The Truth About Men, Women and Work

http://humanresources.about.com/od/worklifebalance/a/business_women.htm
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2114439-2,00.html

First there was the mancession. Then there was the economic war on women. Over the past four years, the monthly jobs figures have been spun like a roulette wheel to declare which sex is gaining--or losing--from recession and recovery. April's numbers show that women gained 73% of the 115,000 new jobs added to the U.S. economy. Looks like we have a winner.

Or do we? The figures would seem to be welcome news for the Obama Administration, which has been battling accusations by Republican challenger Mitt Romney that the President's economic policies have hurt women. Yet since the recovery began in June 2009, women have gained only 16% of the new jobs created. What's more, over the past year or so, the workforce-participation rate of women ages 45 to 54 has "dropped like a stone," says Julia Coronado, chief North America economist at BNP Paribas. "Married, single-earner households are on the rise, and married women are increasingly choosing not to work, in part because many are finding that the jobs they can get simply aren't worth it in terms of pay, commute, hassle, etc."

Which goes directly to the problem with those seemingly great April numbers: most of that big job grab by women occurred in fast-growing but low-paying areas like temporary help, private education, and health, leisure and hospitality. Even in higher-end areas like professional and business services, where women made gains, 51% of the jobs they nabbed were temporary, vs. 27% for men. "Both women and men are gaining jobs in the private sector, but men are getting the more secure jobs," notes Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women's Law Center. No wonder at least some married couples are deciding to live on one salary when the economic trade-off of lower-paying jobs, child-care costs, taxes and commuting doesn't add up.

The real problem for women is that they've suffered more casualties in the war on the public-sector workforce that the Republicans have egged on. Budget cuts at the federal, state and local levels of government--cuts that are at the core of the GOP's smaller-government mantra--amount to 601,000 lost public-sector jobs since June 2009. And two-thirds of those jobs were held by women. University of California, Berkeley, professor Laura Tyson, a former head of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, believes that's one big reason women over age 45 are leaving the workforce in droves. "If you've been a decently paid teacher or a public administrator or a welfare worker your whole life and you see what's available now, that might well make you leave the workforce." Not necessarily by choice, either. Women are now a greater percentage of the long-term unemployed than they were a couple of years ago.

The other thing that's hurt women has been, ironically, the thing that's helped men: the resurgence of manufacturing. When Detroit tanked, it produced a mancession, and so it's only natural that the recovery of factory jobs has disproportionately benefited men, who hold most of those jobs. Women represent only about 23% of workers in the durable-goods sector, for example, which includes things like automobiles and heavy machinery, and those are the American manufactured goods that have been doing best, thanks to the building and consumption boom in the emerging markets.
Of course, women will still benefit over the longer term from the fact that they are earning the majority of college degrees (about 60% of them). Those who are well educated, particularly with degrees in math or science, are starting on an equal footing with men or in some cases an even better one. In many wealthy, urban areas of the U.S. and Europe, young, well-educated and (crucially) childless women now outearn their male peers.

But both the success of women at the top and the scramble for lower-paying jobs at the bottom reflect a larger and more worrisome trend, the bifurcation of the American workforce. It's the core economic issue of our time, and it's likely to be one that hits women hardest. The middle-income jobs that are returning are factory gigs going mainly to men. The public-sector positions that sustained many women and allowed them to balance work and family over the past four decades are going, going, gone.

What's left are the extremes: those with demanding, well-paid jobs who can afford help to manage their lives, homes and children--and those who provide that help. In that sense, the shrinking middle may turn out to be not just a class issue but a gender one as well.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2114439,00.html#ixzz2PoVECCTt

Women Will Rule the World

 Women Will Rule the World Jul 5, 2010 8:00 PM EDT

Men were the main victims of the recession. The recovery will be female.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/06/women-will-rule-the-world.html

 

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Rajni Bector, 67, a food specialist and one of the first female entrepreneurs in Ludhiana, Punjab India. (Reuben Singh / Reuben Singh)

When historians write about the great recession of 2007–08, they may very well have a new name for it: the Mancession. It’s a term already being bandied about in the popular media as business writers chronicle the sad tales of the main victims of the recession: men. They were disproportionately represented in the industries hit hardest during the downturn, including financial services, manufacturing, and construction, and their higher salaries often put them first in the line of fire. Men are the victims of two thirds of the 11 million jobs lost since the recession began in 2007; in August 2009, when U.S. male unemployment stood at 11 percent (versus 8.3 for women), it was the largest unemployment gender gap in the postwar era. Those numbers have improved, a bit—new unemployment figures show men at 9.9 percent and women at 7.8—but not enough to stop Larry Summers, the president’s top economic adviser, from speculating recently, that “when the economy recovers, five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working.”

Click to view a gallery of secure jobs for the next decade. (Robert Nickelsberg / Getty Images)

If they are lucky, they’ll have wives who can take care of them. American women are already the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two thirds of American households; in the European Union, women filled 75 percent of the 8 million new jobs created since 2000. Even with the pay gap factored into the equation, economists predict that by 2024, the average woman in the U.S. and a number of rich European countries will outearn the average man. And she’ll be spending that money: as a new book on female economic power, Influence, points out, American women are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases; they hold 89 percent of U.S. bank accounts, 51 percent of all personal wealth, and are worth more than $5 trillion in consumer spending power—larger than the entire Japanese economy. On a global level, women are the biggest emerging market in the history of the planet—more than twice the size of India and China combined. It’s a seismic change, and by all indications it will continue: of the 15 job categories expected to grow the most in the next decade, all but two are filled primarily by women.

It’s not hard to imagine that such a drastic shift has forced multinational corporations to take note—and ensure their products and services appeal to female consumers. But there are more important implications as well, like the reality that, because it’s women, not men, who are starting businesses on their own, it will be women, not men, who will one day employ a majority of workers. As with most trends involving female empowerment, the shift has begun in the U.S., and is emanating outward. Between 1997 and 2002, female-led firms grew by nearly 20 percent, while overall firms grew by just 7 percent; by 2005, women represented more than a third of people involved in entrepreneurial activity, and the number of women-owned firms continues to grow at twice the rate of all U.S. firms. Indeed, it’s not a leap to say that female entrepreneurship may help revive the fortunes of the middle class in the developed world.

In the United States, nearly all net job creation since 1980 has been generated by firms operating for fewer than five years—and that number is only likely to rise as more multinationals send their new jobs to countries with cheaper labor. “Any economist will tell you, the job creation [we] need to fuel any kind of middle class is not going to come from corporations, it’s going to come from small businesses,” says Harvard business professor Nancy Koehn. “With that in mind, what we need to start thinking about is how we capitalize on this [vast network] of women entrepreneurs. How do we nurture them? How do we fund them? How do we use [this] national asset?”

It’s a question that policymakers all over the world are beginning to ask themselves. Nowhere is this need for talent more clear than in high-growth developing nations, most notably the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), where economic and business growth is dramatically outpacing the production of talented employees, particularly at the higher ends of the food chain. Here, the rise of female economic power will be a transformative growth engine, in large part because education levels among women have vastly improved from where they were even 10 years ago. It’s a well-known fact that in the United States, women outnumber men in the attainment of college degrees (by 20 percent), as well as graduate and law diplomas; 72 percent of high-school valedictorians were women last year. But it’s less well known that the same is true in many developing nations. In Brazil, the United Arab Emirates, and Russia, the vast majority of college graduates are female. In Russia, for example, 86 percent of women ages 18 to 23 are enrolled in tertiary education. Improving education for women can have a dramatic impact on economies: the Women’s Learning Partnership estimates that for every year beyond fourth grade girls attend school, a country’s wages rise by 20 percent, and the child-mortality rate dips by 10 percent. And when the average education level of a country’s adult female population increases by one year, the share of women in the workforce increases by nearly 1 percent
Educated BRIC women have already begun to gain workforce traction: they make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of BRIC workers as a whole, and in three of the four BRIC nations, female labor-force participation rose from 2007 to 2008. There’s every reason to believe the trend will only speed up. As the authors of a new Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP) study on female talent in emerging markets note, the women in developing nations are more likely to describe themselves as ambitious than the men are. Eighty-five percent of women in India and 92 percent in the UAE consider themselves “very ambitious”; in Brazil, India, China, and the UAE, at least 75 percent of women aspire to hold a top job (compare these figures with the mere 36 percent of U.S. women who consider themselves very ambitious). Certainly, the need for greater economic parity drives some of this (in poor countries, the gender wage gap is still quite large). But experts also believe the legacy of communism may have provided a surprisingly beneficial lesson to today’s capitalists: as one Chinese HR leader told researchers, “communism has always emphasized that women can and should do whatever men can do…We often find female candidates to be as competitive, if not more so, than their male counterparts.”

Click to view a timeline of women's rights at work.

The debate over women in the workforce is still fresh and exciting in the developing world. In the United States, and the West more generally, we’ve reached what Rosalind Hudnell, the head of diversity and inclusion at the Intel Corporation, calls a state of “gender fatigue.” “Like this is an old issue; we’re done,” she says. Meanwhile, in emerging markets—countries like China, India, and Brazil—Hudnell is seeing an awakening. When, 18 months ago, the company’s Chinese offices organized networking groups for their female employees, the result was as explosive as the nation’s economic growth. “Two years ago, if you’d [told me] that my fastest-growing focus will be women in China, I would have said, ‘Yeah, right,’?” Hudnell says.

With the state of the economy as it is, corporations are starting to realize that women may be their best hope. Firms like Intel spend increasing time and money mentoring female employees because they consider it a key competitive edge in the global talent wars. Many studies show that companies with more women on their boards do better financially than those with less. A recent McKinsey survey determined that, of companies who’d made efforts to empower women in emerging markets, 34 percent reported increased profits, and another 38 percent said they expected to see profit as a direct result of those efforts. There have been many theories as to why women improve business. Recent research from the London Business School suggests that productivity levels go up when men and women work together in tandem—in part because gender parity counters the idea of group-think. Whatever the reason, there is clearly a business case for workplace equality—and the effects have the potential to transform national economies that are struggling.

The World Economic Forum has estimated that closing the remaining employment gender gap in the United States would increase U.S. GDP by up to 9 percent; in BRIC countries, as well as the N-11 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam), the Center for Work-Life Policy estimates that utilizing women could push per capita income up by 14 percent by 2020, and 20 percent by 2030. “Study after study,” says the White House director of public engagement, Christina Tchen, “shows that increasing education levels and prosperity of women and girls has been able to contribute to social stability and economic progress.” In developing countries, the social effects of female economic empowerment are particularly evident, since women reinvest 90 percent of their income into community and family, compared with 30 to 40 percent reinvested by men.

It’s clear that challenges remain—not just at home, but around the world. Women in the U.S. may be working more, and in greater numbers, but women are still just 3 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and make 77 cents on the dollar. Even as women rise in power, gender discrimination is still prevalent in the developing world, with more than a quarter of men and women in Brazil, India, China, and the UAE saying they believe that women are treated unfairly at work. (In India, the figure is 45 percent.) There are also cultural constraints that limit women’s upward mobility: in China and Russia, for example, extreme jobs (requiring 71 and 73 hours of work a week, respectively) are a challenge to everyday life, especially child rearing. Societal disapproval of women traveling alone often caps female careers—as higher-level positions require more frequent travel—and in many countries, like India and Brazil, women simply feel unsafe getting to and from work.

That said, women in these countries also have unexpected advantages. Extended families, for example, mean they often have to grapple less with issues of child care, and feel less fraught over work/life balances than their Western peers. This unsung freedom of the developing world could help shift the standard workplace culture that was shaped mainly by white, Western males. “You can’t possibly be a highly productive, competitive country unless you engage your full workforce,” says Laura Liswood, a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs. “There is a real possibility that these [new] companies will leapfrog over the cultural norms and structure [currently in place in Western nations]. They almost have a blank slate.” Moreover, while gender issues can seem both divisive and passé in the West (CWLP found that American women care much more about them than men), in BRIC nations, it’s both women and men who believe women suffer from workplace sexism. Discrimination in these nations is more overt, but there’s also a greater willingness to acknowledge it, according to the center’s research.

But the most important shifts won’t be the result of well-meaning inclusion programs run by bosses of either gender. They will be the result of the economic facts that favor women, particularly in the world’s most vibrant markets. “The growth rate in Brazil last quarter was 9 percent, and 60 percent of college grads in Brazil were women,” says CWLP’s Sylvia Ann Hewlett. “Put those two numbers together, and guess what? You might have a revolution.”

Certainly, history would support it. In the 1880s and 1890s, American women poured into factories, hospitals, and retail stores, typically to work as factory hands or clerks, expanding women’s sense of their own power. It was, then, no coincidence that women earned the right to vote not long after, says Harvard’s Koehn, a historian. The same connection can be drawn from women workers during WWII, who, by 1945, made up almost 30 percent of the workforce. In India, as more women have started working in call centers and back-office businesses, they’ve begun living—for the first time in history, in large numbers—on their own. This time around, perhaps the revolution will simply be the way we think about workplace culture. “I think women are really going to shake up the workplace over the next 15 years,” says Koehn. “This is just the beginning of a tsunami of change—and it’s far bigger than any single organization.” Or any single nation. If we’ve just come through a “mancession,” then the recovery, it seems, will be feminized.

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women

by Hanna Rosin – review

Women have taken over, apparently. If only, argues Mary Beard

 

 

The myth of matriarchy is one of patriarchy's oldest inventions. Those stories of primitive warrior queens, buxom mother goddesses and tribes of Amazons are no evidence at all that women did once rule the world. As most anthropologists have recognised for decades, these are cautionary tales invented by men to justify their own dominance. The important point about matriarchy in most of these myths is that the women rulers made a terrible mess of things or they imposed regimes of such terror (who would like to be ruled by the Amazons, after all?) that there was no choice but to overthrow them. And that, according to the logic of the stories, is why we now have patriarchy.

1. Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book

Most of the literary fantasies about women in charge, ancient or modern, make the same point. In Aristophanes' 5th-century BC comedy, Assemblywomen, for example, women have taken charge of Athens, and bring in a whole series of hare-brained pseudo-egalitarian measures – including the requirement that men had to sleep with ugly old women before pretty young ones. It would have been enough to reconcile the average Athenian man to any kind of male government, no matter how incompetent.
Hanna Rosin's The End of Men is yet another version of the old story, but with a twist: she claims that we are now actually living under a matriarchy, or very soon will be. This, I imagine, will come as something of a surprise to most women on the planet. But Rosin's book teems with examples of the decline of modern man and the rise of woman in terms of money, education, employment and power. Men, she argues, have been the major victims of the recession, failing to adapt to the decline in manufacturing industries and to the challenges of post-modernity. If you believe her, vast numbers of the male American working class have been transformed from proud breadwinners to unemployable couch potatoes. Their womenfolk, on the other hand, have seized the opportunities offered by the economic changes of the last few years; they have retrained, requalified and taken the driving seat.
In 2009, she points out, American women outnumbered men in the workforce for the first time. They now outnumber men on degree courses by a ratio of three to two, and are even beginning to "crowd out men" on science and engineering courses. More and more families depend on the woman as the main breadwinner (almost 64% in Washington DC). And of the 15 most expanding job categories in the US, 12 are now dominated by women. "Indeed," she writes, "the US economy is in some ways becoming a kind of travelling sisterhood." And it is not just in North America. Examples from all over the globe – the first openly lesbian head of state in Iceland, the 80% of college-educated Brazilian women who aspire to top jobs, the female majority in the Rwandan parliament – make the new matriarchy seem more or less a fait accompli.
I don't know exactly what to make of all these facts and figures, but I strongly suspect that they have been rather carefully selected and presented. Rosin herself admits that the dominance of female breadwinners in Washington DC "is largely because the city has so many poor single mothers". It is also the case that the majority of those expanding job categories she refers to are in the caring (ie relatively low-paid) professions, and it is these that underpin the "travelling sisterhood" that supposedly defines the US economy; or, as she puts it, "professional women leave home and enter the work force, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill" (not "sisterhood" in the traditional feminist sense then). Besides, she has very little to say about the fact stressed in most studies of gender in the US workforce: namely that women's pay still lags far behind that of men, across the board, with women's salaries averaging 20% less than those of their male counterparts. If this is a budding matriarchy it is a surprisingly poorly paid one.
The headline thesis of The End of Men is, of course, eyecatching (and, according to the book's optimistic publicity material, the title has already "entered the lexicon" as dramatically as The Second Sex or The Feminine Mystique). But, on a closer reading, it is not entirely clear how far Rosin believes it, or at least how far she thinks that women are the straightforward beneficiaries of the power-shifts she detects.
At one point, she writes of visiting a community college in Kansas City and getting into an elevator with a young woman still dressed in her medical assistant's scrubs – who promptly "fell asleep between the first and fourth floors, so tired was she from studying, working, and taking care of her kids by herself". This sounds like the usual downside of women's careers for 100 years or so: "getting on" requires superhuman energy and stamina.
That is certainly the message of several of the case studies in which she explores a new style of male-female domestic partnership that goes hand in hand with greater female power. She calls these "see-saw marriages", in which men and women divide the responsibilities differently at different periods of the relationship – with sometimes the man, sometimes the woman taking on more of the domestic, or more of the money-raising duties. It looks fine on paper, but again, it turns out to be the same old story of two jobs not one (wage earner and domestic goddess) for the women, even the relatively affluent.
Take the unfortunate Sarah, a successful lawyer married to a "mediocre house dude" (his words) called Steve, who stays at home to mind the baby. Sarah's daily routine includes making the family's breakfast before she leaves for work and washing the diapers when she gets back in the evening. Steve defines his domestic tasks as "smearage containment", which means putting the dirty diapers in the sink, but not actually washing them. Sarah, needless to say, is her own worst enemy in refusing to use disposables. So much for the new matriarchy.
It is perhaps to the credit of Rosin (and of her honesty) that if you did not know the title of the book you might very likely imagine that whole sections of it had been written to support precisely the opposite argument. One chapter, entitled "The Top", is a fairly standard discussion of how women still haven't made it there, or not at any rate to the very pinnacle. She does stress a few exceptions. "The job of Secretary of State has been virtually reserved for a woman," she insists (though I'm not sure that three out of the last eight really suggests female dominance). Or: "The number of female heads of state, although still small, has suddenly doubled in the last several years" (is that from four to eight, or five to ten?).
But for the most part she puzzles, as many have before, about women's absence from the boardroom, and their apparent unwillingness to demand the pay rises that their male counterparts achieve. "Women," she explains, "carry psychological baggage into the workplace: a lingering ambivalence about their ambition, a queasiness about self-promotion, a duty to family that they can't or won't offload on to their husbands, etc etc."
So how does all that fit with the arguments about the new matriarchy? All Rosin can offer is the old gradualist answer. "The world does not flip upside down overnight. Men have been in charge for about forty thousand years, and women have started edging them for about forty. So of course there are still obstacles at the top."
It turns out then that we haven't actually put a new matriarchy in place. This version is as mythical as any other – and Rosin, to give her her due, probably knows it.

Women and work

Women and work

We did it!

The rich world’s quiet revolution: women are gradually taking over the workplace

Dec 30th 2009 |From the print edition

Getty Images

AT A time when the world is short of causes for celebration, here is a candidate: within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce. Women already make up the majority of university graduates in the OECD countries and the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the United States. Women run many of the world's great companies, from PepsiCo in America to Areva in France.
Women's economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times. Just a generation ago, women were largely confined to repetitive, menial jobs. They were routinely subjected to casual sexism and were expected to abandon their careers when they married and had children. Today they are running some of the organisations that once treated them as second-class citizens. Millions of women have been given more control over their own lives. And millions of brains have been put to more productive use. Societies that try to resist this trend—most notably the Arab countries, but also Japan and some southern European countries—will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens.
This revolution has been achieved with only a modicum of friction (see article). Men have, by and large, welcomed women's invasion of the workplace. Yet even the most positive changes can be incomplete or unsatisfactory. This particular advance comes with two stings. The first is that women are still under-represented at the top of companies. Only 2% of the bosses of America's largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women. They are also paid significantly less than men on average. The second is that juggling work and child-rearing is difficult. Middle-class couples routinely complain that they have too little time for their children. But the biggest losers are poor children—particularly in places like America and Britain that have combined high levels of female participation in the labour force with a reluctance to spend public money on child care.
Dealing with the juggle
These two problems are closely related. Many women feel they have to choose between their children and their careers. Women who prosper in high-pressure companies during their 20s drop out in dramatic numbers in their 30s and then find it almost impossible to regain their earlier momentum. Less-skilled women are trapped in poorly paid jobs with hand-to-mouth child-care arrangements. Motherhood, not sexism, is the issue: in America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less. And those mothers' relative poverty also disadvantages their children.
Demand for female brains is helping to alleviate some of these problems. Even if some of the new theories about warm-hearted women making inherently superior workers are bunk (see article), several trends favour the more educated sex, including the “war for talent” and the growing flexibility of the workplace. Law firms, consultancies and banks are rethinking their “up or out” promotion systems because they are losing so many able women. More than 90% of companies in Germany and Sweden allow flexible working. And new technology is making it easier to redesign work in all sorts of family-friendly ways.
Women have certainly performed better over the past decade than men. In the European Union women have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000. In America three out of four people thrown out of work since the “mancession” began have been male. And the shift towards women is likely to continue: by 2011 there will be 2.6m more female than male university students in America.
The light hand of the state
All this argues, mostly, for letting the market do the work. That has not stopped calls for hefty state intervention of the Scandinavian sort. Norway has used threats of quotas to dramatic effect. Some 40% of the legislators there are women. All the Scandinavian countries provide plenty of state-financed nurseries. They have the highest levels of female employment in the world and far fewer of the social problems that plague Britain and America. Surely, comes the argument, there is a way to speed up the revolution—and improve the tough lives of many working women and their children?
If that means massive intervention, in the shape of affirmative-action programmes and across-the-board benefits for parents of all sorts, the answer is no. To begin with, promoting people on the basis of their sex is illiberal and unfair, and stigmatises its beneficiaries. And there are practical problems. Lengthy periods of paid maternity leave can put firms off hiring women, which helps explain why most Swedish women work in the public sector and Sweden has a lower proportion of women in management than America does.
But there are plenty of cheaper, subtler ways in which governments can make life easier for women. Welfare states were designed when most women stayed at home. They need to change the way they operate. German schools, for instance, close at midday. American schools shut down for two months in the summer. These things can be changed without huge cost. Some popular American charter schools now offer longer school days and shorter summer holidays. And, without going to Scandinavian lengths, America could invest more in its children: it spends a lower share of its GDP on public child-care than almost any other rich country, and is the only rich country that refuses to provide mothers with paid maternity leave. Barack Obama needs to measure up to his campaign rhetoric about “real family values”.
Still, these nagging problems should not overshadow the dramatic progress that women have made in recent decades. During the second world war, when America's menfolk were off at the front, the government had to summon up the image of Rosie the Riveter, with her flexed muscle and “We Can Do It” slogan, to encourage women into the workforce. Today women are marching into the workplace in ever larger numbers and taking a sledgehammer to the remaining glass ceilings

Womenomics

Schumpeter

Womenomics

Feminist management theorists are flirting with some dangerous arguments

Dec 30th 2009 |From the print edition

 

 

Illustration by Brett Ryder

THE late Paul Samuelson once quipped that “women are just men with less money”. As a father of six, he might have added something about women's role in the reproduction of the species. But his aphorism is about as good a one-sentence summary of classical feminism as you can get.
The first generations of successful women insisted on being judged by the same standards as men. They had nothing but contempt for the notion of special treatment for “the sisters”, and instead insisted on getting ahead by dint of working harder and thinking smarter. Margaret Thatcher made no secret of her contempt for the wimpish men around her. (There is a joke about her going out to dinner with her cabinet. “Steak or fish?” asks the waiter. “Steak, of course,” she replies. “And for the vegetables?” “They'll have steak as well.”) During America's most recent presidential election Hillary Clinton taunted Barack Obama with an advertisement that implied that he, unlike she, was not up to the challenge of answering the red phone at 3am.
Many pioneering businesswomen pride themselves on their toughness. Dong Mingzhu, the boss of Gree Electric Appliances, an air-conditioning giant, says flatly, “I never miss. I never admit mistakes and I am always correct.” In the past three years her company has boosted shareholder returns by nearly 500%.
But some of today's most influential feminists contend that women will never fulfil their potential if they play by men's rules. According to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox and Alison Maitland, two of the most prominent exponents of this position, it is not enough to smash the glass ceiling. You need to audit the entire building for “gender asbestos”—in other words, root out the inherent sexism built into corporate structures and processes.
The new feminism contends that women are wired differently from men, and not just in trivial ways. They are less aggressive and more consensus-seeking, less competitive and more collaborative, less power-obsessed and more group-oriented. Judy Rosener, of the University of California, Irvine, argues that women excel at “transformational” and “interactive” management. Peninah Thomson and Jacey Graham, the authors of “A Woman's Place is in the Boardroom”, assert that women are “better lateral thinkers than men” and “more idealistic” into the bargain. Feminist texts are suddenly full of references to tribes of monkeys, with their aggressive males and nurturing females.
What is more, the argument runs, these supposedly womanly qualities are becoming ever more valuable in business. The recent financial crisis proved that the sort of qualities that men pride themselves on, such as risk-taking and bare-knuckle competition, can lead to disaster. Lehman Brothers would never have happened if it had been Lehman Sisters, according to this theory. Even before the financial disaster struck, the new feminists also claim, the best companies had been abandoning “patriarchal” hierarchies in favour of “collaboration” and “networking”, skills in which women have an inherent advantage.
This argument may sound a little like the stuff of gender workshops in righteous universities. But it is gaining followers in powerful places. McKinsey, the most venerable of management consultancies, has published research arguing that women apply five of the nine “leadership behaviours” that lead to corporate success more frequently than men. Niall FitzGerald, the deputy chairman of Thomson Reuters and a former boss of Unilever, is as close as you can get to the heart of the corporate establishment. He proclaims, “Women have different ways of achieving results, and leadership qualities that are becoming more important as our organisations become less hierarchical and more loosely organised around matrix structures.” Many companies are abandoning the old-fashioned commitment to treating everybody equally and instead becoming “gender adapted” and “gender bilingual”—in touch with the unique management wisdom of their female employees. A host of consultancies has sprung up to teach firms how to listen to women and exploit their special abilities.
The new feminists are right to be frustrated about the pace of women's progress in business. Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission calculated that, at the current rate of progress, it will take 60 years for women to gain equal representation on the boards of the FTSE 100. They are also right that old-fashioned feminism took too little account of women's role in raising children. But their arguments about the innate differences between men and women are sloppy and counterproductive.
People who bang on about innate differences should remember that variation within subgroups in the population is usually bigger than the variation between subgroups. Even if it can be established that, on average, women have a higher “emotional-intelligence quotient” than men, that says little about any specific woman. Judging people as individuals rather than as representatives of groups is both morally right and good for business.
Caring, sharing and engineering
Besides, many of the most successful women are to be found in hard-edged companies, rather than the touchy-feely organisations of the new feminist imagination: Areva (nuclear energy), AngloAmerican (mining), Archer Daniels Midland (agribusiness), DuPont (chemicals), Sunoco (oil) and Xerox (technology) all have female bosses. The Cranfield School of Management's Female FTSE 100 Index reveals that two of the industries with the best record for promoting women to their boards are banking and transport.
Women would be well advised to ignore the siren voices of the new feminism and listen to Ms Dong instead. Despite their frustration, the future looks bright. Women are now outperforming men markedly in school and university. It would be a grave mistake to abandon old-fashioned meritocracy just at the time when it is turning to women's advantage.

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

THE ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER

By W. Somerset Maugham

When I was a very small boy I was made to learn by heart certain of the fables-of La Fontaine, and the moral of each was carefully explained to me. Among those I learnt was "The Ant and the Grasshopper", which is devised to bring home to the young the useful lesson that in an imperfect world industry is rewarded and giddiness punished. In this admirable fable (I apologise for telling something which everyone is politely, but inexactly, supposed to know) the ant spends a laborious summer gathering its winter store; while the grasshopper sits on a blade of grass singing to the sun. Winter comes and the ant is comfortably provided for, but the grasshopper has an empty larder: he goes to the ant and begs for a little food. Then the ant gives him her classic answer:

"What were you doing in the summer time?"

"Saving your presence, I sang, I sang all day, all night."

"You sang. Why, then go and dance."

I do not ascribe it to perversity on my part, but rather to the inconsequence of childhood, which is deficient in moral sense, that I could never quite reconcile myself to the lesson. My sympathies were with the grasshopper and for some time I never saw an ant without putting my foot on it. In this summary (and, as I have discovered since, entirely human) fashion I sought to express my disapproval of prudence and common sense.

I could not help thinking of this fable when the other day I saw George Ramsay lunching by himself in a restaurant. I never saw anyone wear an expression of such deep gloom. He was staring into space. He looked as though the burden of the whole world sat on his shoulders. I was sorry for him: I suspected at once that his unfortunate brother had been causing trouble again. I went up to him and held out my hand.

"How are you?" I asked.

"I'm not in hilarious spirits," he answered.

"Is it Tom again?"

He sighed. "Yes, it's Tom again."

"Why don't you chuck him? You've done everything in the world for him. You must know by now that he's quite hopeless."

I suppose every family has a black sheep. Tom had been a sore trial to his for twenty years. He had begun life decently enough: he went into business, married and had two children. The Ramsays were perfectly respectable people and there was every reason to suppose that Tom Ramsay would have a useful and honourable career. But one day, without warning, he announced that he didn't like work and that he wasn't suited for marriage. He wanted to enjoy himself. He would listen to no expostulations. He left his wife and his office. He had a little money and he spent two happy years in the various capitals of Europe. Rumours of his doings reached his relations from time to time and they were profoundly shocked. He certainly had a very good time. They shook their heads and asked what would happen when his money was spent. They soon found out: he borrowed. He was charming and unscrupulous. I have never met anyone to whom it was more difficult to refuse a loan. He made a steady income from his friends and he made friends easily. But he always said that the money you spent on necessities was boring; the money that was amusing to spend was the money you spent on luxuries. For this he depended on his brother George. He did not waste his charm on him. George was a serious man and insensible to such enticements. George was respectable. Once or twice he fell to Tom's promises of amendment and gave him considerable sums in order that he might make a fresh start. On these Tom bought a motorcar and some very nice jewellery. But when circumstances forced George to realise that his brother would never settle down and he washed his hands of him, Tom, without a qualm, began to blackmail him; It was not very nice for a respectable lawyer to find his brother shaking cocktails behind the bar of his favourite restaurant or to see him waiting on the box-seat of a taxi outside his club. Tom said that to serve in a bar or to drive a taxi was a perfectly decent occupation, but if George could oblige him with a couple of hundred pounds he didn't mind for the honour of the family 'giving it up. George paid.

Once Tom nearly went to prison. George was terribly upset. He went into the whole discreditable affair. Really Tom had gone too far. He had been wild, thoughtless and selfish, but he had never before done anything dishonest, by which George meant illegal; and if he were prosecuted he would assuredly be convicted. But you cannot allow your only brother to go to gaol. The man Tom had cheated, a man called Cronshaw, was vindictive. He was determined to take the matter into court; he said Tom was a scoundrel and should be punished. It cost George an. infinite deal of trouble and five hundred pounds to settle the affair. I have never seen him in such a rage as when he heard that-Tom and Cronshaw had gone off together to Monte Carlo the moment they cashed the cheque. They spent a happy month there.

For twenty years Tom raced and gambled, philandered with the prettiest girls, danced, ate in the most expensive restaurants, and dressed beautifully. He always looked as if he had just stepped out of a bandbox. Though he was forty-six you would never have taken him for more than thirty-five. He was a most amusing companion and though you knew he was perfectly worthless you could not but enjoy his society. He had high spirits, аn unfailing gaiety and incredible charm. I never grudged the contributions he regularly levied on me for the necessities of his existence. I never lent him fifty pounds without feeling that I was in his debt. Tom Ramsay knew everyone and everyone knew Tom Ramsay. You could not approve of him, but you could not help liking him.

Poor George, only a year older than his scapegrace brother, looked sixty. He had never taken more than a fortnight's holiday in the year for a quarter of a century. He was in his office every morning at nine-thirty and never left it till six. He was honest, industrious and worthy. He had a good wife, to whom he had never been unfaithful even in thought, and four daughters to whom he was the best of fathers. He made a point of saving a third of his income and his plan was to retire at fifty-five to a little house in the country where he proposed to cultivate his garden and play golf. His life was blameless. He was glad that he was growing old because Tom was growing old too. He rubbed his hands and said:

"It was all very well when Tom was young and good-looking, but he's only a year younger than I am. In four years he'll be fifty. He won't find life so easy then. I shall have thirty thousand pounds by the time I'm fifty. For twenty-five years I've said that Tom would end in the gutter. And we shall see how he likes that. We shall see if it really pays best to work or be idle."

Poor George! I sympathized with him. I wondered now as I sat down beside him what infamous thing Tom had done. George was evidently very much upset.
"Do you know what's happened now?" he asked me.

I was prepared for the worst. I wondered if Tom had got into the hands of the police at last. George could hardly bring himself to speak.

"You're not going to deny that all my life I've been hard-working, decent, respectable and straightforward. After a life of industry and thrift I can look forward to retiring on a small income in gilt-edged securities. I've always done my duty in that state of life in which it has pleased Providence to place me."

"True."

"And you can't deny that Tom has been an idle, worthless, dissolute and dishonourable rogue. If there were any justice he'd be in the workhouse."

"True."

George grew red in the face.

"A few weeks ago he became engaged to a woman old enough to be his mother. And now she's died and left him everything she had. Half a million pounds, a yacht, a house in London and a house in the Country."

George Ramsay beat his clenched fist on the table.

"It's not fair, I tell you; it's not fair. Damn it, it's not fair."

I could not help it. I burst into a shout of laughter as I looked at George's wrathful face, I rolled in my chair; I very nearly fell on the floor. George never forgave me. But Tom often asked me to excellent dinners in his charming house in Mayfair, and if he occasionally borrows a trifle from me, that is merely from force of habit. It is never more than a sovereign.

JARMUSCH, INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER

Biography:

At school he was dyslexic, and they thought he was stupid because he jumbled his letters. But he turned out to be smart, a good regurgitator, and passed exams easily.
Jarmusch went to Columbia University in New York, where he did a degree in English and French literature. New York was alive, exhilarating, as far removed from Akron as possible. It was the mid-70s, American punk was about to flourish, and he mixed with a bunch of musicians and poets and actors and performance artists - Joey Ramone, Iggy Pop, John Lurie, Richard Hell. They went clubbing at places like CBGBs and Max's Kansas City, and talked up their ideas.
Jarmusch himself played synthesizer and oddly tuned guitars for the Del Byzantines, a band that opened for many British bands, including Echo and the Bunnymen and New Order. He also wrote, and continues to write, poetry.

Foreign influence:

When one lists the number of filmmakers that Jarmusch alludes to, it reads like a dictionary of the cinema. A quick survey: Jarmusch had all of Antonioni's movies screened before shooting Down by Law (with its Wim Wender-like images provided by cinematographer Robby Müller) because, he has said, Antonioni is so elegant in the way he can let the scene go past its normal length, or the shot even, and the whole weight of the scene changes, the essence'. (Other filmmakers mentioned in the interview include Ray, Kurosawa, Ozu, Godard, Rivette, Eustache, Vertov, Ruiz, Fellini, Lang, Sirk, Ulmer and Vigo.) Why does he use homages? At times it is indeed a wink to his audience, underlining his status as a global filmmaker. More fundamentally, Jarmusch sees something inherently American about this clash (as opposed to integration) of references: 'America's kind of a throwaway culture that's made of this mixture of different cultures. To make a film about America, it seems to me logical to have at least one perspective that's transplanted here from some other culture, because ours is a collection of transplanted influences.' This sense of what it means to be American spawns the educative function of Jarmusch's cinema; his is a kind of model for other Americans who want to make films not based on established Hollywood or television style.
Broken flowers is dedicated to French director Jean Eustach. Jean Eustache made a phenomenal film in the 1960's titled, "The Mother and The Whore". He had an influence on John Cassavetes and likewise both had an influence on Jim Jarmusch. In an interview, Jarmusch said he felt close to Eustache for his commitment to making films in a unique and independent fashion.


Music:

Movies are very musical…To me, music is the most pure form of art in that it communicates something immediately and it doesn't necessarily have to be restricted by your understanding of a language. And film is a lot like music in that a film has a rhythm like a piece of music. You start a film and that rhythm takes you through the story that's being told or the length of time the film lasts. The same way with a piece of music. They're closely related with rhythm: the cutting of the film, the way a camera moves, and the way a story is put together.


Jarmusch as independent filmmaker:

"I'm stubborn. I have to fight. The studios want to be your partner in the creative process. That's why I find most of my financing overseas. I don't let the Money give me notes on my scripts. I don't allow the Money on the set. I don't allow the Money in the editing room. These days, even the little independent studios, they act like Hollywood. Some kid is making a movie for $500,000, and they want the final cut. Seems like the squares are taking over everything."

Jarmusch is every bit as cool as his characters - shades, silver chain attached to his black pants, that thick white hair he's had for ever, and a deep, deep Lee Marvin voice. He looks a little anachronistic, is uncertain about whether to smoke and, despite the great voice fails to catch the waitress attention.

Jarmusch's most perceptive commentator Jonathan Rosenbaum presciently wrote in a 1992 review of Night on Earth:
Jarmusch is mainly honoured and rewarded to the extent that he turns out familiar goods (attitude as style, star as icon, road as the world) rather than assumes any risks. The paradoxical upshot is that our most photogenic representative of artistic independence and freedom is often rewarded for doing the same things over and over again. (178-fifty major filmmakers)
To me, 'independent' means staying independent from your work being dictated to, or formed by, some concept of a marketplace…. 'Independent' means being artistically free.

Peculiarities of Jarmusch’s films:

• He has great emphasis on music in his movies.
• His camera moves so slowly that senses look like stills.
• His movies often have no obvious beginning, no obvious end, and not much of the story in the middle.
• His characters seem so self-consciously cool that you want to slap them.
• His stories are absurd to the point of being unbelievable.
• What makes his stories funny and humane is that they are riddled with uncertainties.
• His characters tend to be losers, drifters, and strays. They’d never say as much, but these are people who don’t know home is.
• His films are existential road movies, whether the characters are driving (Night on Earth, Stranger than Paradise), riding horses (Dead Man) or running and swimming to freedom (Down by Law).
• Often casts musicians as actors in his films.
• His films often involve travelers as well as life after midnight.
• His films are about communication or crippled communication. People who love each other or grew to love each other can talk to each other.
• Dramatic moments are often offstaged in his films.
  
  Quotes:

• "I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. I'm not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me. All they did was reduce his life to the big dramatic moments you could pick out of any biography. If that's supposed to be a portrait of somebody, I just don't get it. It's so reductive. It just seems all wrong to me."
• "It's great that the audience have their own different takes on what they have just seen, and don't know all the answers. Often, I don't know all the answers either.
• "The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events."
• "Aw, man, is that the only adjective they know? It's like every time I make a goddamn movie, the word "quirky" is hauled out in the American reviews. Now I see it's being applied to Wes Anderson, too. All of a sudden, his films are quirky. And Sofia Coppola is quirky. It's just so goddamn lazy."
• "I know. It's all so . . . independent. I'm so sick of that word. I reach for my revolver when I hear the word 'quirky.' Or 'edgy.' Those words are now becoming labels that are slapped on products to sell them. Anyone who makes a film that is the film they want to make, and it is not defined by marketing analysis or a commercial enterprise, is independent. My movies are kind of made by hand. They're not polished -- they're sort of built in the garage. It's more like being an artisan in some way."
• "I consider myself a dilettante in a positive way, and I always have. That affects my sense of filmmaking."
• "I feel so lucky. During the late 70's in New York, anything seemed possible. You could make a movie or a record and work part time, and you could find an apartment for 160 bucks a month. And the conversations were about ideas. No one was talking about money. It was pretty amazing. But looking back is dangerous. I don't like nostalgia. But, still, damn, it was fun. I'm glad I was there."
• "I prefer to be subcultural rather than mass-cultural. I'm not interested in hitting the vein of the mainstream."
• "I'm happiest when I'm shooting the movie. Filming is like sex. Writing the script is like seduction, then shooting is like sex because you're doing the movie with other people. Editing is like being pregnant, and then you give birth and they take your baby away. After this process is done, I will watch the movie one more time with a paying audience that doesn't know I'm there, and then I will never see it again. I'm so sick of it."
• "I never talk to actors as a group. Only one at a time. I talk to them about being their characters. Never, ever, about the meaning of the scene. I don't want the actors overladen with research, so they grow stale."

Golden Rules of Jarmusch:

1. There are no rules. There are as many ways to make a film as there are potential filmmakers. It’s an open form. Anyway, I would personally never presume to tell anyone else what to do or how to do anything. To me that’s like telling someone else what their religious beliefs should be. Fuck that. That’s against my personal philosophy—more of a code than a set of “rules.” Therefore, disregard the “rules” you are presently reading, and instead consider them to be merely notes to myself. One should make one’s own “notes” because there is no one way to do anything. If anyone tells you there is only one way, their way, get as far away from them as possible, both physically and philosophically.
2. Don’t let the fuckers get ya. They can either help you, or not help you, but they can’t stop you. People who finance films, distribute films, promote films and exhibit films are not filmmakers. They are not interested in letting filmmakers define and dictate the way they do their business, so filmmakers should have no interest in allowing them to dictate the way a film is made. Carry a gun if necessary. Also, avoid sycophants at all costs. There are always people around who only want to be involved in filmmaking to get rich, get famous, or get laid. Generally, they know as much about filmmaking as George W. Bush knows about hand-to-hand combat.
3. The production is there to serve the film. The film is not there to serve the production. Unfortunately, in the world of filmmaking this is almost universally backwards. The film is not being made to serve the budget, the schedule, or the resumes of those involved. Filmmakers who don’t understand this should be hung from their ankles and asked why the sky appears to be upside down.
4. Filmmaking is a collaborative process. You get the chance to work with others whose minds and ideas may be stronger than your own. Make sure they remain focused on their own function and not someone else’s job, or you’ll have a big mess. But treat all collaborators as equals and with respect. A production assistant who is holding back traffic so the crew can get a shot is no less important than the actors in the scene, the director of photography, the production designer or the director. Hierarchy is for those whose egos are inflated or out of control, or for people in the military. Those with whom you choose to collaborate, if you make good choices, can elevate the quality and content of your film to a much higher plane than any one mind could imagine on its own. If you don’t want to work with other people, go paint a painting or write a book. (And if you want to be a fucking dictator, I guess these days you just have to go into politics...).
5. Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”