos. Krawcheck gets
how difficult it is for women to break into the executive class. She worked her
way up in the banking industry, only to be let go from C-suite jobs at
Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.
Reflecting on her tenure at Citigroup, which ended
about nine years ago, she says she believes gender played a major role in the
tensions she experienced. The final straw, Krawcheck writes, came when she made
an unpopular suggestion that she believed was in the company’s best interest:
reimbursing some Citigroup customers for losses they’d suffered in the early
days of the 2008 financial crisis.
Given how
she frames her experiences, you wouldn’t expect Krawcheck to write that “being
a woman in the business world is not a liability: it’s power.” The liability,
she says, manifests primarily when women try to affect a masculine demeanor
around the office: when women speak up, as she did, they’re judged more
negatively than men. Women who negotiate the way men do are considered too
pushy. So throughout the book, Krawcheck scatters tips on how to successfully
leverage feminine traits. In a chapter titled “The Obligatory Ask-for-the-Raise
and How-to-Negotiate Chapter (With a Twist),” she suggests that women pretend
during salary negotiations that they’re at a PTA meeting. Research shows that
women perform better when they’re fighting on behalf of someone else, such as
their kids.
Her
approach makes sense, but does it work? Here, Krawcheck runs into some trouble.
She argues that companies resistant to women-friendly policies and practices
will fail – but they haven’t, even as inhospitality remains the norm. The pay
gap persists. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission got almost 13,000
complaints of sexual harassment in 2015, a number that’s held steady since
2011. Women enter corporate America at near-parity with men but occupy only 19%
of C-suite positions, according to a recent survey by McKinsey and LeanIn.org.
Sandberg’s nonprofit. In another recent survey, by MWW Public Relations and
Wakefield Research, three-quarters of respondents said they believe women are
worse at delivering financial returns for companies. The opposite is true:
Numerous studies say that organisations with female managers perform better on
average than those led by men. Whatever Krawcheck’s hopes, women tend to get
penalised no matter how they act on their way to the top. Those who get there
are often set up for failure, tapped to lead only in moments of crisis, when
the odds of succeeding are slim to none, a phenomenon known as the glass cliff.
Ultimately,
Krawcheck argues, there may be no way for women to work within the system and
win, no matter how often they transform perceived liabilities into assets. Her
most useful – and radical – advice comes in chapters that urge women to opt
out. In “Literally Own It: Start Your Own Thing,” she encourages women to start
businesses. When that happens, “there’s no playing by the boys’ club rules,”
she writes. “No asking permission.” Since the system isn’t working for us, it’s
time for us to build our own.
Source:
Bloomberg.com
Thursday 2 November 2017
Womenomics
09:35
Education, Everyday Money, Finance and Investments, Marriage, Musings and Amusings, Rights, Sex, Trends, Wealth
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Why Put a Ring on It?
In America,
women are waiting longer to wed than ever, and many are choosing not to do so
at all. The freedom to pursue high-powered careers and sexually diverse lives
without fear of pregnancy or stigma has turned marriage into a choice, not
destiny. By 2009 nearly half of all American adults younger than 34 had never
married, a rise of 12 percentage points in less than a decade. Unmarried women
outnumber married ones for the first time ever.
Single
women are reshaping politics. As women tend to worry more about reproductive
rights and fair pay, they have favoured Democrats for president since 1988. But
the overall women’s vote hides a divide: in 2012 Mitt Romney narrowly carried
married women, while the unmarried rushed to Barack Obama in their millions, giving
him a 36-point margin. Single women cast almost a quarter of the votes, nearly
guaranteeing his re-election.
Delaying
marriage is also having economic effects: women aged 25 to 34 are the first
generation to start their careers near parity with men, earning 93% of men’s
wages. Single women now buy homes at greater rates than single men, a big step
in independent wealth-building.
These
trends have some conservatives fretting about the decline of the family. The
divorce rate rocketed in the 1970s and 1980s, as women who had rushed into
unhappy marriages discovered they could make their own way. The boom in divorce
encouraged many in the next generation to abstain from marriage rather than
enter a flawed one. Now that marriage is simply one option among many, fewer
women are exchanging vows, but those that do tend to be in happier, more
co-operative relationships.
The divorce
rate, now falling, has plunged fastest among those who stay single longest.
Despite the stereotype that high-achieving women are doomed to spinsterhood,
the truth is that these women are now the most likely to tie the knot, and can
afford to hold out for the right match.
Not all
women are celebrating. For some, singlehood is less a choice than bad luck.
Outside big cities, women who are unmarried into their late 30's are often
pitied. For those who hope to become mothers, biology imposes harsh deadlines –
though breakthroughs in fertility treatments have raised the number of women
giving birth after age 35 by 64% between 1990 and 2008.
In
particular, poor single women face a different landscape. Not all are unmarried
by choice: America’s high incarceration rate has shrunk their pool of men.
Single parenthood is strongly correlated with poverty. Conservatives duly push
marriage as the antidote: the federal government has spent almost a billion
dollars on pro-marriage programmes, to little avail.
Source:
economist.com
Friday 27 October 2017
Frame and Investment
Women Are Owning More and More Small Businesses
Owning your
own business is often touted as the ultimate coup in the working world. You set
your own hours, pursue projects you’re interested in, and maybe work in your
pajamas.
About 29%
of America’s business owners are women, that’s up from 26% in 1997. The number
of women-owned firms has grown 68% since 2007, compared with 47% for all
businesses.
The
progress for minority women has been particularly swift, with business
ownership skyrocketing by 265% since 1997, the report says. And minorities now
make up one in three female-owned businesses, up from only one in six less than
two decades ago.
Why have
minority women had such an apparent breakthrough in the world of
entrepreneurship? It’s partially a numbers game – in 1997 minority women
represented such a small number of owners – less than one million – that even
moderate growth would have likely helped them outpace the growth of the broader
field of women-owners. But Jessica Milli, a senior research associate at IWPR,
says that the characteristics of minority women who opt to open businesses may
also play a role in the runaway growth.
“Women of
colour are more likely to be younger when they first found their business,”
says Milli. “Given today’s climate – when a lot of purchasing occurs online and
social-media usage can really make or break a business this can mean that those
businesses might have a competitive advantage.”
The growing
prevalence of female entrepreneurs of all races didn’t happen by accident.
Instead, it may be proof that legislation targeted at women and minority
small-business owners are having an effect.
Women
business owners still face a significant wage gap and continually have smaller
amounts of start-up capital than their male peers.
For one,
women-owner businesses make only about 25 cents for every dollar their male
counterparts earn. That’s a much larger gap than the one that exists in the
overall labour market, where the median earnings of women were about 83% of
men’s.
Although
challenges like access to capital and wage equality persist having more women
entrepreneurs may be helpful in and of itself when it comes to boosting the
successfulness of female owners. Researchers who studied the effect of peer
relationships on female entrepreneurs in India found that women who received
business training with a friend were more likely to take out business loans,
and more likely to report higher business activity and household income than
peers who received training without a peer. And though equality on all fronts
is still a long way off, the field of entrepreneurship is “moving toward
equality in terms of representation, which is a great thing,” Milli says.
“Overall, the picture is optimistic.”
Source:
theatlantic.com
Tuesday 24 October 2017
Everyday Money
This is One Inheritance You Don't Want
Economics
professors at the University of Copenhagen have found that if a parent was in
default on a loan at the end of the year (their study looked at data from 2004
to 2011), the chance of default for their children was more than four times as
high as for those whose parents were model financial citizens. And that’s
across all levels of parental income, loan balances and other measures,
including that of intelligence.
The study
analysed about 30 million personal loans held by some 5 million Danes ages 18
to 45. It linked that information to government data, including income level
and education for the borrowers and their parents.
The key
finding: The share of 30 year olds in financial trouble – narrowly defined in
this study as being at least 60 days late on a loan at the end of the year -
was 5 percent among those whose parents showed no similar sign of financial
trouble. It was 23 percent for kids whose parents’ records showed financial
trouble.
The study
follows other research concluding that risk attitudes seem to be handed down by
generation. It couldn’t rule out the chance that long-lasting health shocks had
an effect on income that carried over to the next generation, but it did find
evidence that shared common shocks tied to the business cycle, such as a parent
and child unemployed at the same time, weren’t likely causes for the
correlation.
An earlier
study that lends support to the Copenhagen work found that adoptees with
parents who take on more investment risk in their portfolios tend to make financial
decisions for their own portfolios that reflect similar levels of risk. It
concluded that nurture plays a substantially larger role than nature in
financial risk-taking among parents and children.
That’s not
to say our hard wiring plays no role. A 2015 study of identical and fraternal
twins in Sweden concluded that “genetic differences explain about 33 percent of
the variation in savings propensities across individuals,” finding that
parenting plays a part in the differences in the twins’ savings behavior early
on but that the effect waned over time.
Even if
some of our attitudes toward money are hard-wired, no one wants to pass along a
legacy of financial instability. There are many ways to nurture self-control
and highlight the difference between “wants” and “needs.”
If you’re
able to be a smart saver and shopper and make the tough budgeting tradeoffs –
and if you let your kids see all that at the grocery store and when you’re
paying the bills – they’re likelier to adopt these behaviors as adults.
Source: Bloomberg.com
Wednesday 18 October 2017
Why?
Men Aren’t the Smartest When it Comes to Credit
The majority
of men – 61% - describe their knowledge of how credit scores work as good or
excellent.
They might
want to take a refresher.
More than
40% of men and women questioned in a new poll think a person’s age, marital
status, and ethnicity are among the components that determine a credit score.
Of course, none of them are. On all three of those questions, a significantly
higher percentage of men thought those things played a part in a credit score,
according to the annual survey of credit understanding.
The biggest
gender-knowledge gap was about whether marital status affected your credit
score. Additionally, fewer men correctly choose three ways a consumer could
improve a credit score, or maintain a high one.
Rather than
a knowledge gap, what women may suffer from in the credit arena is a confidence
gap: Even though they largely outdid men on the questions, fewer women – 54% -
rated their knowledge of credit as good or excellent.
These
figures replicate those relating to both genders, however, showed a decline in
their understanding of credit compared with last year’s survey. Fewer people
had success with a multiple-answer question about how much more a person with a
low credit score could pay on a 60-month auto loan, as well as with more basic
facts such as how everyone has more than one credit score, and that credit
repair companies rarely wind up actually repairing your credit understanding
and confidence for women in investment – read Girls Just Want to Have Funds for more on this. You can order from
our website www.strategies.co.nz.
Source:
Bloomberg.com
Tuesday 17 January 2017
Musings & Amusings
The gender pay gap persists almost everywhere – and has done so since pre Victorian times.
On average, women earn 18% less than men, according to analysis by Korn Ferry Hay Group, a consulting firm which looked at more than 8m employees in 33 countries. The pay gap is largely explained by a lack of women in highly paid roles. Women make up 40% of the global workforce for clerical jobs but only 17% of executive roles. However, the pay gap shrinks when comparing males and females working at an identical level and function within the same company (but still favours men by 1.6%).In Britain, more than four decades after the equal pay act was introduced, the headline difference between men and women’s pay is still high. A pledge made in 2015 by David Cameron, Britain's prime minister, to “end the gender pay gap in a generation” is an ambitious one. Women only make up around a third of senior management roles there. Workers at the same level but in different companies still face an average pay gap of over 9%.
The United Arab Emirates, on the other hand, has a reverse pay gap. Women at the same level, company and function actually earn 2% more than their male counterparts. This is partly because fewer women participate in the labour force, and those that do tend to have higher levels of education. In 2014 women made up 13% of the labour force; in Britain the share was 46%.
Source: The Economist