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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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