Women's & Girls' Leadership

From the OpEd Project blog:

For the last three years, the OpEd Project has conducted a Byline Survey to get a sense of who is getting heard in public discourse.  The following are the results of our most recent effort, which evaluated over 7,000 articles in 10 media outlets over a 12 week period from 9/15/11 to 12/7/11.  We categorized articles by media type (New, Legacy, College), publication, the author’s status as staff or not staff, and subject.  After all of that hard work, I’m glad to say that we have some fascinating results to share with you.

The table below shows the proportion of total articles written by women in New Media (The Huffington Post and Salon), Legacy Media (NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and the Wall Street Journal), and College Media (Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale). As you can see, women were far more active in New Media than in Legacy Media (33% vs 20%). This was expected because, in general, women are more active online than men are. If these numbers are depressing, be heartened by the 38% contribution of articles by women in College Media.

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From the AFP:

The high mortality rate in Mexico's drug war has seen women progress quickly in the shadowy underworld of the cartels and they are increasingly taking on key management roles, a new book says.

"Female Bosses of Narco-Traffic," by Arturo Santamaria, a researcher at the Autonomous University of the State of Sinaloa, traces the ascent of women in drug trafficking organizations.

"The narco-traffickers will become stronger as a result of this," wrote Santamaria. "They will be more difficult to fight because the women appear to be acting smarter."

An estimated 50,000 people have been killed since 2006 in a government crackdown on organized crime that has set off turf wars among rival groups even as they fight off the Mexican military's counter-narcotics units.

Santamaria said the dead have been mainly males belonging to the cartels, which has led to a changing of the guard with younger men and women rising to the top of drug trafficking organizations.

"Widows, daughters, lovers and girlfriends of the men, who are part of the same criminal families," have had to lend a hand, he said.

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From The Telegraph:

The move to drop the “golden skirt” policy is a sign of ministers’ commitment to strip red tape from companies to get the economy moving.

Ministers said they were “standing up for British business” and were opposing the plans to impose more “burdensome regulation” on companies.

The European Commission launched a consultation in March proposing forcing companies by law to bring in the quotas.

The suggestion for quotas was praised by Prime Minister David Cameron at a summit in Stockholm in March.

However ministers will say the Government is not going to implement the quotas, and instead will merely encourage firms to hire more women in executive positions.

Figures show that nearly 16 per cent of senior positions are now held by women, up from 12.5 per cent last year. If the momentum continues, the number of women on boards will exceed 25 per cent by 2015.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary and Women’s minister, said: “We are encouraging firms to use women’s talents by helping them see the business benefits. But we must allow them to get on with their job.

“Our voluntary approach is reaping rewards. The past year has seen the biggest ever jump in the number of women on boards, and some of the UK's leading companies are now reporting on gender diversity, which will help more women rise to the top.”

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From The Wall Street Journal:

A roundup of the highest-paid bosses from 2011 in an earlier Wall Street Journal article is a reminder that women are still a rarity in the corner office. And those that do make it to the corner office are earning far less than their male counterparts.

Kraft Foods CEO Irene Rosenfeld, the top-paid woman last year, ranked 62nd on the list of more than 300 chief executives compiled by Hay Group. With a total direct compensation of $15.5 million, she earned just 1/24th of what top-paid Apple CEO Tim Cook received. (Even considering Cook’s abnormally high pay compared to the rest of the list, Rosenfeld got just one-fifth of what No. 2 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison earned.)

Research suggests the pay disparity between the two genders begins forming early on. New female M.B.A. graduates earn on average $4,600 less than their male counterparts, according to a Catalyst study of graduates from 26 top M.B.A. programs around the world. By mid-career, that pay gap grows to $31,000.

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From BuzzFeed:

Day in and day out, Hillary Clinton is winning the Internet.

The former First Lady and Senator and current Secretary of State has undergone a dramatic public transformation over the past year, one driven in part by her strong handling of a generally popular job, and in part by an unpredictable factor: The Internet has finally fallen in love with her.

Howard Dean was the hero of the rowdy, anti-war blogs in 2004. Barack Obama was the purest icon of the stylized, one-way hero-worshipping web of 2008. Now Clinton is the star of the messy, recursive, and playful ascendant social web. More blunt force than clever package, with her public stumbles and imperfections hanging out for all to see, she’s a fractured, engaging character — a perfect fit for a media universe dominated by Twitter and Facebook.

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From The Nation:

From Bloomberg Business Week:

Unmarried women were among Barack Obama’s most loyal supporters in 2008, turning out in droves and delivering 70 percent of their votes to him. When many of them stayed home in the 2010 midterm election, Democrats lost the House and had their Senate majority trimmed.

Now, determined to get single women back, Senate leaders are reshaping their legislative agenda, advancing a bill to bolster workers’ ability to win pay discrimination lawsuits. A similar measure was blocked by Republicans two years ago, and proponents expect it to be rejected again, setting up a contrast between the parties over an issue that especially touches unmarried women.

It will be the third time this year that Senate Democrats will push for votes on policies affecting women, with the other measures focused on insurance coverage for contraceptives and programs for domestic violence victims.

They are aiming to fire up the 55 million single, divorced, separated or widowed U.S. women eligible to vote this year. While 60 percent of all unmarried women cast ballots in 2008, just 38 percent turned out in 2010, said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. Democratic strategists see these voters as critical to helping return Obama to the White House and to retain Senate seats in Ohio, Virginia and other states.

“What is really at issue is their turnout rate,” Lake said in an interview. “Unmarried younger women plummeted in the turnout in 2010, and they came into this election cycle not very interested in the election.”

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From ABC News:

Ellen Pao, 42, an investment partner with the firm, filed a lawsuit on May 10 alleging the firm engaged in gender discrimination against her and other female employees. She said she faced retaliation when she complained of multiple instances of sexual harassment, which included being pressured by a junior partner to have a sexual relationship and being given a book that had "sexual drawings" and poems with "strong sexual content."

Kleiner Perkins, the esteemed venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, Calif., is seven miles away from the headquarters of Facebook, one of the many tech firms in which it has invested in its 40-year history. Google, Zynga and Groupon are among other beneficiaries of Kleiner Perkins' investments, which can range from $100,000 to $50 million.

In this elite world, women represented fewer than 10 percent of high-level venture capitalists, and left the industry at twice the rate as that of men, according to an estimate from the Kauffman Foundation in 2004.

Teresa Nelson, a professor at Simmons School of Management in Boston and faculty affiliate at the Center for Gender in Organizations, said she has no knowledge that the situation has changed.

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