Musings and Amusings

Don’t Lean In. Opt Out 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...

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Womenomics

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...

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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...

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Everyday Money

This is One Inheritance You Don't Want You may have received a big inheritance, even if you're not aware of it: how you handle your money. 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....

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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...

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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...

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Everyday Money

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Investors These are the basics of running your financial life. In a recent study, just 8 percent of college students taking a recent survey gave themselves an A for how well they manage their finances. In a larger, 2014 survey of U.S. adults, 18 percent gave themselves the top grade for their personal finance knowledge. Many people get stressed even thinking about managing their money, seeing it as just...

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Who's Counting?

Gender pay gap in children's pocket money as boys get 12% more than girls. There was also a gender gap last year but it was just 2%. It’s reasonable to assume that the New Zealand situation reflects that of the UK. Boys received almost 12 per cent more weekly pocket money compared to girls, according to the Halifax’s annual pocket money survey of more than 1,200 children and 575 parents. The gender gap grew from only 2 per cent the year before. In...

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Finance & Investment

Finance industry fails to attract female investors Women savers alienated by ads for ‘older rich men.’ The finance industry is failing to attract cash from female investors who feel “alienated” by jargon-filled marketing campaigns designed to appeal to wealthy older men, given my experiences in that industry can’t say I’m surprised. Advertisements used by the investment industry are confusing women rather than inspiring confidence, a...

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Womenomics

Women bosses boost female places in boardroom Having a female boss makes it more likely that there will be more women on your board, according to new research. Headhunter Spencer Stuart, which compiles an annual report reviewing governance at the UK’s largest listed companies, found that boards have significantly more female directors where the chief executive or chairman is also a woman. The proportion of women serving as non-executive directors...

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Why?

The struggle of women in science is written in the stars. In her 1968 poem, Planetarium, the poet Adrienne Rich wrestles with the crisis of female identity through the lens of astronomy. Rich wrote the poem after learning about the case of Caroline Herschel, an astronomer born in Germany in 1750 who discovered eight comets and three nebulae, and drew praise from the King of Prussia and London’s Royal Astronomical Society. Yet Caroline...

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