Category Archives: Inequality

750 Women Needed to Go on Boards in India

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More than half the listed companies in India are yet to appoint a single woman director to the board—a legal requirement in India now—and they have less than one month to do so.

In 2013, India enacted a new Companies Act, replacing the original 1956 law. It mandated that all companies listed on stock exchanges must have at least one woman on its board of directors.  As many as 755 out of a total of 1,469 National Stock Exchange-listed companies or 51% of the companies, have still not adhered to the one woman director norm, according to Indianboards.com, a database of listed firms.
This means India Inc needs to clock 25 appointments per day for the next 1 month to meet the deadline. This will also mean that qualified women directors will be inundated with offers to join multiple boards.

Two hundred and forty four companies, which did not have a woman director earlier, have complied with the requirement in the last six months. A fifth of these directorship positions have gone to women belonging to the promoter family.

“These women shall have the same voice as the promoter, defeating the very purpose of genuine (independent) gender diversity,” said Pranav Haldea, managing director of PRIME Database which operates indianboards.com.   Even after the recent appointments, women occupy just 7% of the total directorship positions.

Women on Boards

 

Women as EU Commissioners

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Juncker must give decent portfolios to at least some of the eight women that have been nominated to the college in addition to Federica Mogherini, the foreign policy chief.  Elżbieta Bieńkowska, Kristalina Georgieva, Cecilia Malmström and Margrethe Vestager have deserved reputations for being very competent.  Also, Juncker has to reward those member states that opted to nominate women as he struggled to reach nine women out of 28. Romania switched to Corina Creţu, the Czech Republic put forward Vĕra Jourová, and Belgium eventually nominated Marianne Thyssen. Juncker has to decide whether to reward all women or to discriminate among them by, for example, ignoring the claims of Alenka Bratušek, ex-prime minister of Slovenia.

Juncker also faces issues of political persuasion.  How does he accommodate liberals and what policy does he endorse by an appointment.  Lobbyists wonder about Juncker’s approach to climate change, or to EU enlargement, or to manufacturing industry and will be reading much into his choice of commissioners, and his decisions to merge or abolish dossiers.

At the moment, the relationships between Catherine Ashton, the current high representative, and the other commissioners who have foreign policy portfolios – neighborhood, development, humanitarian aid, trade – could hardly be described as smooth.  will Juncker make an attempt to re-shape the structure of the Commission to tie in Mogherini with the other commissioners?

Women on the Commission

Companies Do Better with Women on Boards

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Companies with at least one female director had better returns for six straight years. Which raises the question: If the financial argument for gender diversity is so compelling, then why aren’t companies recruiting more women to their boards? Or, to put it more broadly, why do public companies need an incentive to do something that is clearly in their own interest?

One solution to this dearth of women may be demographic. As more women graduate from college — in most advanced economies, their graduation rate is now higher then men’s — eventually more women will find their way to boardrooms and corner offices. Except that this isn’t necessarily true. By 2035, studies show, women will still be underrepresented.

In Silicon Valley, again, the shortage is even more acute. Only 20 percent of computer-science grads are women, down from 37 percent in 1985. The proportion of women in computer jobs declined to 27 percent in 2011 from 37 percent in 1990. Overall, women make up almost half the workforce. Yet they aren’t choosing careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

Women on Corporate Boards

Are the US Markets Broken? Can Transparency and a Functioning Government Help?

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Heather Long writes:  It is a message US Senator Elizabeth Warren has been taking all over the country, and she isn’t afraid to call banks, credit card companies and some employers cheats and tricksters.  “The biggest financial institutions figured out they could make a lot of money by cheating people on mortgages, credit cards and payday loans,” she told a packed auditorium at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  The Democrat from Massachusetts even said the market is broken in many regards.  “This is about getting markets to work for real people,” she said.

The biggest applause of the night was on three issues that come up frequently in Warren’s speeches.

1) Financial regulation: Warren was the driving force behind the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after the 2008 financial crisis. The agency has returned billions of dollars to Americans who were wronged.  “Traffic works better with traffic lights,” she explained.

In her eyes, a true capitalist system would have transparency so consumers could make informed choices. But in a world of “mice type” with pages and pages of fine print that no one reads or understands, the market breaks down.

2) Reducing student loans: Last summer Warren made headlines for arguing that student loans should have the same interest rates that banks get when they borrow money from the Federal Reserve.  This year she’s pushing to allow people to re-finance their student loans at the historically low rates currently in place.  As she likes to remind people, “Student loans issued from 2007 to 2012 are on target to produce $66 billion in profit for the United States government.”

3) Raising the minimum wage: “No one should work full time and still live in poverty,” Warren said.  She uses her own family story to illustrate how critical it is for workers to make a living wage. Her father had a heart attack when she was 12, and her mother had to go back to work in retail at Sears (SHLD) to support the family. That would be much harder today because a woman working a minimum wage job and trying to support even one child would likely still be in poverty.

Her other big push is for basic worker rights, including allowing workers to talk freely about how much they make and forcing employers that call shift workers in for only a few hours to pay them for at least four hours of work.

“We can’t have a market that functions unless we have a government that functions. That’s the heart of it,”  Warren says.

 Elizabeth Warren

 

Will Five Women Appointed by Abe to Cabinet Improve Economy?

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Taro Aso remains in place as deputy PM and finance minister, while Fumio Kishida stays as foreign minister.  Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera will be replaced by Akinori Eto.  The new line-up was announced by Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, who also kept his post.

Mr Abe said in a press conference: “Realizing a society where women can shine is a challenge our cabinet has undertaken… I look forward to the wind of change these women will bring.”  He said a “positive economic cycle is kicking off”.

“We’re only halfway through in reforms and we need to deal with new challenges. I reshuffled my cabinet so that we can tackle these challenges boldly and vigorously,” he said, adding that the biggest issue was reviving some regions of Japan. The reshuffle is the first significant rejig since Mr Abe took office in December 2012 after a landslide election win.

Support for his government has since fallen, partly because of the recent rise in consumption tax.  Mr Abe has in the past described women as an “under-used resource” in Japan. Last year he set a goal to increase the percentage of women in leadership positions to 30% by 2020.

Experts also believe that persuading more women to remain in the workforce – either by better accommodating working mothers or by offering better opportunities for promotion in a traditionally male-dominated society – could help ease looming labour shortages caused by Japan’s low birth rate.  In Mr Abe’s previous cabinet, women occupied two of the 18 posts.

Among the new female entrants is Yuko Obuchi, the daughter of former leader Keizo Obuchi, who takes on the economy, trade and industry portfolio, while Midori Matsushima was named justice minister.

What Mr Abe has done is a significant step but the appointments mask a much deeper problem in Japanese society.

Japanese Women to Cabinet

 

 

French Woman, Amelie Mauresmo Coaches Andy Murray

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It is rare that a woman coaches a man in tennis, although men have most often coached women.  When Andy Murray took on Mauresmo, he opened the doors for different coaching arrangements in the game.  As always with gender issues, the reasons are complicated.  My guess: Mauresmo was a played her turned on herself when she made errors.  Murray does the same thing.  The great tennis teacher Dennis Van der Meer was detoured from a pro career because he had performance anxiety.  He worked particularly well with players who suffered from the same fears.

If Mauresmo succeeds with Murray where Brad Gilbert and Ivan Lendl have failed, can it be that she understands his core problem and can make him take a page from Novak  Djokovic’s book and get angry for a second and then go on?

It is nice to think that if a woman is the right person to do this job, a Wimbledon winner will pick her.

Mauresmo and Murray

 

Jobs Still a Problem in US

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On Labor Day, Peter Schroeder and Vicki Needham write:  Democrats are running out of time for an economic savior.  They have long predicted that an economic turnaround would be the elixir that helps them retain control of the Senate in November.  But with just a handful of big economic reports left before Election Day, the economic picture is largely in place. And while the outlook is bright, voters continue to hold a dim view of their own financial prospects.

“There are still a lot of families playing catch-up,” said Jared Bernstein at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. “It’s got to be awfully hard for the typical voter to figure out what Congress had done to help the economy move forward. It’s a lot easier to figure out what they’ve done to screw things up.”

Broadly speaking, the economy has made gains in the last several months. The unemployment rate has held steady or dropped every month for over a year, and new data shows the economy grew this spring at its fastest rate in more than 12 months.

A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 71 percent of people blamed Washington for the economy’s woes, and dissatisfaction mainly fell on incumbents overall, rather than on a particular party.  That poll found roughly half of voters believe the economy is still in a recession, even though the economic decline ended in June 2009.

Similarly, Gallup’s index of economic confidence has remained unchanged for all of 2014. People are actually less confident about the economy now than they were in January, when the unemployment rate was nearly half a percentage point higher.

With just two months to go before the midterm elections, there are just a handful of major economic indicators due before ballots are cast, including a pair of jobs reports.

With so little time left, it appears increasingly unlikely that views will change enough to boost the chances of Democrats, who are trying to escape the gravity of President Obama’s flagging poll numbers.

Some researchers argue the economic recovery has not been felt widely, with the majority of the gains going to people on the top of the income scale.

“While the economy is clearly improving, the benefits of that growth have only recently begun to reach middle class people,” said Bernstein, a former economic adviser for Vice President Biden. “People don’t pay their rent or buy their food with GDP. It’s got to reach their paychecks.”

On Wednesday, the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute reported that in the past year, wages have actually fallen for everyone but the very poorest when taking inflation into consideration. That study found that wages were stagnant or falling at nearly every income and education level. No matter how good the overall economy might be doing, voters notice the size of their paychecks most of all, experts say.

“I don’t think voters will feel good about the economy until real wage growth begins to rise,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist with Moody’s Analytics. “Since most people have jobs, they judge the health of the economy based on whether they are getting a raise that covers the increase in the cost of living.”

Democrats have tried to harness dissatisfaction over wages with a populist campaign message focused on economic inequality, raising the minimum wage and requiring equal pay for women.

While the NBC/WSJ poll found that women in particular were in favor of a Democrat-led Congress, it remains to be seen whether the populist proposals can overcome the broader concerns over the economy.  Many Americans simply have not benefitted from the “recovery.”   It’s about jobs.

Job Lines in US

 

 

How to Give Female Farmers A Voice

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Jaqui Ashby writes:  Imagine a typical scene in agricultural research for development: a group of predominantly male researchers visit a group of male farmers whose views they take to inform their work.

The reality is that a large proportion of smallholder farmers – the majority in some parts of the sector – are female.   What can researchers do to make sure female farmers get their fair share of attention in agricultural research? Here are our top tips for implementing a successful gender strategy:

You may need to recruit specialised researchers who will make sure gender issues are addressed in technical fields like plant breeding. For example, to make sure CGIAR have the in-house expertise to tackle gender equality in research, we are forming a community of young gender researchers with a post-doctoral programme.

You could also try designing a programme which focuses explicitly on gender-related changes in farming systems. Our aquatic agricultural systems programme includes research focused on transforming gender roles and social norms that hold back the productivity of female farmers.

To give female farmers a fairer deal, research must look beyond the practical needs of women to tackle underlying constraints. This includes unequal land rights, restricted mobility or limited schooling that prevent fair access for women farmers to extension training, credit or markets. Often institutions and policies have to change before women can benefit from our technologies.

Tackling gender inequalities in farming means you need to think differently about agriculture. Instead of concentrating on crops and livestock, think about food systems that include minor crops and vegetables grown by women, and post-harvest processing, so much of which is done by women. Or about domestic use of farm resources, especially labour, but also water and fuel for cooking.

You’ll definitely need extra resources dedicated to tackling the gender inequalities which affect many aspects of how crops and livestock are raised, consumed, and sold, and who benefits from new research. So dedicated budget for this purpose in research plans, proposals and programmes are a must.

We try to ensure our technologies create opportunities for both women and men through the collection of data and evidence. This data should be disaggregated by sex, that is, analysed separately for males and females. This often involves asking questions such as “who is benefitting from you work?” which gives us a better idea of how women farmers specifically are benefiting from our technologies.

Indian Farmers

 

How to Address Income Inequality

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Michael Spence writes:  High-priority items are fairly clear. In the short run, the top priority is income support for the poor and the unemployed, who are the immediate victims of crises and the underlying imbalances and structural problems, which take time to remove. Second, especially with rising income inequality, universal access to high-quality public services, particularly education, is crucial.

Inclusion sustains social and political cohesion – and hence the very growth needed to help mitigate the effects of rising inequality. There are many ways for economies to fall short of their growth potential, but underinvestment, especially within the public sector, is one of the most potent and common.   Good and Bad Income Inequality

Equality of Opportunity?