Workplace Buzz: Today's Headlines

Workplace Buzz on July 9, 2007 7:15 AM

Women Are A Powerful Economic Force

Mona Ghuneim reports in Voice of America on a prominent businesswoman who says the global business community must realize that women are a powerful economic force, and that supporting greater opportunities for women will lead to greater prosperity around the globe.

Barbara Krumsiek is the head of Calvert Group, a U.S.-based investment firm. She says advancing the economic, social and educational status of women is crucial to eradicating poverty and hunger around the world.
Krumsiek says corporations can "significantly affect whether women prosper or continue to fall further behind," especially in developing nations.
"In the developing world, women put in nearly two-thirds of the hours worked and produce half of the world's food, but only own one percent of its farmland," said Barbara Krumsiek. "Of the more than one billion people in the developing world who live on less than a dollar a day, 70 percent are women."

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Who’s Chattier?

Robert Mitchum, Tribune staff reporter, looks more closely at a recent survey.

Stereotypes tell us that women are the chattier sex, reeling off detailed verbal accounts of emotions and events while men brood in front of the television.

Now a scientific study is taking aim at that idea by finding the daily number of words spoken by male and female college students is virtually the same.

Brizendine said studies comparing male and female speech in the workplace have found significant differences in talkativeness. She predicts the same result would occur in studies conducted in a home environment, believing men generally talk more at work and women use more words at home.

Other scientists say that simply counting words does not get at possible sex differences in the content or style of speech.

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The Way We Talk

Meghan Daum, for the Los Angeles Times, asks why do so many women sound like Valley Girls?

HAS THE WHOLE country been sucking on helium balloons?

The singsong, Valley Girl-ish vocal style that was once the exclusive domain of actual Valley Girls (and anyone who worked at a tanning salon) is infiltrating a host of unlikely venues. From Ivy League campuses to workplace conference rooms, we're hearing elongated vowel sounds (think "yeaaah" and "whatahver"), prodigious mumbling and, of course, declarative sentences turned into questions.

Last month, the public radio program "Marketplace" aired a story on the prevalence of grown women speaking in high-pitched, babyish voices. It cited the example of Monica M. Goodling, the 33-year-old attorney (and Justice Department appointee) who testified before Congress in a voice that seemed more appropriate to Smurfette than to a government official with something to say about fired U.S. attorneys. "Marketplace" suggested that this girlish cadence signaled a feminist backlash, a sonic corollary to bikini waxes and baby-doll dresses.

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