bizchix

European businesswomen: killed with kindness?

2006-02-19T20:43:00.000-08:00

Interesting article in Newsweek about the dearth of women in senior leadership positions in Europe:

For all the myths of equality that Europe tells itself, the Continent is by and large a woeful place for a woman who aspires to lead. According to a paper published by the International Labor Organization this past June, women account for 45 percent of high-level decision makers in America, including legislators, senior officials and managers across all types of businesses. In the U.K., women hold 33 percent of those jobs. In Sweden—supposedly the very model of global gender equality—they hold 29 percent....

Simply put, Europe is killing its women with kindness—enshrined, ironically, in cushy welfare policies that were created to help them. By offering women extremely long work leaves after children, then pushing them to take the full complement via tax policies that discourage a second income, coupled with subsidies that serve to keep them at home, Europe is essentially squandering its female talent. Not only do women get off track for long periods, many simply never get back on. Nor have European corporations adapted to changing times. Few offer the flextime that makes it easier for women to both work and manage their families. Instead, women tend to get shuffled into part-time work, which is less respected and poorly paid. Those who want to fight discrimination find themselves hamstrung by laws favoring employers.

See the full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11435567/site/newsweek/from/ET/

Women's Health Initiative strikes again

2006-02-18T10:17:00.000-08:00

Two more health bombs were dropped this week from the Women's Health Initiative, this time calling into question the value of calcium supplements and low-fat diets. Here's the summary from the NYT:

The studies were part of the health initiative, which started in the 1990's. The one on the low-fat diet, which included nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79, found that overall, after 8 years, the diet had no effect on the rates of breast cancer, strokes, heart attacks or colon cancer.

Similarly, the calcium and vitamin D study, which included more than 36,000 women, found that taking supplements for 7 years did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer, even though it did produce a 1 percent increase in bone density in the hip.

However, both the low-fat diet and calcium studies have some interesting twists:
- The low-fat diet study showed a 9% reduction in breast cancer risk; right below the 10% threshold required to show statistical significance.
- In the calcium study, "The ones who took most of their calcium, 80 percent of the pills, had a 29 percent reduction in hip fractures. Women over 60 also had a reduction, 21 percent."

It's generally considered bad study design to create sub-groups after the study has been conducted and "fish out" interesting results:

The temptation, statisticians say, is to pick the subgroup analyses that support a favored hypothesis and disregard ones that do not. And the more subgroups that are examined, the greater the chance that some will support that hypothesis.

Put down that Diet Coke

2006-02-12T22:13:00.000-08:00

Today the New York Times reported on a recent study that throws new concerns on the safety of artifical sweetener aspartame. Key excerpts:

"...The research found that the sweetener was associated with unusually high rates of lymphomas, leukemias and other cancers in rats that had been given doses of it starting at what would be equivalent to four to five 20-ounce bottles of diet soda a day for a 150-pound person. The study, which involved 1,900 laboratory rats and cost $1 million, was conducted at the European Ramazzini Foundation of Oncology and Environmental Sciences, a nonprofit organization that studies cancer-causing substances..."

...Dr. Soffritti said he was inspired to look at aspartame because of what he calls "inadequacies" in the cancer studies done by Searle in the 1970's. He said that those studies did not involve large-enough numbers of rats and did not allow them to live long enough to develop cancer.

The Ramazzini study was conducted with 1,900 rats, as opposed to the 280 to 688 rodents used in Searle's studies, and the rats lived for up to three years instead of being sacrificed after two, which is the human equivalent of age 53. "Cancer is a disease of the third part of life," Dr. Soffritti said. "You have 75 percent of cancer diagnoses for people who are 55 years old or older. So if you truncate the experiments at 110 weeks and the rats are supposed to survive until 150 to 160 weeks, it means you avoid the development of cancer at the time when cancer would be starting to arise."

Others have also challenged Searle's studies. Documents from the F.D.A. and records from the Federal Register indicate that, in the years before the F.D.A. approved aspartame, the agency had serious concerns about the accuracy and credibility of Searle's aspartame studies. From 1977 to 1985 — during much of the approval process — Searle was headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is now the secretary of defense...."

"...In an analysis of 166 articles published in medical journals from 1980 to 1985, Dr. Ralph G. Walton, a professor of psychiatry at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine found that all 74 studies that were financed by the industry attested to sweetener's safety...Of the 92 independently funded articles, 84 identified adverse health effects.

When are we going to learn that industry-funded safety studies (never mind those done by a company headed by Donald Rumsefeld) generally aren't worth squat?

So put down that Diet Coke.

Fathers of girls vote more liberally

2006-02-09T10:28:00.000-08:00

Caught this tidbit today in the Seattle Times:

Fathers of girls vote more liberally on women's issues
"...[The] ultimate insiders are the daughters of lawmakers, says Ebonya Washington of Yale University. She found that members of the House who have a daughter voted more liberally on a range of women's issues, notably abortion, than those who did not. Moreover, the more daughters a congressman had, the more likely he was to vote for reproductive rights. ..."

Kosmix is a DEMO God

2006-02-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

The 2006 DEMO God Awards were announced...and you guessed it, Kosmix was a winner!
http://news.com.com/2061-12351_3-6037140.html

Wal-Mart & Healthcare

2006-01-24T18:18:00.000-08:00

Another bad rap on Wal-Mart from today's Seattle Times: "More than 3,100 Wal-Mart employees in Washington [state] were benefiting from state-subsidized health coverage throughout 2004 — nearly double the total for any other company, according to two confidential state reports."

Last week Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat had an interesting perspective on the Wal-Mart healthcare situation: "Whose job is it to insure American workers, anyway? We can't make up our minds. We don't trust government to do it. And we don't want to force businesses to do it, even huge ones with multibillion-dollar profits." (Click here for full story.)

Don't get me wrong - I'm no Wal-Mart fan, but is anyone really surprised by this? This is exactly what we should expect if we leave health care to be "managed" by private sector employers. Companies are formed in order to generate profits, not to run social programs; last I checked, that falls under the government. Oh wait, I guess government is in the business of managing health care -- at least for people that work at Wal-Mart. :-)

Also see Malcolm Gladwell's New Yorker article The Moral Hazard Myth for an excellent discussion of what Gladwell calls "the bad idea behind our failed health care system."

Fun WSJ snippet on vacations

2006-01-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

From today's edition:

"The idea that leisure is pleasing and work is not is patently false," says Geoffrey Godbey, a professor of leisure studies at Penn State University. For one thing, "the idea of shared family leisure is largely mythical," he says, noting that families often split apart during such activities as visiting amusement parks. In addition, in his studies of time diaries, Prof. Godbey found that once a couple has a child, men start to spend more time at work. That may be because the man wants to get ahead in his job to better provide for his child. But it also is possible "it's preferable for him to be at work than to go home and do the very hard work of taking care of children," the professor says.

See the full article (account required).

Two cool sites

2006-01-06T17:01:00.000-08:00

Two cool websites were sent my way recently: LibraryThing and Talk Digger.

While I'm not a huge fan of the names, they're both pretty slick. LibraryThing is a tagging site focused on books -- very fun. Talk Digger is a search engine which focuses on telling you who's linking to a given URL. Pretty amazing coverage -- I 'dug up' a ton more links than I found elsewhere.

Girl Powered Real Estate

2005-12-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on the plane back to Seattle I read about a new Bay Area real estate firm, Girl Powered Real Estate. (See the article here.) The business is built around the concept of helping "awaken women to their own financial independence." Seems like a great idea - hope they do well!

Seems like there could be lots of additional service businesses that could work this same angle of catering towards the upwardly mobile female professional...

NYT Series on Being a Patient

2005-12-16T22:29:00.000-08:00

The NYT is running an interesting series on being a patient in the American health care system. Good quote from today's article:

Sick and Vulnerable, Workers Fear for Health and Their Jobs

...The Catch-22 of the American health care system is that while many people work "for the insurance," when they become too sick to work and are most in need of that insurance, they are most at risk of losing it.

This is particularly true of workers at small companies, which are not covered by existing law. (The Family and Medical Leave Act, for instance, only applies to workplaces with 50 or more employees.)

See the whole article here.

Fortune on Moms' Pay

2005-11-14T14:33:00.000-08:00

Fortune.com reports on an interesting study re: pay bias against mothers. The sample is a little wonky since they did the experiment with Cornell undergraduates as opposed to employers, but it's interesting all the same:

...Correll, an associate professor of sociology, and Benard, a graduate student, conducted an experiment wherein 84 men and 108 women Cornell undergraduates were asked to evaluate several female candidates for the same mid-level management position. All of the hypothetical applicants were equally qualified, with strong success in their previous jobs. The only difference: Some candidates' profiles noted in passing that they had children and were active in parent-teacher associations, while the other candidates' profiles said nothing about children. The result: The student evaluators said they would hire 84% of the women without children, but only 47% of the mothers. (In case you're wondering, the female evaluators were no more kindly disposed toward the moms than were their male peers.) What's more, the gap in starting pay between mothers and childless women averaged $11,000. "In fact, the more children a mother was described as having, the lower the salary that the test subjects said they would offer," notes Correll. "Other studies have shown that the reverse is true for men. The more children they have, the higher the salary offers they receive."...

See the article here.

NYT on email

2005-11-11T10:25:00.000-08:00

NYT has a fun article on email today. Favorite snippets:

Dealing with e-mail - filing it, cataloging it, prioritizing it - has added hours of extra work a week, much of it done by people in the late evening and early morning. In a recent survey by America Online and Opinion Research Corporation, 41 percent of the respondents said they checked their e-mail in the morning before going to work. More than 25 percent said they had never gone more than a few days without checking e-mail, with 60 percent saying they check it on vacation. Four percent looked at e-mail in the bathroom. [MFH: I knew my husband Peter was special!]...

...A survey of 850 professionals this year by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, a consulting firm, found that 55 percent of the companies said they "retain and review" their workers' e-mail; that a quarter of the companies had fired employees for violating e-mail policies; and that 20 percent had their e-mail subpoenaed by courts and regulators at some point. ...

TIME cover story on ambition

2005-11-10T16:20:00.000-08:00

This week's TIME Magazine is running a cover story on ambition. Excerpts below -- login required to view the whole story here.

...."Men and women just differ in their appetite for competition," says Vesterlund. "There seems to be a dislike for it among women and a preference among men....To old-line employers of the old-boy school, this sounds like just one more reason to keep the glass ceiling polished. But other behavioral experts think Vesterlund's conclusions go too far. They say it's not that women aren't ambitious enough to compete for what they want; it's that they're more selective about when they engage in competition; they're willing to get ahead at high cost but not at any cost...

...Just how wealth or poverty influences drive is difficult to predict. Grow up in a rich family, and you can inherit either the tools to achieve (think both Presidents Bush) or the indolence of the aristocrat. Grow up poor, and you can come away with either the motivation to strive (think Bill Clinton) or the inertia of the hopeless. On the whole, studies suggest it's the upper middle class that produces the greatest proportion of ambitious people--mostly because it also produces the greatest proportion of anxious people....

...But a yearning for supremacy can create its own set of problems. Heart attacks, ulcers and other stress-related ills are more common among high achievers--and that includes nonhuman achievers....

For these reasons, people and animals who have an appetite for becoming an alpha often settle contentedly into life as a beta. "The desire to be in a high position is universal," says de Waal. "But that trait has co-evolved with another skill--the skill to make the best of lower positions..."

Is the Bay Area Losing its Luster?

2005-11-07T11:59:00.000-08:00

Another interesting one:

The New York Times: Business Section
Saying Goodbye California Sun, Hello Midwest
By MOTOKO RICH and DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: November 7, 2005

Last year, a half million people left California for other parts of the United States, while fewer than 400,000 Americans moved there. The net outflow has risen fivefold, to more than 100,000, since 2001, an analysis by Economy.com, a research company, shows, although immigration from other countries and births have kept the state's population growing....

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/business/07move.html

According to the accompanying graphic, more people are moving from the San Francisco area to Seattle than the reverse: in 2001 Seattle's net gain of SF residents was 397, and in 2004 this was up to 988. Of course, more San Franciscans are heading to other areas in Northern and Southern California, Vegas, and Phoenix than to Seattle. Also interesting: in 2001, New York City lost 2,443 residents to the San Francisco area...but by 2004, NYC had gained 624 residents from SF.

The big driver cited in the article? Housing costs, of course. Based on my own (admittedly unscientific) observations, Bay Area housing commands a 30-40% premium vs. Seattle.

WSJ Article on Teamwork

2005-11-07T11:36:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article today on teamwork. Snippets below:

Theory & Practice
Teamwork Raises Everyone's Game
Having Employees Bond Benefits Companies MoreThan Promoting 'Stars'
By SCOTT THURM
November 7, 2005; Page B8

...Research from a variety of settings, from hospital operating rooms to Wall Street, suggests that the way people work together is important for an endeavor's success -- even in fields thought of as dominated by individual "stars."

In the case of heart surgery, teamwork literally can be a matter of life and death. Robert Huckman and Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School analyzed the work of Pennsylvania heart surgeons who practice at more than one hospital. The professors found that the death rates from similar procedures performed by the same surgeon can vary as much as fivefold at different hospitals. Most of the time, patients did better in the hospital where their surgeon performed more operations.

...A second group of Harvard professors reached the same conclusion by examining star Wall Street research analysts. They found that stars who jump from one firm to another lose their luster, falling off published lists of "all-stars" for as long as five years. Nearly two-thirds leave the new firms within five years.

"It's the match of analyst and firm that makes a star," says Boris Groysberg, who conducted the study with colleagues Ashish Nanda and Nitin Nohria. When analysts switch firms, "it's hard to re-create that match again," he says. Indeed, the professors found that analysts who brought assistants and salespeople with them to another firm did better than those who did not...

Check out the full article here.

Puget Sound Women of Influence

2005-11-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

The Puget Sound Business Journal just posted its list of the "2005 Women of Influence":
http://seattle.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/seattle/content/feature/?feature_id=276

Out of twenty women listed, only two of them work at Fortune 500 companies: Dana Manciagli from Microsoft and Marie Gunn from Bank of America. So, is this a quirk of how the list was constructed, or are the "most influential" women in Puget Sound really not found in the biggest corporations?

The Fortune 500 companies that are headquartered in Washington state are: Costco (#29), Microsoft (#41), Weyerhaeuser (#89), Washington Mutual (#131), Paccar (#188), Safeco (#285), Nordstrom (#294), Amazon.com (#303), and Starbucks (#372).

Kosmix hits the news

2005-11-02T10:37:00.000-08:00

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-20051031KosmixHealthSearchGoesAlpha.html

Kosmix Health Search Goes Alpha
David Utter
Staff Writer
Published: 2005-10-31

A new health topic search engine that will compete with Healthline and established sites like WebMD has launched as an early public test. The Kosmix search seeks to tap into the expanding demand for health-related information by web users. As an alpha release, Kosmix wants to use this period to play with the search algorithm and garner feedback from users...

Wall Street Journal's 50 Women to Watch

2005-11-01T09:16:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal put out their 50 Women to Watch in 2005. Check it out here. Notables on the list include Meg Whitman, Oprah, and the CEOs of Avon (Andrea Jung), Xerox (Anne Mulcachy), and Sara Lee (Brenda Barnes). The one Seattle name I noticed on the list was Sylvia Mathews, COO of the Gates Foundation.

Here's an excerpt:

For one thing, those at the top still represent a very small percentage among women employees: While 50.3% all managers and professionals are women, just 1.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 7.9% of Fortune 500 top earners are women.

What's more, whatever their industry, virtually all these women rose through the operations side of business. Yet about 90% of all women managers are concentrated in staff jobs...

...Clearly, it's a big advantage for women to work in companies that depend on female customers and for a CEO who believes that work-force diversity is a business imperative. More than half of the women on our list who are already "running the show" or "in line to lead" work in consumer products, financial services, media and publishing, or retail.

Maureen O'Dowd on the Modern Girl...

2005-10-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

Interesting Maureen O'Dowd column in the New York Times Magazine this weekend: What's a Modern Girl to Do? Excerpts:

Do women get less desirable as they get more successful?... Women moving up still strive to marry up. Men moving up still tend to marry down. The two sexes' going in opposite directions has led to an epidemic of professional women missing out on husbands and kids.

Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the author of "Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children," a book published in 2002, conducted a survey and found that 55 percent of 35-year-old career women were childless. And among corporate executives who earn $100,000 or more, she said, 49 percent of the women did not have children, compared with only 19 percent of the men.

Hewlett quantified, yet again, that men have an unfair advantage. "Nowadays," she said, "the rule of thumb seems to be that the more successful the woman, the less likely it is she will find a husband or bear a child. For men, the reverse is true."

Another NYT article not to be missed was Louise Story's "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." See a full archive of the article here or in PDF format.

Kosmix.com

2005-10-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

Hello Blogworld:

Check out http://www.kosmix.com to see where I'm working these days. Kosmix.com is a search-related startup in the Bay Area, and our first product is a health-focused vertical search engine. Read below for more info, and check out the site!

How is Kosmix different from other search engines?
Kosmix has taken a different approach to helping people learn and discover through searching. When you need to learn about a medical condition, you want to see comprehensive results from the most authoritative medical sources. You also want to expand your base of knowledge by tapping into sources that don't show up in the top ten queries on most search engines. Kosmix helps you discover new sources of great health information by showing a number of different health categories, and providing in-depth results for all those categories.

How is Kosmix different than other health sites?
Kosmix searches the entire web to bring you the most authoritative and complete medical sources on your condition. Sources include medical journals, research institutions, government and nonprofit organizations, general health information web sites, alternative medicine web sites, as well as what other people are saying in blogs. Instead of getting information from a handful of sources, we are constantly collecting the newest information on all medical topics across the web, from all sources.

Check it out and tell us what you think: http://www.kosmix.com/feedback.html