Category Archives: Women

How Do Women Get On Board?

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An interesting study on the policy of getting women on has been published.  Women on Boards

Women on Boards

The study introduces the actors who make the implementation of this policy possibile.  Here are the four crucial elements:

1.  Women mobilize for quotas to be instituted for women’s representation on boards.

2.  Political elites recognize the strategic advanages for pursuing quotas.

3. Quotas are consistent with existing or emerging notions of equality.

4.  Quotas are supported by international norms and spread through transnational sharing.

The study is dynamic.  Actors who participate in the process are shown at work.  What determines national public policy initatives to increase the presence of women on boards?

Women on Board Types of Actors

 Actors in Four European Countries

Entrepreneur Alert: Addressing the Obesity Epidemic

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Kenneth Rogoff writes:  To what extent should governments regulate or tax addictive behavior? This question has long framed public debate about alcohol, tobacco, gambling, and other goods and services in many countries worldwide. And now, in the United States – arguably the mother of global consumer culture – the debate has turned toward the fight against the epidemic of childhood obesity.

It is ironic that in a world where childhood malnutrition plagues many developing countries, childhood obesity has become one of the leading health scourges in advanced economies. The World Bank estimates that over a third of all children in Indonesia, for example, suffer from stunted growth, confronting them with the risk of lifetime effects on fitness and cognitive development. Yet, the plight of malnourished children in the developing world does not make obesity in the advanced countries any less of a problem.

Indeed, though perhaps not on a par with global warming and looming water shortages, obesity – and especially childhood obesity – nonetheless is on the short list of major public-health challenges facing advanced countries in the twenty-first century, and it is rapidly affecting many emerging-market economies as well. Yet solving it poses much more difficult challenges than the kind of successful public-health interventions of the last century, including near-universal vaccination, fluoridation of drinking water, and motor-vehicle safety rules.

The question is whether it is realistic to hope for success unless the government resorts to far more blunt instruments than it currently seems prepared to wield. Given the huge impact of obesity on health-care costs, life expectancy, and quality of life, it is a topic that merits urgent attention.

The US leads the world in obesity, and is at the cutting edge of the debate. Almost everyone agrees that the first line of defense ought to be better consumer education. First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” educational campaign aspires to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation, though its impact so far remains unclear. Other efforts include appeals by celebrities like the chef Jamie Oliver and attempts to use peer-based learning, such as the Sesame Street-inspired platform Kickin’ Nutrition (full disclosure: the creator is my wife).

The right place to start to address it is by creating a better balance between education and commercial disinformation. But food is so addictive, and the environment so skewed toward unhealthy outcomes, that it is time to think about broader government intervention. That should certainly include vastly enhanced expenditures on public education; but I suspect that a long-term solution will have to involve more direct regulation, and it is not too soon to start discussing the modalities.

 Obesity Epidemic

Poverty and the Developing Brain

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Madeline Ostrander writes: The brain’s foundation, frame, and walls are built in the womb. As an embryo grows into a fetus, some of its dividing cells turn into neurons, arranging themselves into layers and forming the first synapses, the organ’s electrical wiring. Four or five months into gestation, the brain’s outermost layer, the cerebral cortex, begins to develop its characteristic wrinkles, which deepen further after birth. It isn’t until a child’s infant and toddler years that the structures underlying higher-level cognition—will power, emotional self-control, decision-making—begin to flourish; some of them continue to be fine-tuned throughout adolescence and into the first decade of adulthood.

Pat Levitt, a developmental neuroscientist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, has spent much of his career studying the setbacks and accidents that can make this construction process go awry. In the nineteen-nineties, during the media panic over “crack babies,” he was among a number of scientists who questioned whether the danger of cocaine exposure in utero was being overstated. (Levitt spent two decades examining the brains of rabbit mothers and their offspring that were dosed with the drug, and says that the alarm was “an exaggeration.”) More recently, as the science director of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, he has become interested in another sort of neurotoxin: poverty.

As it turns out, the conditions that attend poverty—what a National Scientific Council report summarized as “overcrowding, noise, substandard housing, separation from parent(s), exposure to violence, family turmoil,” and other forms of extreme stress—can be toxic to the developing brain, just like drug or alcohol abuse.  Poverty and the Developing Brain

Poverty and the Developing Brain

Entrepreneur Alert: Women Discover Scarves

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Nancy Diehl writes:  When International Monetary Fund managing director Christine Lagarde goes to the G8 summit in June, she may well be wearing a scarf – a fashion accessory that she’s become known for, and one that’s been drawing more and more attention.

In fact, the BBC recently identified scarves as a “new power symbol” for women.

True, just as some men choose amusing ties to enliven monochrome suits, many women who work in an atmosphere that requires conservative business apparel will wear scarves to add a fillip of colour and distinction.

The scarf is the most simple form of adornment: a single piece of cloth. For this reason, it’s one of the most versatile clothing accessories, used for centuries across a variety of cultures, for a range of purposes.

Many Muslim women wear headscarves for modesty, while women of a certain age favour scarves with a triangular fold to protect expensive or elaborate coifs.

The British firm Jacqmar produced designs with propaganda-themed slogans. One design mimicked a wall with posters urging citizens to “Lend to Defend” and “Save for Victory”.

But in Western culture, the scarf is most prominently known for its use as a fashion accessory, one that first gained widespread popularity in the 19th century.

The fichu is a typical 18th- and 19th-century style that can be seen as the forerunner of modern scarves. A piece of fabric worn draped on the upper chest and usually knotted in front, it provided modest covering but was also an opportunity to add an especially fine textile – sometimes lace edged or embroidered – to an ensemble.

Lightweight, finely woven silk and cashmere shawls from India were one of the first fashionable scarf styles. Empress Joséphine – the first wife of Napoleon – had an extensive collection (thanks to her husband’s travels), and the style persisted through much of the 19th century, spawning cheaper imitations fabricated in other parts of Europe, notably France and Paisley, Scotland.

Certain labels are particularly associated with high style in scarves. Ferragamo, Fendi and Gucci – all originally esteemed leather goods houses – now produce desirable scarves.

But for prestige and polish, Hermès represents the pinnacle of scarf culture.

Limiting the number of designs they offer each season has maintained Hermès’s mystique. The company’s focus on craftsmanship helps justify their reputation and high prices; Hermès takes pride in the impressive number of colours in each design, the hand-printing process and the fineness of their silk, positioning their output as artisanal creations.

In contemporary fashion, scarves continue to serve the same functions as those earlier fine linen fichus and paisley shawls; they denote connoisseurship and sophistication.

French Economy, Industry and Employment minister Christine Lagarde leaves the Elysee Palace on April 21, 2010 following the weekly cabinet meeting in Paris. AFP PHOTO / LIONEL BONAVENTURE (Photo credit should read LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images)

Jungle Camps for Trafficked Humans?

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Malaysian police forensic teams, digging with hoes and shovels, began pulling out the remains of dozens of suspected victims of human traffickers on Tuesday from shallow graves discovered at a jungle camp near the border with Thailand.

The government said it was investigating whether local forestry officials were involved with the people-smuggling gangs believed responsible for nearly 140 such graves discovered around grim camps in the country’s northwest.

The dense forests of southern Thailand and northern Malaysia have been a major stop-off point for smugglers bringing people to Southeast Asia by boat from Burma, most of them Rohingya Muslims who say they are fleeing persecution, and Bangladesh

Apparently abandoned in haste, what remained of the camp was little more than a tangle of bamboo and tarpaulin, but one police official, who did not want to be identified, said it could have held up to 400 people.

Malaysian authorities said on Monday they had found 139 graves, some containing more than one body, around 28 camps scattered along a 50-km (30 mile) stretch of the border in the northern state of Perlis.

The grisly discoveries in Malaysia followed the uncovering of similar graves on the Thai side of the border at the beginning of May, which helped trigger a regional crisis. The find led to a crackdown on the camps by Thai authorities, after which traffickers abandoned thousands of migrants in overloaded boats in the Bay of Bengal and Andaman Sea.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims are ferried by traffickers through southern Thailand each year, and in recent years it has been common for them to be held in remote camps along the border with Malaysia until a ransom is paid for their freedom.

The scale of the discoveries has raised questions about the level of complicity by officials on both sides of the border.

Malaysia’s Home Minister Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said on Tuesday that initial investigations revealed links between forest rangers and smuggling syndicates, Bernama reported, adding that some had been detained by police as part of the probe.

An official said 37 graves had been found at the site, a few hundred meters from the Thai border. As the police teams began to dig, a large supply of body bags and white cotton shrouds was piled on the ground.

Human Trafficking Deaths?

Maid Abuse in Asia?

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Astrid Zweynert writes:  The promise of a salary five times what she could make at home prompted Nabila to leave Indonesia and her family for a job as a domestic worker in Singapore.

What she did not realize was that it would be eight months before she earned a cent because of deductions made by the employment agency that brought her to Singapore.

With a 17-hour working day that started at 5am, a “very demanding” employer and dinners that consisted of leftovers, the 30-year-old said she was driven to despair.

Employment agencies are part of a complex web spun across Southeast Asia by brokers and agents that allow the domestic workers virtually no say in their working conditions.

Reports of domestic workers being burned, beaten and raped have sparked outrage in Asia, which has the largest share of the world’s domestic workers at more than 21 million.

The Philippines is the only Asian nation to have ratified the International Labour Organisation’s convention on domestic workers, which bans recruiters from taking money from workers’ wages to recoup placement fees, among other measures.

Activists say an example of discrimination against foreign domestic workers is their exemption from Singapore’s Employment Act, which regulates working conditions for locals.

Many domestic workers still work seven days a week even though the government introduced a compulsory weekly day off for them in 2013. Employers can opt out of this by offering to pay.

Often, workers dare not say ‘no’ even if they only get paid an average of S$17 if they work on their day off, Ummai Ummairoh, president of the Indonesian Family Network (IFN) said

Singapore’s maids are forbidden to live away from their place of work, which for many means being on call all the time.

Some said they have to share rooms with their employer’s children or elderly relatives and sleep in the hall or the living room, unable to sleep until the employer goes to bed.

At HOME’s shelter for domestic workers, a Filipina said she was dismissed without notice by her American employer after four months because she did not know how to cook Western food.

Still owing money to the employment agency, she now faces having her work permit cancelled and being forced to return to Mindanao, a particularly poor region of the Philippines.

Unlike in Hong Kong, another top Asian destination for domestic workers, those in Singapore are not allowed to form a union and must rely on informal networks and charities for help.

Ummairoh is proud that the IFN and its counterpart, the Filipino Family Network, provide classes in English, computer studies, hairdressing and make-up skills.

A plan by Indonesian President Joko Widodo to stop domestic workers from working abroad is unlikely to succeed unless there are better jobs available at home, said Ummairoh.

Singapore Maids

Why Equality Between the Sexes is Necessary

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Andrea Migliano writes:  Simulations are a simple mechanistic answer for the puzzle of why modern hunter-gatherers live with so few kin, but they have huge implications for our understanding of human evolution, and also of human nature.

The fact that we are able to live, interact and cooperate with unrelated individuals and not only with kin has been recently identified as the most fundamental difference between human societies and other animal societies.

Of course, humans have the capacity to be anything, from the most cruel and unequal species, with sex slavery and warfare, to the most cooperative and caring animal, with people donating blood to complete strangers. Good and evil are just the two extremes of our malleable nature. However, the few surviving hunter-gatherers groups show us that without the equality and cooperation between sexes that they share with our distant ancestors many of the characteristics that we like to call “uniquely human”, such as caring for others and fairness, would probably not have evolved.

Hunters and Gatherers

Beyond the AIIB and Development

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On the Rocky Road to Globalization

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes:  China’s success in establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has been widely regarded as a diplomatic fiasco for the United States. After discouraging all US allies from joining the AIIB, President Barack Obama’s administration watched as Great Britain led a raft of Western European countries, followed by Australia and South Korea, into doing just that.

Worse, the Obama administration found itself in the position of trying to block Chinese efforts to create a regional financial institution after the US itself was unable to deliver on promises to give China and other major emerging economies a greater say in the governance of the International Monetary Fund.

China will control half of the voting shares in the AIIB, initially capitalized at $1 billion. Unless the Western victors of World War II can update the rules and institutions that underpinned the post-war international order, they will find themselves in a world with multiple competing regional orders and even dueling multilateral institutions.

From the point of view of developing countries in need of capital, competing banks probably look like a good thing. But what about the impact on actual development, the likelihood that individual citizens of poor countries will live richer, healthier, more educated lives? World Bank conditionality often includes provisions on human rights and environmental protections that make it more difficult for governments bent on growth at any cost to run roughshod over their people. Competition is good, but unregulated competition typically ends up in a race to the bottom.

China’s establishment of the AIIB is the latest sign of a broader move away from the view that aid to developing countries is best provided in the form of massive government-to-government transfers. Power and wealth are not only diffusing across the international system, but also within states.

The new model of development may be one based on the recognition “that the United States is one of many actors, and that countries require investments from multiple sources to achieve sustained and inclusive economic growth.” Initiatives such as Feed the Future, the US Global Development Lab, and Power Africa combine “local ownership, private investment, innovation, multi-stakeholder partnerships, and mutual accountability.”

This new model moves beyond the mantra of “public-private partnership.” It genuinely leverages multiple sources of money and expertise in broad coalitions pursuing the same big goal.

Power Africa takes a “transaction-centered approach,” creating teams to align incentives among “host governments, the private sector, and donors.” Unlike big government-to-government transfers, which can often end up in the pockets of officials, the point is to ensure that deals actually get done and investments flow to their intended destination.

Skeptics will say that the US is simply making a virtue of necessity. The federal government no longer has billions of dollars to dole out to foreign governments, while China is far more centralized and less beholden to its taxpayers.

That criticism contains some truth. But, over the longer term, the new US model of development is actually far more resilient and sustainable than the old government-to-government model. Only societies with thriving sectors free of government control can participate in these broad coalitions of public, private, and civic actors.

Overall, the AIIB is a positive development. More money aimed at helping poor countries become middle-income countries and at middle-income countries to help them provide transport, energy, and communication for their people is a good thing. But the Asian way is not the only way.

AIIB and US

Gender Discrimination in Hollywood?

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Grumblings that Hollywood is a man’s world have percolated for decades and are borne out in grim figures: Women directed only 4 percent of top-grossing films over the last dozen years. Now this apparent truism is being challenged as a violation of civil rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union has asked state and federal agencies to investigate the hiring practices of major Hollywood studios, networks and talent agencies for what the organization described as rampant and intentional gender discrimination in recruiting and hiring female directors.

“Women directors aren’t working on an even playing field and aren’t getting a fair opportunity to succeed,” said Melissa Goodman, director of the L.G.B.T., Gender and Reproductive Justice Project at the A.C.L.U. of Southern California. “Gender discrimination is illegal. And, really, Hollywood doesn’t get this free pass when it comes to civil rights and gender discrimination.”

What the A.C.L.U. is requesting has precedent. In the 1960s, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission held hearings about Hollywood and asked for the intervention of the Justice Department, which in turn found employment discrimination. A settlement was reached with the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers and several unions: Remedial measures included employment referrals for minorities, although not women specifically, and the A.C.L.U. said enforcement measures sputtered and ultimately failed.

Note: One of the principals of this website was in the film business for ten years.  She won a Gold Medal in Venice for co-producing and co-writing a feature film.  During her stint in the business, she experienced no discrimination at all.  However, when she wanted to return to the film business after the birth of her first child, it was clear to her that woriking 36 hours a day for half the year was not possible for her because she wanted to be an active mother.  Many women do not want to leave their young children to be reared by nannies.  (That is the recommendation of Skaden Arps’ female partners to young women associaites.)

 Female Directors Still Shadows

Extreme Poverty in the US

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The number of adults on welfare has dropped dramatically since its reform in 1996. As of 2011, a little over 1 million adults remained on the welfare rolls in a typical month, down from about 4.6 million at the program’s peak in the early 1990s. As these numbers plummeted, the number of single mothers joining the workforce or returning to it grew at rates that were largely unexpected. For these reasons, welfare reform has been touted as a success.

At the same time, in the years since 1996, a new group of American poor has emerged: families with children who are living on virtually no income—$2 or less per person per day in a given month. These are America’s “extreme poor.” The U.S. official poverty line for a family of three would equate to roughly $17 per person per day. What scholars call “deep poverty”—incomes at less than half the poverty line—is about $8.50 per person per day, over four times higher than our cutoff. This new group of American poor, the extreme poor, are likely experiencing a level of destitution not captured in prior poverty measures, one that few of us knew even existed in such a rich country.   Rise of Exttreme Poverty in US