Happy Tuesday:
With all the upsetting news in the press lately, we will begin with the good news file today. According to the Wall Street Journal, half of all new S&P500 directors added in 2017 were women and minorities. The full article can be found here. The impetus behind this progress is most likely attributable to the fact that diversity is becoming more important to asset owners. A Pensions & Investments article notes that asset owners are taking broad steps to address the issue. The full article may be found here.
With sexual harassment scandals spreading across industries, employers are taking proactive steps to make the workplace safer and more welcoming for women. These initiatives mark the most rapid changes in corporate behavior in generations. The full article can be found here.
In terms of sexual harassment, unless you have thousands or millions of twitter followers, what is the best way to address your personal situation? The New York Times published a great piece with step by step advice on how to proceed. The full article can be found here.
With all this poor (and criminal behavior) coming to light, the question is, why is this so prevalent and why have some men felt that abusing women was their prerogative? The next article explores the phenomenon that we learn misogyny growing up as children. Countless studies have shown that men do not partake equally in helping around the home and children notice. Even working moms with a husband at home carry 65% of the child rearing responsibilities. To quote from the article “ideals are no substitute for behavior. What are kids to make of their father sitting on his phone reading Facebook while their mother scrambles to prepare them for the day? It’s not hard to predict which parent’s personhood those offspring will conclude is more valuable. Children are gender detectives, distinguishing between the sexes from as early as 18 months and using that information to guide their behavior, for example by choosing strongly stereotyped toys. And family research shows that men’s attitudes about marital roles, not women’s, are ultimately internalized by both their daughters and their sons. This finding is a testament to kids’ ability to identify implicit power, to parse whose beliefs are more important and therefore worth adopting as their own.” The full article can be found here.
In honor of Veterans’ Day last week, Code Girls – The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II was released. These brilliant women were the unsung heroes of WWII and author Liza Mundy’s OpEd notes how women can help fix what is broken in the tech world today. It seems genius is not only a male trait.The article makes for interesting reading and can be found here.
And finally, the next article addresses the question of what it really takes to succeed in life and how can we prepare ourselves and our children to thrive and prosper. It seems it all comes down to resilience. Numerous studies have shown that the concept of bouncing back is too simplistic, rather resilience is a muscle we develop over time that allows us to adapt well to stressors. And it seems practice really does make perfect. The full article can be found here.
We have some terrific events lined up for you the last two months of the year and we look forward to seeing you all at an event in 2017! To learn more about our 2017 and 2018 events, please visit www.txwsw.com Kind regards
Christine