Eric Wilson reports in the New York Times on the death of Liz Claiborne.

Liz Claiborne, the designer of indefatigable career clothes for professional women entering the workforce en masse beginning in the 1970s, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 78.

Before she became the most successful women’s apparel designer in America, Ms. Claiborne had worked for 20 years in the backrooms of Seventh Avenue sportswear houses like Youth Guild and Juniorite, making peppy dresses.

A strong-willed designer with an acute sense for business, she defied the male-dominated ranks of the fashion industry by starting her own company in 1976 with Mr. Ortenberg, a textiles executive. In an apt reversal of roles, she gave him the corporate title of secretary.

Ms. Claiborne correctly anticipated a market for affordable, professional-looking clothes that women could wear to compete on an equal footing with men in corporate professions. In her no-nonsense way, she became something of a role model, and her label an inspirational emblem, to those who, like her, were looking to break through glass ceilings.

Tory Johnson, Good Morning America’s workplace contributor and CEO of Women for Hire, writes that elder care is a costly struggle for employees and employers alike.

A MetLife study found that people who take on a caregiver role give up more than $650,000 in lifetime earning potential. And on the employer side, the same study estimated that American businesses see a $33 billion productivity loss each year because of employees' caregiving obligations. The numbers suggest there's clearly a business case for introducing benefits and support programs.

It's smart to let your boss know that you're coping with this issue. He or she need not be privy to every detail; you don't want to come across as overwhelmed or unreliable. The goal is to reiterate your commitment to work, but also be clear that this is a personal priority and an obligation.

In some cases, you may learn that your boss is dealing -- or has dealt -- with the same thing. And you'll also get a sense of whether he or she is going to be supportive.

“Are many young adults today just not trying hard enough to launch their careers and gain financial independence?” asks MSNBC contributor, Eve Tahmincioglu.

My June 4 column addressed how many parents were struggling to help get their adult sons and daughters on the right career path. I suggested their kids needed a little bit of tough love. Mom and Dad can’t keep the gravy train going forever, right?

Well, I got a bunch of letters from folks who thought I was being too hard on recent graduates who couldn’t find jobs in their chosen professions.

Some readers pointed to a lack of economic opportunities for U.S. workers thanks to globalization and a growing chasm between the rich and poor. It’s harder today for young people trying to make it in the world than past generations, many of you wrote.

Anthony Chapman of New York writes: “I am amazed at the overall message of your article, which, like most articles or reports on this subject nowadays, carries a macho 'blame the victim' tone. The fact is, that these unemployed kids are through before they even start. Corporate globalism and feel-good pro-immigration attitudes in The United States have combined to mount a coordinated attack on American labor, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the days of Joe Hill and The Wobblies. Articles such as yours perpetuate the myth that Americans are the masters of their own financial destinies, which is, in my opinion, a laughable fallacy.”

The number of employers offering adoption assistance is soaring, reports Stephanie Armour for USA TODAY.

Nearly 50% of employers offer adoption benefits, according to a survey by benefits consultants Watson Wyatt Worldwide. That's up from 37% who offered the benefits in 2003.

With some adoption costs topping $30,000, employers are increasingly providing cash reimbursement for adoption-related legal services, paid time off or other benefits to help. Unlike health insurance reimbursement of pregnancy costs, though, payments for adoption assistance are considered taxable income.

Good pay, good prospects and a good quality of life: Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer writes about the best jobs for the long run. From an operations and production management to a fundraiser, these are some jobs from the list to consider.

Job: Operations and production management

President Bush's push to have the nation reduce its gas consumption by 20 percent in 10 years (and, by extension, increase its consumption of corn-based ethanol and other alternative fuels) has meant more money for biofuel makers and an even greater need for talent in the growing field, said Michael Jones, president of the bioenergy practice at the Richmond Group, a recruiting firm member of the MRINetwork.

There's demand not only for chemical and mechanical engineers, but liberal arts grads, too, Jones said. Some jobs require those with an engineering degree from college because of their technical nature. But someone with a liberal arts degree can start at a lower position in the company (e.g., a job that pays by the hour operating equipment in a chemical processing environment) and rise up through the ranks.

Job: Fundraiser

Every nonprofit needs a good development director to keep it in the black. The good news is "the ranks of the wealthy are growing. There's a great deal of wealth that's untapped," said Tom Damewood, owner of Management Recruiters of Mid-Hudson Valley, N.Y.

Being paid to raise money for a good cause can be a rewarding experience that puts you in touch with wealthy donors, corporate executives, foundations and, if you're involved in special fundraising events, top entertainers, intellectuals, politicians and other newsmakers.

You can get your foot in the door through volunteering, interning or working as a development assistant or special events program assistant, Damewood said. He also recommends taking courses in nonprofit management and joining a chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals

The Bing Blog offers tips for those working from home.

1. DO NOT leave your cell phone back in the living room when you step out to the diner for a couple of hours.
2. DO take your BlackBerry and cell phone when you go to the bathroom.
3. DO schedule a few short conference calls with anybody who works for you, since they are probably at the office cursing your name. This will show them you are fully engaged in the business of the day, which, of course, you are!
4. DO NOT start a complex e-mail chain with your boss too early in the day, since they often result in incoming telephone action that will raise the question of where you actually are in the physical (i.e. non-virtual) sense. NOTE: Even if you have received permission to “work from home” don’t remind your boss that you have done so. Reminding him or her of your status may impair your ability to do so again next week.
5. DO NOT start drinking any earlier than usual. Not even beer.
6. DO send out that lengthy e-mail with several Excel attachments that people have been waiting for since last Tuesday. This will serve two purposes: 1) demonstrate that you are active and on the field, in spite of all appearances; 2) stop anybody from replying to you on any issue while they chew over a spreadsheet they have no desire to deal with on a Friday during July or August.
7. DO NOT leave your Elvis Costello album playing in the background while you talk with colleagues, even if they are junior to you. Word will get around.
8. DO NOT answer the phone during your nap. Allow the ring to wake you. Splash some cold water on your face. Then return the call and apologize for having been “caught up” in something else while it was ringing. You may not fool anybody but it will be worth the attempt.
9. DO attempt to call your boss at 6 p.m., when you know he has gone for the day. You will appear on his call sheet first thing Monday morning as any industrious corporate citizen should.
10. DO NOT conduct any sort of business in your underwear. People will know. I don’t know how, but they will.

Charles S. Farrell for DiverseEducation.com asks, “Is racism a male thing? Study suggests that men have less tolerance than women.”

A new study that suggests racism within small groups appears to affect men more than women may have immense implications.

Jury verdicts could be swayed, military strategies changed, business decisions influenced because of the racial composition of a group, according to Dr. Larry E. Davis, one of the authors of the study and a professor of social work and psychology at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.

"While many people might consider that an equal number of Black males and an equal number of white males would be an ideal composition when working on a project, our study shows that that might be the worst thing to do, setting up all kinds of conflict," Davis said. Interestingly, all-women work groups were less affected by the racial balance of the group, leading Davis to conclude that gender is a factor in racism.

Lynne Marek reports on how women lawyers find their own paths as law firms struggle to keep them in The National Law Journal.

People were always asking San Francisco attorney Mae O'Malley how she lined up so much contract legal work as she juggled continuing her law career and raising three children. Her secret: As a former in-house counsel, she had built up a clientele, including Google Inc., and was ready for solo work after her third child was born.

Last year, O'Malley, 34, created a company built on her strategy, giving her the opportunity to share the trick with the many other women who have asked about it. She opened Paragon Legal Group in September and already has 20 lawyers working for her on either a full-time or part-time basis, 90 percent of whom are women.

As big law firms struggle to retain women lawyers and boost them into leadership roles, they're losing many to contract positions, smaller firms, in-house jobs, government posts and legal aid careers that women lawyers say give them more control over their work and personal lives. Law firms are trying to reverse the trend with some new policies as clients seek diverse legal teams, but so far seem to have had little effect.

For every woman who leaves a law firm to stay at home with her children or otherwise remain unemployed, there are nearly three who move to nonfirm law jobs and one who takes her skills to a nonlawyer job, according to the results of a study of Massachusetts attorneys by the MIT Workplace Center this year. The study also showed that women left firms in larger numbers than men at both associate and partner levels.

Forbes.com’s Matt Woolsey reports on the best cities for professionals.

Head to the Big Apple, and your chances of getting the corner office might not be as far off as you think.

That's because New York City tops our list as the No. 1 city for young professionals.

That likely comes as a shock to, well, no one. Many of America's best companies, as determined by Forbes rankings of the best 400 big businesses and best 200 small businesses, including financial giant Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) and media conglomerate News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people ) are in New York. Throw in New York's bars, clubs and world-class dining, and you get a city teaming with young professionals.

Robert Preer, Globe Correspondent, writes that more women are now guarding men in the prison system than ever before.

Ninabeth Fay-Butler, clad in a dark-blue, military-style uniform with heavy black boots, strode into a housing unit one recent morning during her rounds at Bridgewater State Hospital. The 54-year-old captain, a supervisor in the medium-security, combination prison and treatment center, moved with confidence among the male inmates as she stopped to scoop up one man's stray sock and to chat with another inmate.

The casual exchanges belied the dangers of her job.

"I like challenges," said Fay-Butler, who has worked at the hospital for 17 years.

"One thing about corrections is you get to use your brain a lot. I've been in a unit by myself with 81 lifers. In that situation, you have to start thinking with your head."

Fay-Butler is among a growing number of female correction officers in Massachusetts and the United States. At Bridgewater State Hospital, where men are sent for psychological evaluation or treatment after involvement in serious crimes, 23 of the 235 uniformed officers are women.

Women guarding men was unheard of in this country before the 1970s. As recently as 1977, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could legally bar women from working in dangerous male prisons. In the past three decades, though, new legislation in states, as well as shifts in administrative policy, have opened the doors to prison as a female workplace. Today, about 13 percent of correctional officers in the country are women.

Joyce Gannon, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette contributor, writes studies show moms still control bulk of purchase decisions in the home.

Beyond serving as the focus of shopping for a single Sunday in June, fathers aren't considered much of a force in the world of mass purchasing. Some may still get the last word on a new family car or which beer to stock in the refrigerator, but mom remains the power buyer in an overwhelming majority of households, say marketing experts.

Despite the rise of two-income families that has prompted more men to handle traditional female tasks such as grocery shopping, cleaning, cooking and laundry, women still make 80 percent to 85 percent of family purchases, according to several studies. This highly-sought-after female sector spends $1.7 trillion annually, says research by Ketchum, a communications agency.

"[Moms'] influence is being driven by them bringing more income into the family, so they have more to say about how the family spends" even in traditional dad-dominated categories such as automobiles and do-it-yourself gadgets, said Kelley Skoloda, partner and associate director of Ketchum's Pittsburgh office and director of the firm's global brand marketing practice.
"The clients we work with are trying to wrap their heads around how you reach the female purchaser. That's who spends the money."

David R. Butcher writes in ThomasNet.com about gender equality.

The 21st century has been called the Woman’s Century. Hillary Clinton is running for President, women are playing stronger roles in the workplace and the female profile is rising in many professional fields. So why does no one seem shocked that gender discrimination still lingers in the workplace today?

Without doubt, discrimination in global business today persists, whether it’s based on race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, age or, of course, gender.

We’ve come a long way since the days when male executives expected women in the workplace to stay quiet and passive while fetching coffee. But not far enough, sadly. Although much more subtle, workforce and workplace barriers still persist.

Not only do these biases continue to fuel disparity and tension in basic human relations (and human rights), they are damaging the workforce and the workplace — and by extension, innovation and competitiveness in industry and business.

Susan Felt, for the Arizona Republic, reports on social entrepreneur Marc Freedman proposing keeping boomers in the work force rather than enticing them to leave.

In three years, millions of baby boomers will turn retirement age, a time that their parents viewed as the Golden Years, when golf and rocking on the front porch seemed like ideal pastimes.

In his latest book, Encore (PublicAffairs, 2007, $24.95 hardcover), Freedman proposes changes that individuals, business, government and society need to embrace in order to keep that generation working, not retiring.

From a park bench in New Hampshire, Freedman, co-founder of Civic Ventures, a San Francisco think tank, answers questions about how he sees aging baby boomers launching second careers that could be more meaningful and productive than their first 40-plus years of work.

Question: In Encore, you describe the inevitability of a longer working life than our parents. What does a second career mean now that many of us are close to turning 65?

Answer: Much of the discussion about longer working lives is caught between two extremes. On one hand is the dreaded notion of another five to 10 years at the grindstone and not being able to afford to retire. Then the glorious tales of reinvention, transformation and almost a nirvana-like success in second careers. For most people, it's something in the middle. In reality, they have to work longer, and they want work to look forward to.

Stephanie Armour, for USA TODAY, reports on companies that help employees save money on gas.

The breathtaking cost of gas has companies adopting programs to curb commuting costs and employees developing more economical alternatives to driving to work.
Employers are taking action as average national gas prices persist above $3 a gallon. Nearly 90% of employees drive to work, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Thirteen percent of companies offer transit subsidies, and 7% subsidize carpooling, according to a 2006 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Twenty-six percent allow telecommuting on a part-time basis.

For example:

•The University of Portland has launched an initiative to provide a Flexcar (which allows users to share access to vehicles) to faculty and students. The university subsidizes the first four hours of personal use of the car a month.

"We almost doubled (users) in the past month because of rising gas costs," says Jeffrey Rook, environmental health and safety officer at the Oregon university. The school also subsidizes bus passes, and last August launched a shuttle bus program.

Tom Van Riper, for Forbes.com, reports on job markets here and abroad.

To live in one of the world's hottest job markets, you may need to move to South America.

At least that's the case into the fall of 2007, as Argentina and Peru join traditional economic powers like the U.S., Canada and Hong Kong among the countries with the most robust job outlooks for the third quarter of the year.

While both countries have a long way to go to escape the ranks of the world's poor, they're booming, in recovery from the downtrodden 1990s. Freer trade, private sector investment in the mining and telecom industries, plus rising commodity prices that have boosted export dollars, have begun to show signs of paying off. Peru's economy grew 6.5% last year, while Argentina's shot up 8.5%.

Manpower's quarterly Global Employment Outlook, which surveyed over 50,000 employers across 27 countries, ranked Peru No. 2 and Argentina No. 4 in expected job growth for the July-September quarter. The firm scored each country by subtracting the percentage of companies that said they plan to cut back on workers from the percentage that said they plan to add them. A country where 75% of employers plan to add to their workforces and 25% plan to cut them, for example, scores +50%. Peru rated +48%, while Argentina weighed in at +38%.

Explaining the rest of the Top 10 list is pretty simple: Free markets and minimal government interference mean more jobs. Of the 10 countries with brightest employment outlooks, six also show up on the Top 10 on the Heritage Foundation's Index of Economic Freedom, a guide the free market think tank uses to recognize those countries that adhere to relatively lower taxes and a light government touch to running the economy.

The six: Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the U.S., New Zealand and Canada. All are also among the seven countries rated highest by the World Bank for "ease of doing business."

Martha Burk, director for the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations, writes corporate culture must start giving dads a chance.

In the 19th century, before Father’s Day was celebrated or even thought about, men literally owned wives and children. Women had to get their husband’s permission for a divorce, and were not entitled to custody of children. Kids were Dad’s property.

Few of us would want to go back to that model. But as the 20th century produced a more balanced legal equation, it also brought a cultural pendulum swing that went too far in the other direction, producing an equally harmful societal norm – mother ownership of children. In divorce, judges often mindlessly award custody to the mother, even in cases where the father is more nurturing and engaged with his children.

For married parents, you can see it most clearly in the workplace.

Our workplaces are still structured around the idea that family responsibilities will be taken care of by someone other than the employee, who is expected to have unlimited hours to devote to the job. And unfortunately, the father most often fulfills that role.

Mirror Staff Writer Walt Frank reports that according to a latest study by the National Association of Realtors, a record 22 percent of homebuyers are single women.

Single women have outnumbered single men as homeowners since the mid-1980s, with single men comprising of 9 percent, according to the study.

There are more women in the work force, and they are in a better position financially than ever before, said Ellen Renish, vice president of the association’s Region Two, which includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

‘‘Women today are waiting to get married and are more aggressive in the workplace. They don’t wait for a guy. They do it on their own,’’ Renish said. ‘‘Women today have purchasing power they didn’t have years ago.’’

Liz Webber for Inc.com writes, moms may be increasingly comfortable with their positions as working women, but it seems men are still coming to grips with life as working dads, according to a new study.

More dads say they struggle with work-life balance than moms, according to the survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Adecco USA, a career-services consultancy. A majority of men also said they would not take paternity leave if their company offered it.

The Workplace Insights survey, which polled 223 men and 272 women who are employed full-time or part-time and have at least one child, compared workplace attitudes toward parents and asked what companies could do to be more accommodating to those with children. When asked if it is easier for dads to maintain work-life balance, 50 percent of women claim that it is, versus 29 percent of men. Dads also seem to find it harder to manage their work time and their family time. Nearly half of moms polled said they devote equal time to work and family, compared to 32 percent of dads.

The study also found that 59 percent of men would not take paternity leave if given the option. These dads are most worried about the financial burden of taking time off — 46 percent said they could not afford paternity leave even if offered partial salary.

Women for Hire CEO and Good Morning America Workplace Contributor, Tory Johnson, offers some signs to help you determine if you are a workaholic.

It's a frequently asked question: Do we live to work, or work to live?

A growing number of Americans are finding that they live for work, and some of them are popping up at Workaholics Anonymous meetings nationwide.

Unlike people who simply work very hard, which quite frankly is most of us, workaholics never punch out. They always feel like they are on the clock, 24/7, physically, mentally and emotionally working.

They are more genuinely enthusiastic about work than anything else in their lives, even family and friends. There's nothing that person would rather be doing than working.

And we're not just talking about Fortune 500 executives; nurses and construction workers, among others, attend Workaholics Anonymous meetings to try to kick the habit.

WASHINGTON - Applications for unemployment benefits totaled 311,000 last week, unchanged from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The fact that claims remained at the same level was better than the small increase analysts had been expecting and supported their view that the job market has held up remarkably well in the face of a yearlong economic slowdown.

Claims have fallen in six of the past nine weeks. Those declines followed a period of rising claims which had raised fears that the slowing economy was starting to trigger higher layoffs.

For the week ending June 2, when claims had posted a small rise of 2,000, there were 29 states and territories reporting increases in claims and 24 reporting declines. The state figures are not adjusted for seasonal variations.

Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer, asks, Who gets the most (and least) vacation?

It's the start of vacation season, but you can probably count on one hand, if that, the people you know who are taking off several weeks this summer.

The tally likely would be much higher if you also had friends from, say, Finland, where workers must get a minimum of 30 days paid vacation plus up to 14 paid holidays a year. That makes it the country with the most generous paid time off laws out of 49 nations surveyed by human resource consulting firm Mercer.

Besides getting less vacation than workers in many other countries, Americans often don't use all the time that they do get, and what vacation they take is spent in small slices and often in contact with the office, according to findings from other studies.

Unlike in most other countries, there is no federal law mandating that companies pay employees for time off or that they grant them a minimum amount of vacation days unpaid.

The typical practice in the United States - among large companies anyway - is 15 days paid vacation and 10 days of paid holidays for full-time employees with 10 years of tenure, Mercer found.

(Reuters Life!) - Boston has the highest percentage of commuters who walk to work, Portland can boast the most cycling commuters, but the vast majority of Americans still drive to work, according to a U.S. Census Bureau study.

Analysis of data from the American Community Survey, gathered in 2005 and released on Wednesday, found nine out of 10 workers, or 87.7 percent, drive to work with most people, 77 percent, driving alone despite rising fuel costs.

In contrast, 4.7 percent of commuters used public transportation to get to work in 2005 which was an increase of about 0.1 percent over levels five years earlier.

"With each succeeding year, we'll be able to see how people respond to changing circumstances, such as rising gas prices," Census Bureau Director Louis Kincannon said in a statement.

Dr. Nancy D. O'Reilly writes about job stress and burnout: the equal opportunity destroyer.

Jane has years of experience as a company executive, a demanding position that requires her to travel and manage multiple projects and deadlines.

These challenges often leave Jane feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. She admits that she is not handling the job pressures well, and is calling in sick and missing days on the job. In fact, going to work is increasingly hard and her stress has become a chronic issue. She feels tired all the time. Her acute stress is painful and she has not found ways to discharge it. Jane is in danger of burning out.

For many people, the phenomenon called "burnout" is a typical stress reaction. Simply put, burnout means a worker has lost motivation and job performance has declined; it can lead to termination or leaving the job. Its effects need to be dealt with immediately to prevent valuable, well-trained, experienced workers from walking out the door. This can and does affect the company's bottom line.

Stress has been called an equal opportunity destroyer. No one is immune from its effects. Some workers may express their stress openly but others may suppress and ignore stressor signals until they are desperately ill. Stress can cause physical symptoms such as headache, stomach problems, and ulcers and can leave employees vulnerable to disease. Emotional and behavioral stressors can also impact the overall productivity of the workplace. A worker who does not manage his or her stress may find that job performance declines and sick days increase.

Most important of all, workers (and employers and supervisors!) need to remember that life is really much too short to waste it feeling freaked out and frazzled. By restoring some balance between the demands of the workplace and personal life, people can douse burnout and prevent stress from taking its terrible toll. Every person needs to take time to manage their stress so they can enjoy life.

Lis Wiehl for Fox News looks at working women who decide to keep their maiden name.

Traditional social mores and values dictate that women should adopt their husbands’ surnames upon marriage. Women were once considered property and changing thelast name reflected this. Although not true anymore in the legal or social sense, name changing symbolically still reflects unity and commitment. Lucy Stone, a prevalent antislavery activist and woman suffragist, became the first woman on American record to not change her surname upon marriage in 1855. Now, Lucy Stone’s name continues to be synonymous with the movement against name change. In the mid-1920s the Lucy Stone League was formed, a committee dedicated to name change equality for men and women. The organization likens name change to certain prisons where prisoners are given a number instead of being called by their names.

Although many of us may not take this idea as far as the Lucy Stone League, questions of identity may be of importance when deciding whether or not to change your name after marriage. In a recent study by University of Florida Professor Diana Boxer, one woman expressed dismay at losing part of her ethnic heritage by changing her last name. The results of the study indicate that many women are concerned about the confusion their kids may encounter when mom has a different last name, and also that women who are in professional fields are less likely to change their names.

The results are not surprising. As women began to assume a more professional role in the workplace in the 70s and 80s, the number of women who kept their maiden names also increased. If I had to guess the reason behind the upswing, I’d say that women began marrying later in life, allowing more time for career and finding they have “made a name for themselves” in their respective professions. But, like bell-bottoms and aviator sunglasses, most trends come back around and women are once again beginning to adopt their husband’s names. Statistics now show that roughly 90 percent of all married women take on their partner’s surname — even though women are marrying even later in life.

Long weekends take the place of long vacations, reports Stephanie Armour for USA TODAY.

The two-week vacation is fast disappearing. Instead, employees are using their vacation days to extend weekends and take shorter breaks from the office.
The shift is being blamed partly on rising gas prices as well as mounting pressure for workers to be available to clients around the clock. And more dual-income couples are finding it difficult to coordinate vacation schedules due to work demands.

Only 14% of Americans plan to take a two-week vacation in 2007, down from 16% in 2006, according to a new study by Harris Interactive for Expedia.com, an online travel site. One-third of workers do not always use all their vacation days.

Beverly Fortune, for Long Island Press, writes about growing old in the workplace.

If youth is the advantage that some corporations crave, they should keep in mind that being young is a condition that won’t last. Everybody gets old.

Valentina Janek, founding member of the Long Island Breakfast Club, knows firsthand how cruel growing older in the workplace can be. "It used to be job stability was good. It’s not now," she says.

The victim of a corporate downsizing, Valentina embarked on a long journey to find another job she was qualified for. Along the way, she met three other unemployed 50-somethings, and in 2006, they formed the Long Island Breakfast Club, an organization that provides advocacy, support, career counseling and referrals for job seekers 40 and older. The club’s mission statement is, "Experience Counts!"

"We have almost 20 people in the club now," Valentina says. "We’re all successful and want to help others. There are mentors in the group and people who need to get jobs."

Going on an interview is stressful enough, says Valentina. She should know: It took 26 interviews and two years to find the right job for her. During the process, she maintains, "You are being interviewed by people less qualified than you." And, to add insult to injury, Valentina says, "seven out of ten interviewers don’t call you back."

Health care is the second-fastest-growing sector of the U.S. economy, employing more than 12 million workers, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Women make up nearly 80 percent of the health care work force, and increasingly they’re moving into the executive ranks.

Julie Vincent for Business Journal writes how women are forging a path in health care management.

Like many women, Riverview Hospital CEO Patricia Fox got her start in health care as a nurse. She served as vice president for patient care services at Wishard Health Services before coming to Riverview.

Fifty-six percent of women in health care management, but only 31 percent of men, have previous experience as clinicians, according to the American College of Healthcare Executives.

“My personal barrier was getting past the image I had of myself as a nurse, which was clinically focused, to one of being business-focused,” Fox said. “I worked very hard to learn the business side of things and understand the cultural difference in the two worlds. It takes time to build the reputation of being business-focused.” Fifty percent of Riverview’s senior leadership team are women.

The UN News Center reports on a new study by the United Nations labour agency finds that more than one in five workers around the world – over 600 million people – are working “excessively” long hours.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that 22 per cent of the global workforce are still working more than 48 hours a week, “often merely to make ends meet.”

The study, Working Time Around the World: Trends in working hours, laws and policies in a global comparative perspective, spotlights working time in over 50 countries, and for the first time explores the implications for working time policies in developing and transition countries.

“The good news is that progress has been made in regulating normal working hours in developing and transition countries, but overall the findings of this study are definitely worrying, especially the prevalence of excessively long hours,” said Jon C. Messenger, Senior Research Officer for the ILO’s Conditions of Work and Employment Programme and a co-author of the study.

Richard Conlyn reports on a study that finds real wages and buying power are down from 30 years ago.

American men in their 30s today, on average, are making 12 percent less than their fathers' generation did, according to a study released by The Economic Mobility Project.

The report states that men in their 30s in 1974 had a median income of $40,000 in modern dollars, compared to men in 2004, who made an average income of $35,000.

"The American dream has been premised on this bedrock principle that each generation will do better than the one that came before," said John Morton, director of Pew's Economic Mobility Project.

Morton and his colleagues are looking for the answer to what is driving these economic trends. Future studies will address possible factors such as globalization and changing family structures.

"The crisis is growing, and factors like divorce and inflation have played a role in the decline of income for today's working man," Pinal Modi, accounting major, said.

"There are several factors to consider when looking at this study. Along with the convergence of women in the workplace, there is an impact and change in the economy with the influx of immigrants that are in the workplace today," said Robert Mead, Cal State Fullerton professor of economics.

"The demographics have changed. Women are more open and there are more stay-at-home dads and that makes a difference in these findings," said Sagnika Sen, CSUF professor of information systems.

(Reuters) - Worker productivity grew at a slower pace than initially estimated in the first quarter, driving up labor costs and reinforcing concerns about inflation.

The Labor Department said on Wednesday that nonfarm productivity, a measure of how much any given worker can produce in an hour, rose at a 1 percent annualized pace in the quarter after a 2.1 percent fourth-quarter advance.

A month ago, the department had estimated productivity grew at a 1.7 percent rate.

On the labor front, U.S. employers announced plans in May to eliminate 71,115 jobs, up 32 percent from May 2006 when job cuts totaled 53,716.

It was the second consecutive month in which job cuts increased from the year earlier period, according to the monthly job-cut report released on Wednesday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

Jim Puzzanghera, for the LA Times, reports a media policy group's study finds a lack of diversity in who holds radio station licenses.

Women and minorities are largely absent from radio station ownership, thanks to a surge in media consolidation.

A public-interest group study made that case Tuesday, arguing that the groups were woefully underrepresented as radio stations increasingly are swept up by big chains headed by white males.

The findings, unveiled in a conference call by a group that included feminist Gloria Steinem and the two Democratic members of the Federal Communications Commission, sparked women's groups, minority activists and Democrats to urge federal officials to refrain from further relaxing restrictions on ownership of broadcast stations by large companies.

The FCC is considering changes to its media ownership rules, and opponents of further consolidation have complained at hearings about a lack of diversity among station owners.

"Women and minorities have been systematically cut off from media ownership," said FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps. "It's not that they're riding in the back of the bus … they're not even on the bus."

Susan G. Hauser, for Fortune Small Business, offers tips how to market your business online.

When Mark Bitterman, who calls himself a "selmelier," was trying to pump up sales at his gourmet salt shop, he knew standard marketing techniques such as radio ads and direct mail wouldn't be enough.

Seeking to capture the imagination of educated, adventurous gourmand prospective customers, he instead set out to draw more people to his Web site and his Portland, Ore., shop by writing an informative, entertaining and provocative blog, "Salt News."

Bitterman knows that people, including reporters, visit both the site and the blog, and many eventually come through the doors to see the 60 or so varieties of salt.

"You can't tell if it gets you new traffic or if it just shapes the expectations of those who come to the shop," he adds.

There are probably as many varieties of marketing a business and increasing sales as there are versions of high-end salt. But you can't expect to compete as a small business today without choosing from a growing arsenal of online marketing tools.

Paul Maidment for Forbes.com reports on America’s Jobs

When we first looked at America's best- and worst-paying jobs a year back, we asked the question, "Why do financially pushy parents want their children to marry doctors?" Our answer then: Because, as Willie Sutton said of banks, that is where the money is. Still is.
The medical profession continues to dominate the top end of our list of the 25 best- and worst-paying jobs in America. Anesthesiologists have flipped places with surgeons to take the top spot, but the next eight places are firmly in the healing hands of various sorts of specialist practitioners.

At the other end of the scale are jobs in restaurants, hotels and leisure businesses. The lowest paid of all? People who cook, prepare and serve in fast-food joints, followed by dishwashers, busboys and the folk who show you to your seat in coffee-shops and the like.

Catalyst, the organization that studies, among other things, the progress of women in the workplace, released its "2006 Census of Women Corporate Officers, Top Earners, and Directors of the Fortune 500" report last month, featuring some interesting results, writes Selena Maranjian for The Motley Fool.

Why does this topic matter to investors? Well, as I've reported before, some studies suggest that having more women on a board of directors can lead to better governance. A previous Catalyst study, in fact, found, "the group of companies with the highest representation of women on their senior management teams had a 35% higher ROE [return on equity] and a 34% higher [total return to shareholders] than companies with the lowest women's representation."

(WOMENSENEWS)--Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York and the only woman on the Supreme Court have both vigorously responded to the U.S. Supreme Court's May 29 ruling against a woman's claims of gender-based pay discrimination by Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

The court ruled against a female employee of the Akron, Ohio, company because she did not file her claim within a 180-day limit stipulated by current civil rights law. The decision is expected to uphold stringent time limits on claims based on race, sex, religion or national origin and limit opportunities for legal responses to discrimination.

In a biting oral dissent read from the bench, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called on Congress to enact legislation to correct the high court's "parsimonious reading" of pay inequity claims.
Ginsburg's words spurred Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York--already outraged by news of the decision--to do just that.

Boston’s NPR’s Tom Ashbrook, host of On Point, talks about keeping women at work.

It's been a long and winding road for women in the American workplace. First, they were frozen out or locked in the steno pool. Then came "liberation" with its open doors and glass ceilings. Then, a crisis of confidence over whether work and child-rearing could really co-exist.

Now, the new challenge is that of the era of "extreme work," when seventy-hour weeks and 24/7 demands can make work-life balance seem impossible. But we need the talents of women at top levels.

Diane Brady for BusinessWeek Online asks GE: Still Holding Women Back?

Since coming to the top job at General Electric (NYSE:GE - News) in 2001, Jeffrey Immelt has basked in the aura of being today's man. He wants his businesses to help save the environment, he waxes eloquent about China and obscure markets in the Middle East, and he talks often about the necessity of diversity in the top ranks (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/11/06, "General Electric, the Immelt Way").

Now one of the company's top lawyers has slapped Immelt, GE, and a slew of other senior executives with a $500 million lawsuit that claims she--and other executive-level women at GE--are systematically discriminated against. Not only does the company underpay women in comparable jobs held by men, she says, but it promotes them at a slower rate and has failed to make any progress under Immelt's watch.

Sun block. Beach umbrella. Laptop. Alan Fram for the Associated Press reports on a recent poll.

One in five people toted laptop computers on their most recent vacations, an AP-Ipsos poll released Friday said. Along with the 80 percent who said they brought along their cell phones, the survey shows going on vacation no longer means being out of the electronic loop.

Sizable numbers are interrupting their unwinding time to check in at the office and, even more so, to keep up with the social buzz.

About one in five said they did some work while vacationing, and about the same number checked office messages or called in to see how things were going, the poll showed. Twice as many checked their e-mail, while 50 percent kept up with other personal messages like voice mail.

The credit -- or culprit, depending on one's view -- is in part today's array of devices that can easily keep people digitally tethered to workplaces, friends and family. The electronic gear was most commonly brought along by younger people -- one in four below age 40 brought laptops, compared to 15 percent of those 50 to 64 and even less for older people.

Stephanie Armour reports that workaholics have long been a part of the workforce. But new research shows the number of these extreme workers is growing, driven to long hours on the job because of new technology, globalization and today's intensified business pressures. Research is also providing new insight into who these workaholics are: men who endure large amounts of travel and have responsibility for profits and loss.

"Extreme work is real. The technological age has exacerbated this problem beyond belief," says Ken Siegel, of Beverly Hills, Calif., president of The Impact Group, a group of psychologists who consult with the management of leading global companies. "You can take work into the shower or the bath. There's no escape. (Extreme workers) often feel like if they don't work like that, they'll fail or their performance will suffer. They focus externally on the next goal, the next task."

A study in the December issue of Harvard Business Review provided new information on the rise in workaholics: Of extreme job holders, 48 percent say they are working an average of 16.6 more hours per week than they did five years ago.

But there is debate among the mental-health community about how detrimental such extreme work is. Stress related to work can lead to heart disease and mental health problems such as depression, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Blogging from the Huffington Post, Hannah Seligson asks, Should I Have Written a Career Guide Called "New Kid on the Job: Advice from the Trenches?"

The number of women in my graduating class outnumbered the men. And if my class was anything reflective of what the national statistics bear out, the women graduated with higher grade point averages.

So why, with all these doors swinging open, would I write a book, (published today) called New Girl on the Job: Advice from the Trenches?

Because, distressingly, young women's academic success is not translating into workplace parity. Last month, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) found that women one year out of college make 80 percent of what their male peers do. And this month, the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that white males from the class of 2007 are out-pacing their female counterparts when it comes to having a full-time job upon graduation.

Tory Johnson, the CEO of Women for Hire and one of the career experts I interviewed for New Girl on the Job puts it like this: "It's very easy for young women to get stuck in support roles...After a year or so you become pegged and it's more difficult for your employer to see you in a different light."

Ilene H. Lange, president of Catalyst, the leading research and advisory organization working with businesses to expand opportunities for women at work, attributes the glaring absence of women at the top to the fact that women are two and half times more likely to be channeled into staff jobs like Human Resources and communication than into operating roles where they would be generating revenue and managing profit and loss. The revised career calculus should be to use an assistant position as a springboard to bigger opportunities, not as a place to incubate.

Heather Cassell reports on a study titled, “The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women" by Jennifer L. Berdahl, Ph.D., an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Toronto University's Rotman School of Management.

"My study shows that you don't even have to be obviously butch or transgender, you just have to be outspoken, assertive, and independent to be treated this way," said Berdahl, 40, whose research is focused on workplace harassment. She began her sexual harassment research 10 years ago studying how men who deviated from gender roles were harassed in the workplace.

"It's really a pretty strong barrier put up for women in the workplace and it presents a double bind for them because if they are feminine and submissive, then they might be liked, but not respected at work," Berdahl said. "Then, if they are outspoken and assertive, they might be treated badly and derogated and put back into their place."

Many people would like the chance to walk away from their jobs and be able to work from home, but several people fall victim to scams. Eyewitness News Everywhere uncovers legitimate work-at-home jobs for those willing to work.

Bob Sachs is a nationally known shoe seller who ships hundreds of pairs of shoes across the country every month. Sachs runs his business from his garage in Southeast Memphis.
Sachs' business is booming, and eBay considers the business so successful that the company considers him to be an expert who can help other people trying to work from home.

However, business consultant and work-at-home expert Tory Johnson says it's not easy.

"You definitely have to treat it like a business," Johnson said." "You have to remember that working from home means there's no manager looking over your shoulder. There is no person to kind of prod you along."

Johnson said you have to keep the same ready-to-work attitude as if you were going to the office everyday.

Washington Post Services’ Mary Ellen Slayter writes about a new book that offers advice for young women in the workplace.

Don't let yourself get ``assistant-ized.''

It's one of the many perils of being a young woman in today's job market, Hannah Seligson warns in her new book, New Girl on the Job: Advice From the Trenches (Citadel Press, $19.95).

There are enough issues that specifically affect young women, such as salary negotiations and the tendency to pigeonhole women into support rather than leadership roles, that she felt they deserved their own career guide, she said.

New Girl covers the key things that any young woman needs to know to thrive at those first couple of jobs.

Young women often hang on to jobs for way too long, even jobs where they are grossly overworked and under-compensated. It's as if they are afraid to leave. But staying put comes at a cost. DON'T WASTE TIME.

Freelance journalist and editor, Laura Vanderkam, asks, “When You Work For Yourself, is ‘Maternity Leave’ Possible?”

I'm rushing to write this post because at some point in the next few days (God willing) I will give birth to my first child. This is both exciting and terrifying for me. I'm sure birth is exciting and terrifying for all new parents. But my particular situation also presents an interesting challenge from a work/life perspective.

I'm a freelance journalist and editor. I work for myself. I have for the past five years. I usually work from home. As people are fond of pointing out as they notice my protruding belly, "it's so great that your work is so flexible!"

It is. I don't have to ask anyone's permission to take time off. But like many micro-business owners, I work more than fifty hours a week. Those are real hours, not "have a meeting and then hang around in the office kitchen and then schedule a pointless conference call and whoops is it noon already?" hours. If I don't drum up work, it will not appear. If my business isn't pulling in money, I will not get paid. Given these realities, the question arises: Is it even possible for the self-employed to go on maternity leave?

It's a question a growing number of women will face. The number of women-owned businesses, as the Center for Women's Business Research is fond of pointing out, is growing at twice the rate of all businesses. Entrepreneurs in general are better at blending work and family than corporate women; Creating a Life author Sylvia Ann Hewlett's groundbreaking research found that only 22% of high-achieving entrepreneurs were childless in middle age, compared with 42% of corporate women. But many of these entrepreneurs launched their businesses after they had their children.

CNN Supreme Court Producer Bill Mears reports that U.S. Supreme Court Rules 5-4 in favor of Goodyear Tire in pay discrimination lawsuit.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A female worker at a tire plant who claimed pay discrimination lost her appeal before the Supreme Court on Tuesday, after the conservative majority concluded she missed a critical deadline for filing a lawsuit.

Lilly Ledbetter accused Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. of gender discrimination because court records showed she was being paid $6,000 less than men doing the same work, including those who were the lowest paid in their job duties.

But a divided 5-4 high court concluded Ledbetter had had only a federally mandated 180-day window in which to make her initial claim.

"The EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) charging period is triggered when a discrete unlawful practice takes place," concluded Justice Samuel Alito. Such a "filing deadline protects employers from the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions long past."

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg accused her conservative colleagues of being "indifferent" to victims of pay discrimination.

John Paul Newport and Russell Adams report for The Wall Street Journal that golf outings are no longer as popular as they once were in the business world.

Early one Friday afternoon about 20 years ago, Wendy Baker, then a senior vice president at the insurance company Continental, was leaving her office when she ran into another female executive.

"Where is everyone?" Ms. Baker asked. Many of the company's executive men were off at a golf outing. "We're the ones in charge here. Why aren't we out there?" Ms. Baker said.

Almost immediately, she says, she began taking golf lessons, and soon she and a group of friends were playing socially on a weekly basis. Within two years she had developed enough talent to feel comfortable using golf in her business dealings. Today, Ms. Baker is president of Lloyds America, the U.S. arm of the British insurance syndicate, and a respectable 12-handicap golfer.

In a sense, business golf is a collusion that has developed over the years between business people and their clients. And it used to be much worse -- or much better, depending on your point of view. As late as the 1970s, Time magazine had a full-time staffer -- a top-flight golfer named Sonny West -- whose only duties were to play golf with the magazine's best advertising customers.

Today, though, things are different. Participation levels in golf have been flat for a decade in part because fewer people can justify the hours it takes to play a round or the expense. And the workplace has changed dramatically. Women who may not be steeped in golf now occupy executive positions, and many of the tech geeks who run the world would rather be mountain biking. At the same time, corporate perks are under intense scrutiny and booking time on the company jet for golf outings to Bermuda seldom flies anymore.

Knowledge at Wharton reported on a recent fellowship program.

This spring, Wharton and the University of Pennsylvania law school hosted 37 professional women from the Middle East for a four-week legal and business fellowship program. Depending on their professional experience, the women attended classes at Wharton executive education or the law school, and then began five-month internships with large companies and top-tier law firms across the U.S.

The program, in partnership with America-Mideast Educational and Training Services and the U.S. State Department, teaches management, business and legal skills, and encourages women to share information and network with each other as well as the faculty.

Claude Solnik, for Long Island Business News, writes that female executives are missing from the best-paid list.

Female executives failed to make the list of Long Island’s best-paid public company executives last year, as male compensation surged and the region’s top women-led companies moved out.

Cablevision chief Jim Dolan led the annual Top 100 ranking with total compensation of almost $16 million in 2006, but you have to slide off the charts to what would be position No. 154 to find a woman – Veeco Instruments Executive Vice President Jeannine P. Sargent, who earned $660,000 last year.

“It is very much the function of an ‘old boys’ network,’ ” said Dana Friedman, president of Women on the Job, a not-for-profit organization that promotes workplace rights for women. “There are qualified women who should be earning high salaries, serving in executive positions, and they’re not,” she said.

To be fair, one cause of the Top 100 shutout is that multiple companies with high-paid female executives have shipped off the Island. Linda Huett, who headed Weight Watchers when the company relocated to Manhattan in 2005, was Long Island’s top-paid public company female executive, earning $4.6 million and ranking 15th overall on the 2004 list.

Anthony Cronin, business editor for TheDay.com, reports that employers have to face a shifting workforce.

Barbara Reinhold sees challenges ahead for employers and employees, but she also sees opportunities, as well.

The challenge for employers, says the author and careers expert, is they need to start listening to what employees want in order to keep them around. Loyalty to employers, after all, isn't what it used to be.

And this nation's work force is shrinking, and getting older. So she says employers need to begin to “truly differentiate the important tasks from the less important ones.” There just won't be enough workers around to be able to “do things because 'that's the way we do it here.' ”

Working Mother magazine Wednesday announced that Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is a 2007 Best Company for Multicultural Women. Now in its fifth year, the Working Mother Best Companies for Multicultural Women initiative celebrates employers that are establishing groundbreaking diversity policies and programs to encourage the hiring and advancement of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American and Native-American women.

"Working Mother magazine is making a difference in the way corporate America views diversity and its multicultural employees," said Suzanne Riss, editor in chief, Working Mother magazine. "They're holding managers accountable for helping workplace diversity thrive. We have the good fortune to live in one of the most culturally rich countries in the world, and Wal-Mart recognizes that this richness is a workplace asset. Harnessing the wealth of talents and perspectives that people of different backgrounds have to offer is helping Wal-Mart excel in our increasingly global and competitive world. Wal-Mart is truly leading by example."

Newswise — A restrictive drinking culture at work curbs an individual’s overall alcohol intake, including outside of work, suggests research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

The researchers base their findings on a detailed analysis of workplace attitudes towards drinking and drinking behaviours in over 5,000 employees in 16 different organisations, representing a range of different sectors.

The employees were quizzed about how often they drank alcohol, and when and where they did so.

And they were asked to reveal their attitudes to social drinking, including whether they thought alcohol boosted workplace morale, was good for business, alleviated boredom, improved their health, was harmful, or set a bad example.

Their responses were tied in with those of their supervisors and managers who were also quizzed about the drinking culture in their respective divisions.

SAN DIEGO and MCLEAN, Va., May 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Science Applications International Corporation announced today that Deborah Alderson, president of its Defense Solutions Group was recognized as a winner by the Women in Technology (WIT) organization. WIT contributes to the success of professional women in the Washington technology community.

This year's awards recognize women who embody the WIT spirit to connect, lead, succeed and who have excelled in their roles as mentors, leaders and role models.

"The caliber of the nominations that WIT received this year for its Leadership Awards was outstanding," said Marguerete Luter, president of WIT. "We are thrilled to recognize Deb Alderson for her stellar contributions to the technology community at large and to SAIC specifically."

Variety columnist Pamela Robinson’s hot tip of the week: Always keep your network of business connections current - even if you take a sabbatical, or decide to travel for awhile.

Today, the women I meet & talk to want balance in their lives. They want to be married, at a younger age than the previous generation, they want to have children, & some want to be stay-at-home mothers. There is a pride in childrearing, that didn’t exist when I started my career (hence the term “latch-key kid”) & can say that it continued on until the mid to late nineties. There was a shift to wanting family life to take priority, and I believe that the first internet boom had a profound impact on this aspect of life. The big tech companies offered their employees creature comforts not formerly found in the workplace… the office became a campus, with pets allowed, childcare, cafeterias with free meals, & generally a familial feeling permeated the workplace. I distinctly remember my first visit to a company in Silicon Valley, “WebTV” before Microsoft bought them. There were animals roaming all over the offices, their were futons in the halls for overworked people who stayed up all night to nap, and everyone was in jeans, Birkenstocks & T-shirts. Quite a cultural change from the way older corporations operated or the dress codes of execs at the entertainment companies or talent agencies.

Now, most of the women I meet between 25-40 are interested in working at their convenience. They want to work from home, or work on a part-time basis, telecommute or job share if that is possible. The barriers that my generation faced are not there as blatantly as they were in the early 70’s, so the shift toward balance is easier.

Four town employees with 46 years of service between them were fired, in part for gossiping and discussing rumors of an improper relationship between the town administrator and another employee that Hooksett residents now agree were not true.

Gossip is ingrained in American culture, from the elementary school playground to the office water cooler. But Tory Johnson, "Good Morning America's" workplace contributor, said people should be careful about what they say when they're on the clock.

"Free speech only goes so far," Johnson said. "An employer definitely has the right to defend his reputation."

In Hooksett the four firings are ironically now the talk of the town. But for the women out of work, the controversy is not a matter of idle chatter -- they want to get back to work.

(Alexandria, Va., May 22, 2007)—According to new numbers from the Leading Indicator of National Employment® (LINE), manufacturing hiring will be much weaker in June 2007 than it was in June 2006. Within the larger service-sector, growth will be just slightly stronger than in June 2006. LINE is a collaborative effort between the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

This LINE employment expectations report references the same June period as the report the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release on July 6, 2007. The responses in the LINE survey are weighted using the proportion of total employment represented by the respondent’s industry.

Compared with a year ago, new-hire compensation is rising more slowly within manufacturing, but more rapidly within the service-sector. The number of vacant positions that employers are actively trying to fill is rising rapidly within the exempt manufacturing sector, but has dropped significantly in the exempt service-sector and in the non-exempt manufacturing and service-sectors. Recruiting difficulty increased in the service-sector, but eased in manufacturing. In both sectors, recruiting difficulty remains a major concern.

Sharon Reed Abboud, for Quintessential Careers, interviewed Women For Hire’s CEO, Tory Johnson

Transitioning back to work can be difficult for long time stay-at-home parents. Often transitioning career-seekers have lost touch with their professional network. They send their resume in response to job ads and usually end up without a job or with a job that is below their professional level. There is a better way.

Job-seekers who have been home for three, five, or even 10 years or more can ease into a professional job if they strategize their job search carefully. By considering the following eight factors with advice from some of America’s career experts, most transitioning career-seekers should be able to jump right back into the professional work force.

Tory Johnson, CEO of Women for Hire and author of Take this Book to Work: How to Ask for (and Get) Money, Fulfillment and Advancement also urges career-seekers to network with such network members as neighborhood friends and PTA contacts.

"These are people who know your work ethic and like you and trust you -- so they are more eager to either help you get hired or hire you themselves," Johnson said.

Jenna Russell, Globe Staff, reports on how rumors led to employees being fired.

HOOKSETT, N.H. -- No one knows exactly where the rumor started. But everyone in this small town knows what happened when the gossip -- about a close relationship between two married town employees -- finally reached the ear of one of its subjects.

Town Administrator David Jodoin was deeply troubled by the rumors about his personal life. He complained to the Hooksett Town Council, which launched an investigation of the gossip at the town offices. When the brief probe was over, the town moved quickly to action, and fired four town employees for spreading the rumor.

If town officials hoped to quell the chatter, their action has had the opposite result. The town hall drama has become the hottest topic at Robie's Country Store, the unofficial epicenter of buzz about local affairs; the rumor has been aired in the pages of local newspapers. And the firings of the four women -- long time employees who had earned stellar performance reviews -- have unleashed a wave of disbelief and anger among many residents.

The best response to a rumor is a truthful rebuttal, said Nicholas DiFonzo , a psychology professor who studies rumors at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He said rumors can be deeply damaging, but he also supported Branch's view of gossip as a normal way to work through uncertainty.

"People are going to try to figure out the facts of the matter, and they view that as their basic right," DiFonzo said.

MAYNARD, Mass. (BusinessWire EON/PRWEB ) May 21, 2007 -- The high school graduating class of 2007 is a tenacious and well-connected demographic, according to Monster’s first annual nationwide survey of graduating seniors. Among the findings, two-thirds of those surveyed already have work experience under their belts as they commence the next phase of their life, whether that involves pursuing higher education, beginning their career or entering the military. Monster is the leading global online careers and recruitment resource and flagship brand of Monster Worldwide, Inc. (NASDAQ: MNST).

“Monster’s inaugural High School Graduate Survey shows that seniors are not passively waiting for opportunity to knock on their door – they have strategic post-graduation plans and they realize it is never too early to consider their long-term career path,” said Diana Nicholson, senior vice president and general manager of Monster Youth. “Many students already have an intended major and are aggressively preparing for their future now.”

The scale might soon be tipping in the male-dominated, fight-to-the-death corporate arena, reports Matthew Kirdahy for Forbes.com.

For the increasing number of women who aspire to achieve "alpha status" in the workplace, there is a relatively new, apparently flourishing but hardly cheap program.
A workshop and boot camp that guarantees to turn you into a leader, BecomeAlpha has piqued the interest of the wealthy--and women especially--according to the program's co-founding partner, who goes by the moniker Drawk.

Drawk--Nathan Kwast, 30, originally from Alberta, Canada--started BecomeAlpha in November 2006 and says it seems to be more women than men seeking out his and his colleagues' counsel on confidence because females tend to be the first to admit if they're lacking this nerve, whether it's during the job interview process or when they're interacting with a mate.

Tyler Cowen writes in The New York Times that [t]he most commonly cited culprits for the income inequality in America — outsourcing, immigration and the gains of the super-rich — are diversions from the main issue. Instead, the problem is largely one of (a lack of) education.

Immigration has a smaller influence on wages than is often believed as well. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, both professors of economics at Harvard, estimate the numbers in their recent paper, “The Race Between Education and Technology: The Evolution of U.S. Educational Wage Differentials, 1890 to 2005,” soon to be expanded into a book.

College graduates have been gaining relative to high school graduates. But competition from immigrant labor accounts for only 10 percent of the change in the wages of unskilled workers, relative to the skilled, since 1950.

GRAND RAPIDS (AP) — The entire 19th floor and a lounge at a JW Marriott hotel being built by direct-sales giant Alticor Inc. and set to open in September will be reserved exclusively for female clientele.

Andrea Groom, a spokeswoman for the 24-story, 340-room hotel being constructed alongside the Grand River in Grand Rapids, said more than half of all business travelers are women.

"A lot of women are saying they're not feeling like they're safe when they're traveling to a strange city," Groom told The Grand Rapids Press for a story published Wednesday. "They don't necessarily want to go down to a lounge and feel like they are getting hit on by guys."

The women-only rooms will have amenities not found in other rooms, such as chenille throw blankets, ionic hair dryers, jewelry holders and special bath products. Access to those rooms will come at a $25- to $30-per-night premium over the standard rate of about $229.

Harold Core, a spokesman for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission, said he was uncertain about the legality of a hotel offering a women-only floor.

Motley Fool contributor Rich Duprey writes, The lure of the leisurely life gets stronger the closer we get to retirement age. Whether we're facing a company mandate or a self-imposed date to take that gold watch, being a short-timer makes us think more about what we'd rather be doing.

Yet it also brings on doubts about whether we've prepared ourselves financially for the downtime. Even if you've been following a sound financial plan for years, it's not uncommon to feel some insecurity. While it's been ingrained in us that we should want to retire, it's becoming more common that simply by working a bit longer, we can ensure we achieve the financial security that will make retirement rewarding and fulfilling.

Fortune teamed up with Experience Inc. to find companies that offer impressive perks to new hires just out of college - ranging from generous salaries to workplace flexibility, from enviable benefits to serious growth opportunities.

(MARKET WIRE) -- May 14, 2007 -- Based on findings released today by WITI (Women in Technology International) and Compel Ltd., a management consulting and research firm, there is a simultaneously fascinating and disturbing paradox at play in today's technology workplaces. According to research conducted jointly by the organizations, 75 percent of today's women in technology roles would advise a young woman starting her career to enter a technology-related field. Yet, only 52 percent believe their organizations offer "favorable climates" for women.

The findings in the "Women in Technology 2007 Report" derive from an on-line survey conducted and analyzed from December 2006 through March 2007. A total of 1,985 women responded to 34 multiple-choice and three open-ended questions.

Infozine.com reports on a recent study published in Law & Social Inquiry.

A study published in Law & Social Inquiry conclusively demonstrates that federal efforts to improve diversity in the workplace are effective at the management level. The groundbreaking new study evaluates the efficacy of both discrimination lawsuits and affirmative action compliance reviews at improving the numbers of women and minorities moving into management positions, finding that both methods prove beneficial.

"For those who argue that civil rights enforcement has been merely ceremonial, we offer clear evidence that compliance reviews and Title VII lawsuits have had a significant impact on the careers of women and minorities," say study authors Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin, who insist that the continued involvement of the federal government in diversifying business remains essential.

Whether you're a college student, a seasoned professional with 30 years under your belt, or a mom looking to make a career comeback, we believe every woman has something to share with others. Do you think you have a flair for combining humor and seriousness to your career-related triumphs and challenges to engage other women? Would your workplace anecdotes and experiences provide comic relief or valuable lessons to your peers?

If you've answered yes to both questions, we'd love to welcome you as a Women For Hire blogger. We're selecting a group of every day women to submit daily, weekly or bi-weekly content offering a fresh perspective on any number of topics. From working at home and managing work and family to dealing with office politics, and navigating advancement and leadership obstacles to overcoming job search rejection, please send us a sample of the type of content you'd like to contribute. Also include a brief summary of your background and experience, along with the frequency you'd like to contribute. Blog entries should be about 250 words. E-mail submissions to blogger@womenforhire.com by July 13.

The New York Times reports, human resources professionals and career counselors say that in the last several years, more high-level executives (those making more than $150,000) have turned to executive coaches and professional résumé writers. They see it as a way to gain an edge in self-marketing, said Steven Miranda, chief human resource and strategic planning officer for the Society for Human Resource Management.

There is a sense among some executives that using traditional search firms is still effective, but that these firms essentially work for the employer, not the job seeker, he said.

Tory Johnson, president of Women for Hire, a group in New York that organizes career expos and seminars, recently coached a client for two months, charging just over $15,000 for the service.

“We did everything for her, from revising her résumé, to prepping her for interviews and negotiations and putting her in direct contact with recruiters and decision makers,” Ms. Johnson said. “A committed individual who is willing to do his or her part, not just rely on the expertise of a coach, can and usually does land a position faster and for more money than those who go it alone.”

Ms. Johnson said her client found a $185,000-a-year executive position that includes bonuses and other incentives.

PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Today, in honor of Mother's Day, many of the nation's most influential women's groups, including the National Council of Women's Organizations, the National Organization of Women (NOW), CODEPINK, National Congress of Black Women, National Committee on Pay Equity, Wider Opportunities for Women (WOW), National Women's Conference, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, International Women's Democracy Center, Coalition of Labor Union Women, Black Women United for Action, National Women's Political Caucus, Veteran Feminists of America, and the Dolores Huerta Foundation signed a joint letter that calls on Wal-Mart to address its record of mistreating women workers and help "make this Mother's Day the best ever for Wal-Mart's Associates and mothers all across our country."

Writer Ellen Goodman reports that discrimination against moms is practiced openly.

It's become a Mother's Day tradition on a par with candy, flowers and guilt. While advertisers wax poetically about the priceless work of motherhood, economists tally up the paycheck for the services she performs.

This year, salary.com estimates the value of a full-time mom at $138,095, up 3 percent from last year. The monetary value of a second-shift mom is $85,939, on top of her day job.

But, alas, the check is not in the mail. Nor will mom find it next to the maple syrup on her bed tray. Motherhood is what the economists call a monopsony, a job for which there is only one employer. And it's a rare child who's saved up to fill mom's piggybank, let alone a 401(k).

Mothers in the workplace still are treated as if they were a third gender. Here's a Mother's Day card from a study just published by Shelley Correll in the American Journal of Sociology: Correll performed an experiment to see if there was a motherhood penalty in the job market. She and her colleagues at Cornell University created an ideal job applicant with a successful track record, an uninterrupted work history, a boffo resume, the whole deal. Then they tucked a little telltale factoid into some of the resumes with a tip-off about mom-ness. It described her as an officer in a parent-teacher association.

Read Sue Van Der Hout’s Interview with Tory Johnson, CEO of Women for Hire and Workplace Contributor for Good Morning America here.

BusinessWeek Online reports that there are plenty of jobs for MBA graduates.

After his interviews were over this spring, Michigan State University MBA student Derek Teo waited for an offer. The 29-year-old marketing major from Singapore was nervous he would be left without a job when he graduated. But within days he had three options to choose from. "I would have been surprised just to get one," Teo says. "But when I got two in one day and one a few days later, I was very surprised."

With multiple offers, Teo had the chance to evaluate which position would best fit his career plan and keep him close to his wife, Hong Hui Tang, who was also assessing several options. "I looked at my interests and what I wanted to be doing," he says. The couple elected to work an hour and a half away from each other, Teo at Whirlpool (NYSE:WHR - News) and Tang at Motorola (NYSE:MOT - News).

In Demand

Like Tang and Teo, the typical MBA graduate will consider more than one offer this year. While it wasn't too many years ago that students were happy with a single offer, 2006 graduates snagged an average of 2.3 offers, according to a study by career adviser WetFeet.

And this year, companies expect to hire 22% more MBAs than a year ago, according to the National Association of Colleges & Employers (NACE)--the highest increase since 2001, thanks to retiring baby boomers and the strong economy (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/3/07, "Survey: MBAs Search for Google").

Dana Knight, reporting for IndyStar.com, looks at how being a parent prepares one for the office.

No CEO or high-ranking manager's career skills can compare to Dawn Nowakoski's. She's a pro at being patient with her subordinates, solving problems and perfecting time management.

After nearly two decades honing her skills at home with her children, Nowakoski has entered the work force and says nothing could have prepared her better than motherhood.

Conventional workplace thinking says combining a career and motherhood means somehow being out of whack. But could it be that being a mom gives women an advantage in the workplace?

"We can make the most of it by knowing ourselves and the strengths we have gained through motherhood," says Kelly Watson, president of Career Partners, which works with executives who want to succeed at work and family.

AP Sports Columnist Nancy Armour writes that the NBA gets race and workplace right.

Say what you want about the dress code brouhaha or the study that came out last week suggesting racial bias among referees. When it comes to the touchy issues of race and workplace diversity, the NBA gets it. Better than most.

The NBA got an A- when it comes to the number of minorities and women in top jobs, according to the annual Racial and Gender Report Card. When the season began, 40 percent of the NBA's head coaches were black. It has the only black CEOs and presidents in men's pro sports, and three of its 30 teams have black general managers.

If you're not Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts or even Britney Spears, it's no picnic making a career comeback after time out of the workplace.

Tory Johnson, Good Morning America’s workplace contributor and Women for Hire’s CEO, asks, Are you really ready to reenter the job market?

Women aren't the only victims of sexual harassment in the workplace, reports Scott Flander. More than 15 percent of all harassment claims filed with federal and state EEO agencies now come from men -- a figure that's been steadily rising since the early 1990s.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that during the last fiscal year, 15.4 percent of the approximately 12,000 sexual-harassment claims came from men, compared with 14.3 percent in the prior fiscal year, and 9 percent in 1992.

Often, such cases involve men who are harassed by other men because they are perceived as being gay -- whether or not they are actually gay, says Deborah Zalesne, a law professor at the City University of New York, who specializes in sexual harassment law.

The Tribune weighs in on the equal pay issue.

No one should be surprised at the recent report that a pay gap still exists between men and women. The issue of women's rights and equality has been around for generations. And while changes have been made, progress seems incredibly painful and disturbingly inappropriate.

But let's keep the situation in perspective. It's been less than 100 years since women were granted the right to vote in the United States. (The 19th Amendment was ratified on Aug. 18, 1920.)

This doesn't mean women should just accept the status quo. What it does mean is society as a whole -- men and women -- must have a heightened awareness that change is needed, but it definitely will be up to the women to lead the charge for reform.

Elsewhere, MSNBC contributor Eve Tahmincioglu reports that one reason for the pay gap is that women do not speak up.

Shellye Archambeau knows a lot about how much men and women make in corporate America, having been a top executive for more than two decades, running major businesses at companies such as IBM and Blockbuster.

Could it be that women are partly to blame for the persistent pay gap between males and females in the work force? Are many of us lame negotiators, afraid to toot our own horns and bring up the taboo subject of money?

Archambeau thinks so.

Competing in an aggressive marketplace isn’t slowing the progress being made by women business owners, reports Robert Cole for The Kansas City Star.

In the last two decades, the number of majority women-owned firms increased at about twice the rate of all U.S. firms.

Businesses owned by women of color are growing at five times the rate of all privately held firms, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research.

Most owners think there’s little disadvantage for women operating a business. But getting proper credentials can help get your foot in the door, said Courtney Welch, owner of Landworks Inc., a landscaping company based in Edwardsville, Kan.

Debbie Cafazzo, for The News Tribune writes, More than three decades ago, as the feminist movement drew more women to the workplace, American attitudes about gender roles and families underwent a revolution.

Now, what’s happening seems more like evolution than revolution. And some wonder if the trends might actually be reversing.

“It’s important for the public to understand that change doesn’t occur in a linear way, with either good or bad outcomes,” says Stephanie Coontz, a family historian at The Evergreen State College in Olympia who serves as director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families. Instead, she says, there are always trade-offs.

“We are certainly never going to go back to a situation where everyone is married,” say Coontz, whose 2005 book “Marriage, A History,” documented the transformation of marriage. Nor does she believe that most people in the future will spend the majority of their lives married.

The Free Lance-Star reports on the rankings of the "Best Places to Work in the Federal Government."

Worker participation in the latest survey increased by almost 50 percent, demonstrating the growing acceptance of this vital tool to encourage employee feedback on their work environment.

Here are some survey highlights:

Since the last survey in 2005, employee satisfaction increased in 41 percent of all federal organizations.

Among racial and ethnic groups, Asian-Americans reported the highest employee satisfaction, with Hispanics second.

Women were slightly more satisfied than men, and workers under 40 have higher satisfaction rates than those over 40.

Here is the survey's list of the 15 best places to work in the federal government:

1) Nuclear Regulatory Commission

2) Government Accountability Office

3) Securities and Exchange Commission

4) NASA

5) Department of Justice

6) Department of State

7) Social Security Administration

8) General Services Administration

9) Environmental Protection Agency

10) Department of the Army

11) Department of the Air Force

12) Department of Commerce

13) Department of Defense

14) Department of the Treasury

15) Tie: departments of Labor and Veterans Affairs

Barbara Rabinovitz for Lawyers Weekly Weighs in on the Recent Study

Women attorneys caught in the professional-personal vise that squeezes their time for work and family are continuing to leave the state’s large law firms in significant numbers, but they are finding employment in other law-related sectors far less demanding of their time, according to a newly released survey.

The 2005-2006 study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Workplace Center confirms earlier findings about the ever-increasing numbers of young women entering the law profession while their older female colleagues, juggling the responsibilities of big-firm practice and child-rearing, are exiting law firms at ever-faster rates.

However, this latest survey, which examined rates of attrition among women at large firms and their subsequent career decisions, found that more than 50 percent of the “leavers” of law-firm practice move on to lawyer jobs in government, non-profit organizations or business — sectors said to be more accommodating of the dual demands of work and family.

“Women are not making a choice to stay home as full-time caregivers,” said Boston attorney Pamela E. Berman, acknowledging she was “surprised” to learn that women who leave law firms “don’t stay home; they opt to practice law in another setting.”

The Badger Herald reports that an equal pay issue between male and female professors inspired a lawsuit on behalf of the female professors.

Seven female medical school professors at Pennsylvania State University sued their employer last week, saying they have been paid less than their male counterparts and have received fewer benefits for the same job.

The professors are asking for back pay in addition to any benefits that are disparate as a result of the alleged discrimination.

The women’s lawyer, Clifford Haines, said the professors have tried to achieve equality in the workplace, adding that suing is a last resort.

“This is not their first choice,” Haines said. “[It is] the only alternative they are left with.”
Haines said the women have felt disrespected in the workplace for many years, adding they should be “adequately and appropriately compensated” for the job they do.

“I think that every woman who is in the position these women are in — who is confronted with a long history of disparity in income — feels a lack of respect that represents a critical part of what my clients want,” Haines said.

The lawsuit, Haines added, places the professors in an awkward situation and jeopardizes their jobs.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- If the typical stay-at-home mother in the United States were paid for her work as a housekeeper, cook and psychologist among other roles, she would earn $138,095 a year, according to research released Wednesday.

This reflected a 3 percent raise from last year's $134,121, according to Salary.com Inc , Waltham, Mass.-based compensation experts.

The 10 jobs listed as comprising a mother's work were housekeeper, cook, day care center teacher, laundry machine operator, van driver, facilities manager, janitor, computer operator, chief executive officer and psychologist, it said.

The typical mother puts in a 92-hour work week, it said, working 40 hours at base pay and 52 hours overtime.

A mother who holds full-time job outside the home would earn an additional $85,939 for the work she does at home, Salary.com.

Last year she would have earned $85,876 for her at-home work, it said.

Salary.com compiled the online responses of 26,000 stay-at-home mothers and 14,000 mothers who also work outside the home.

The Boston Globe reports that female lawyers are not pursuing path to partnership.

For women, the law remains a frustrating profession.

Female lawyers continue to face intractable challenges in their attempts to become partners, causing them to abandon law firm careers -- and the legal profession entirely -- at a dramatically higher rate than men, according to a local study to be released today.

The study echoes the findings of other recent major reports, but offers more detailed statistics and demographic data. It also aims to draw attention to the social consequences of this troubling exodus: As fewer women ascend to leadership positions in their firms, the pool of women qualified to become judges, law professors, business chiefs , and law firm managers is shrinking.

Anne D'innocenzio, AP Business Writer, reports that Wal-Mart violates workers’ rights.

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart's exploitation of weak U.S. labor laws interferes with workers' rights to organize and violates the human rights of its employees, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, an independent nongovernment organization.

In a 210-page report released Monday, Human Rights Watch said Wal-Mart uses an arsenal of sophisticated tactics — some of which it says are illegal_ aimed at thwarting union organization and creating a climate of fear for its 1.3 million U.S. workers.

The Human Rights Watch study was based on interviews with 41 current and former Wal-Mart workers and managers, as well as labor lawyers and union organizers, between 2004 and early 2007. The organization also said it analyzed cases against Wal-Mart charging the company with violating U.S. labor and employment laws.

While Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is not alone in engaging in illegal anti-union tactics, the retailer "stands out for the extreme sophistication and aggressiveness of its anti-union strategies," said Carol Pier, senior researcher on labor rights and trade for Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The most sought-after corporate board members are those who curry favor with fellow directors, not those who are active in standing up for shareholders, a new academic study has concluded.

The study paints an unflattering picture of outside directors in corporate America, who have come under increased scrutiny in recent years following a series of major U.S. business scandals.

The study by business professors James Westphal of the University of Michigan and Ithai Stern of Northwestern University suggests that directors - who are supposed to be watchdogs for shareholders - still are not independent enough.

The study, based on a survey of 760 directors at large and medium-size U.S. companies, found that directors who ingratiate themselves with peer directors and avoid challenging management can increase their chances of gaining additional board seats at other companies.
"Our findings indicate that directors who engage in monitoring and control behavior are effectively punished in the director labor market," Westphal and Stern wrote. "They are less likely to be selected onto additional boards, and thus they are less likely to become central in the board network" that exists throughout corporate America.

The study, which appears in the current issue of the Academy of Management Journal, is based on survey comments from directors at 300 randomly selected companies.

Hanah Cho for the Sun-Sentinel looks at the recent AAUW study.

Here's a news flash: Women get paid less than men.

Okay, so that's not anything new.

But even just a year out of college, women earn 20 percent less than their male counterparts.

Ten years after graduation, the pay gap gets worse with women earning 69 percent of what men earn, according to a new study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore, started a Web-based program called "Women Helping Women Succeed" where students can sign up for e-courses on topics such as leadership, mentorship and networking.

The project, with a $5,000 grant from AAUW, was launched earlier this year.

Sheila Greenwood, a diversity manager in human resource services at the university, says the purpose of the program is to increase awareness of educational and career issues women are facing, including pay disparity.

Female students must have such knowledge "in order to deal with the issue," Greenwood says. "We have to be more educated in what we can do, and professions that we're not going into as females."

Dr. T. J. Bryan, the chancellor of Fayetteville State University, recently spoke at the Professional Women’s luncheon.

In her address, Dr. Bryan emphasized the role of women both in the home and workplace.

"We are the foundation and backbone of society," Dr. Bryan said. "I'm not saying that we're super women, but some days we come close."

Dr. Bryan told the crowd that like most people, she has been struggling to cope with the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

"As a chancellor, I'm concerned about the safety of my students," Dr. Bryan said. "But we can't put college campuses in a bubble. We do need to be alert, vigilant and be aware of students who seem separated from college life."

Even in the midst of tragic changes like the Virginia Tech shootings, Dr. Bryan said there are opportunities for rebirth and growth.

The great American hiring boom is slowing down -- but as labor cools with the rest of the economy. A few choice regions will stay red-hot. You just have to know where to look, reports CNNMoney.com.

Seven years ago, a Missouri doctor discovered a troubling pattern at a microwave popcorn plant in the town of Jasper, reports the New York Times. After an additive was modified to produce a more buttery taste, nine workers came down with a rare, life-threatening disease that was ravaging their lungs.

Puzzled Missouri health authorities turned to two federal agencies in Washington. Scientists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which investigates the causes of workplace health problems, moved quickly to examine patients, inspect factories and run tests. Within months, they concluded that the workers became ill after exposure to diacetyl, a food-flavoring agent.

But the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with overseeing workplace safety, reacted with far less urgency. It did not step up plant inspections or mandate safety standards for businesses, even as more workers became ill.

On Tuesday, the top official at the agency told lawmakers at a Congressional hearing that it would prepare a safety bulletin and plan to inspect a few dozen of the thousands of food plants that use the additive.

Stephanie Armour, for USA Today, reports on parents who hover while their children job hunt.

Employers are finding that parents are increasingly involved in their children's job choices, as "helicopter parenting" extends to the workplace.

As Generation Y enters the job force, parents of new hires are calling employers to negotiate salary and benefits, and some are even showing up at job fairs. It's a new dynamic that has some employers responding by training recruiters and managers how to handle "helicopter parents," who hover over their children's lives.

•At Hewlett-Packard, parents have gone as far as contacting the company after their child gets a job offer. They want to talk about their son's or daughter's salary, relocation packages and scholarship programs.

"Parents are contacting us directly," says Betty Smith, a university recruiting manager at HP. "This generation is not embarrassed by it. They're asking for parents' involvement."

Linda Chavez-Thompson and Gabriela Lemus look at how they believe the erosion of unions hurt women.

Although women have made many gains since the 1960s, they must still catch up with men when it comes to equal pay and the benefits that generally accompany it, like educational attainment and access to health insurance, paid leave and other benefits. This is particularly true for women of color who have the highest levels of disparities in income in comparison to men. In 2006, women overall made 77 percent of men's annual earnings.

The wage gap is stark irrespective of one's ethnic group, but for Latinas it is singularly startling. Latinas earn only 52.4 percent when compared with men. In industries that are job-typed, such as teaching and nursing where many Latina workers are concentrated, unions have fostered change in closing the pay gap and given Latinas access to health insurance and other benefits. We must assess the remaining barriers to economic equality and push hard for policies that are even-handed and diminish gender- and racial-inequities. If ever there was an argument for joining a union, then this would be it. And if ever there was an argument for having the capacity to bargain collectively without retribution, this would definitely be it.

Lori Sokol, for the Baltimore Sun, writes, Today, on Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, I am again keeping my children at home.

Why? Because the "typical" work environment is now atypical - no longer wholly housed within a company cubicle's four walls. Employees are stepping out by staying at home, teleworking from fully equipped home-based offices, as I have been doing for the past 17 years. But today's teenagers - dubbed the "I-Generation" for their addiction to everything digital, from iPods to IM (instant messaging) - are receiving mixed messages about how, when and where they can expect to effectively balance their future careers and family lives.

Ramona Oliver for TomPaine.com says that women are still shortchanged.

Equal Pay Day is observed in April for a specific reason: this month indicates how far into each year the average woman must work in order to earn as much as a man earns by December of the year before. Tuesday symbolizes the day when women's wages catch up to men's wages from the previous week. Over forty years ago, the first equal pay law was passed to try to offset this wage inequality.

Women just out of college may think that a law nearly twice their age is antiquated or unnecessary. After all, many young graduates assume that the difficulties faced by their mother’s generation went out with the shoulder pads of the late 1980s. Why are we still having this conversation?

TheFinancial Times and theAssociated Press on Monday focused on a brand new study that says that the wage gap is getting worse for recent female graduates.

(PRWEB) -- A national survey of working adults commissioned by Workplace Options (WPO), the largest provider of work-life employee benefits in America, found that 59% of employees or their spouses missed three to ten days of work in the last year due to the lack of adequate back-up child or elder care options.

Back-up care is needed when primary child care or elder care arrangements fall through due to illness, vacation or other unexpected circumstances. When these situations arise, they can be stressful and costly for employers and employees alike. Workplace Options conducted this survey to learn just how severe the issue is in corporate America today.

The national survey, conducted by the North Carolina firm of Public Policy Polling on March 12-13 of this year, polled working adults with dependents about their back-up care needs and opinions. Fifty-seven percent of respondents were women and 43% men. Household incomes ranged from less than $30,000 per year to more than $100,000.

Teresa M. McAleavy talks to John McKee about his new book, “21 Ways Women in Management Shoot Themselves in the Foot.''

Most of us have worked with them.

They are the once-decent, humble, team players who get promoted (often beyond their abilities) and wind up becoming unbearable human beings -- and much less likable colleagues.

By the time their first new paycheck gets cashed, they've become too big for their new britches. Like the Englewood Cliffs-based executive who got tapped to lead a new division after nailing a few big accounts. She quickly decided the new job didn't involve enough responsibility and began to demand more, alienating pretty much everyone around her along the way.

McKee, one of the founding members of DirecTV, says this particular heady bigwig was guilty of gluttony and greed, two of the "seven deadly workplace sins'' he advises against.

(Alexandria, Va., April 24, 2007)—May hiring projections in the service-sector appear strong as most employers plan to increase hiring in the coming five weeks. However, within the much smaller manufacturing-sector, hiring will be weaker in May 2007 than in May 2006. These findings are reported in the April report of the Leading Indicator of National Employment (LINE) index, a collaborative effort between the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and the Rutgers University School of Management and Labor Relations.

This LINE employment expectations report references the same May period as the report the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) will release on June 1, 2007. The responses in the LINE survey are weighted using the proportion of total employment represented by the respondent's industry. These weights have been recalculated to incorporate the annual benchmark revisions that the BLS released on February 2, 2007.

Molly Selvin, for the Los Angeles Times, reports a salary gap persists between college-educated men and women.

Although women have made significant gains in education and income during the last three decades, the pay gap between college-educated men and women appears to widen in the years after graduation, experts say.

A new report to be released today by the American Association of University Women sheds light on what is holding back many women graduates and what they can do to catch up.

Women can't get ahead, writes Dawn Peake.

They can attain more college degrees than men and work full time. But they still earn 77 cents for every dollar men make, according to a 2005 U.S. Census Bureau report.

Leaders said that's because a stereotype remains: Women take care; men take charge.
A group of local leaders aims to change that by raising awareness about the issue at an Un-Happy Hour on Tuesday at Red Carpet Martini Bar in St. Cloud.

The Business & Professional Women in St. Cloud event is part of a nationwide effort to narrow the gap. Women recognize Equal Pay Day on Tuesday to signify that women need to work until April — four more months — to earn the same amount as men did in 2006.

Elsewhere, women are taking the same action, reports Bob Petrie.

At the SkyBox Sports Pub & Grille on Tuesday, women will be getting a break on the price of happy hour drinks, but the occasion is anything but special.

It's the Unhappy Hour, sponsored by the Sheboygan County chapter of the Wisconsin Federation of Business & Professional Women, designed as a protest to lower wages being paid nationally to women than men for comparable jobs, skills and education in the workforce.

FRAMINGHAM, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--They’re the unsung heroes of the office who keep their organizations running smoothly. Office managers across the country have revealed what they really do every day – and many accomplish the work of at least 10 different jobs and the equivalent of a $90,000 salaried position, 65 percent more than the median office manager salary. These findings, among others, are the result of 8,000 office managers sharing their work experiences through Staples’ My Real Job, a national initiative to discover and recognize office managers’ contributions.

From February 19 to March 16, Staples invited office managers nationwide to reveal their job descriptions on www.staples.com/myrealjob, sharing specific work roles performed and “above-and-beyond” duties to keep their workplace running. From airport chauffeur to office psychologist to chief operating officer, office managers are expected to fulfill a wide range of responsibilities.

“More and more, workers are required to wear many hats to fulfill their workplace roles,” said Tory Johnson, a leading workplace expert and CEO of Women for Hire, a recruitment services firm. “This incredible range of duties can create significant challenges with managing time effectively and achieving work-life balance.”

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Ms. Foundation for Women, which launched "Take Our Daughters to Work" day 15 years ago, will stop sponsoring the annual event after this year, declaring the program a success, the head of the women's group said on Friday.

The day, which evolved into "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work" 10 years ago, has accomplished its goals be raising awareness of issues of gender, empowerment and opportunities in the workplace, the foundation said.

"We feel our success is that we've raised a lot of issues and put them on the agenda," said Sara Gould, president and chief executive of the foundation.

CNNMoney.com reports that wage growth will likely flatten in the coming months as the economy faces slower growth in 2007, according to a survey released Tuesday.

The Bureau of National Affairs Inc., a Washington-based news publisher, said its final reading for the first quarter 2007 Wage Trend Indicator ticked up to 100.80 from 100.78 for the fourth quarter of 2006.

This was unchanged from the previously revised first quarter reading of 100.80, BNA said.
"The latest wage trend indicator is very little changed from the end of 2006, signaling that a further acceleration in the rate of wage growth is unlikely," said economist Kathryn Kobe, who worked on the development of the index for BNA.

A sustained rise in the indicator generally foreshadows increased pressure for higher wages, while a sustained decline in the index predicts a deceleration in the rate of wage increases in the private-sector.

Ruth Walker for the Harvard News Office reports on women in science.

At Harvard’s fourth National Symposium on the Advancement of Women in Science, it was clear why female scientists need to keep meeting like this.

The proportions of women in many scientific fields, notably computer science, are not just low but falling. Some major funding organizations have done little to advance the cause of women in science. And work-at-home scientists, even those on the cutting edge of space exploration, still have to explain to their husbands at the end of the day why the children’s toys are strewn all over the living room.

On the other hand, participants described field after field as being in a “golden age” of one kind or another.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is considering whether to develop guidance on work/family balance and the intersection with the federal anti-discrimination laws.

The agency recently held a public meeting to discuss the topic.

EEOC Vice Chair Leslie E. Silverman, one of the organizers of the meeting, highlighted the "maternal wall" that may act as a barrier to the career advancement of women with children, and the plight of the "sandwich generation" for whom the term "caregiver" has taken on a new meaning -- workers who hold jobs while also caring for children, aging parents, or other family members.

"Fortunately, many employers have recognized employees' need to balance work and family, and companies have responded in very positive and creative ways," Silverman said. "Unfortunately, not all caregivers work in hospitable environments. We hear from caregivers who face barriers, stereotyping, and unequal treatment on the job."

Today's professionals -- women and men alike -- want rewarding careers coupled with fulfilling personal lives, write Margaret Mann and Jessica Wolff, Heller Ehrman LLP. They do not want their dedication to their professions to prevent them from enjoying quality time outside the office environment.

While it is only human to want it all, striking a healthy balance between career and home life is no easy task. Professional careers frequently demand long hours, travel and selfless dedication, which places tremendous strain on people also caring for children, elderly parents, sick spouses or partners.

Given that these personal obligations tend to be borne disproportionately by women, their growth in strength and numbers in the workplace has put a spotlight on the issue for both genders. Because the ability to attract and retain the best, brightest and most qualified professionals is a key goal of nearly every company, flexible work hours and more extensive family leave are now offered by many companies to allow employees to stay on track in their careers and still maintain a healthy family life. As an example, Heller Ehrman is at the forefront of offering child care, part time, family and medical leaves and numerous programs to help its professionals achieve balance in their lives. Many firms find this effort is a "no-brainer" given the strength of the business case in favor of doing what is so clearly the right thing for their people.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dress for Success, an international non-profit organization that promotes the economic independence of disadvantaged women, continues its partnership with Chantelle, a leading French manufacturer of women’s lingerie. Chantelle has been the national intimate apparel sponsor for Dress for Success since 2003, further demonstrating the company’s dedication to caring for the comfort and confidence of women.

With Mother’s Day approaching, Dress for Success and Chantelle partner to encourage women to help another woman succeed in the workplace. For every bra purchased from May 1– May 31 and November 1 – November 30, Chantelle will donate 2% of retail sales to Dress for Success, with a minimum donation of $100,000. In addition, during these promotion periods, one bra for every 100 sold will be donated to Dress for Success, with a minimum of 5,000 bras donated.

Denver Post Staff Writer Jeri Clausing reports that the Senate backs gay-bias ban in the workplace.

The state Senate voted Monday to prohibit workplace discrimination based on a worker's sexual orientation - a bill Sen. Jennifer Veiga has been trying to pass for nearly a decade.

With a Democratic governor, she said she hopes the proposal - twice vetoed by former Republican Gov. Bill Owens - will become law.

The Senate gave initial approval to Senate Bill 25 after more than an hour of debate.

Stephanie Armour for Gannett News Service reports on the difficulties in job relocation.

The offer was too good to turn down. Just after selling his home and moving to a new place, Joe Cashen landed a marketing job with Nissan North America. The catch? He would have to sell his newly purchased home and move his wife and two young daughters from Los Angeles to Nashville, Tenn.

Two years ago, amid the feverish housing market, such a relocation would have been simple.

But the real estate slowdown means there's no such thing as an easy move anymore: Slumping prices have put a sudden chill on employees' ability to relocate for a job and employers' ability to get new hires to move. Cashen's house languished on the market for more than three months, and he was eventually forced to take a $90,000 loss.

"I was incredibly anxious. I was supposed to move to Nashville, and the clock was ticking," says Cashen, 38, who sold his California home in 2006 after dropping the asking price three times. "It was quite a stressful time. We had to just get rid of it."

Gone are the days when companies could move employees and new hires around like puppets on strings. Now, the sluggish housing market is creating hassles for employers and employees struggling to move and to sell homes in what has quickly turned into a buyer's market.

Christina Settimi, for Forbes.com, asks, So what about the big guys?

Everybody picks on the little guy. Not us though. Every year, when we put out our rankings of the Best Places for Business and Careers, the top spots tend to be fast-growing, small and mid-size metros, typically in the South and West (never in California though--too expensive).

So what about the big guys? Is it really that bad in the New Yorks and Los Angeleses?

Yes and no. Many metros are prohibitively expensive when it comes to labor, energy, taxes and office space costs, making them tough cities to start a new business. But those high labor costs mean high salaries for people willing to brave high living costs--a full 42% above the national average in a place like San Francisco. And while employment growth has been mediocre in many big metros, there are job categories that are surging in these cities.

The head of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is calling on the media and entertainment industry to make greater efforts to combat racism, in light of the dialogue spurred by radio host Don Imus's sexist and racist remarks about the women's basketball team at Rutgers University.

EEOC chair Naomi C. Earp wrote an open letter to Imus, the shock jock's longtime producer Bernard McGuirk, CBS, and MSNBC.

Both CBS and MSNBC dropped the "Imus in the Morning" program earlier this week, several days after Imus and McGuirk made the remarks.

Ellen Bravo, former director of 9to5, National Association of Working Women, writes about family values and the workplace.

Pundits opine over whether John Edwards should suspend his presidential campaign in the face of his wife's recurrence of cancer -- a personal decision that's frankly none of our business. But here's something that is our business, every one of us: what happens when ordinary workers' loved ones become sick with cancer, or for that matter, the flu?

Imagine that John Edwards worked as an associate at Wal-Mart -- or any other non-union retail outfit -- stocking shelves 35 hours a week. Most weeks he's scheduled for 40 hours or more, but because he doesn't work those hours year-round, he's not full time and not eligible for health insurance.

Business lobbyists tell us the workplace is family-friendly. Of course, many small business owners would know John personally and generously help out.

And an increasing number of larger employers have policies that cover these situations, because they know paid leave cuts down on the high cost of turnover, boosts employee loyalty and adds to productivity.

But millions of people in this country live just like this hypothetical John Edwards. Many companies have no family leave policies; where policies do exist, they often depend on management discretion.

Lee Roper-Batker, for StarTribune.com, writes about the question of women’s choices.

Over spring break, my family and I watched "North Country." Inspired by true events, the film details the systematic sexual harassment experienced by Lois Jenson and Minnesota's first women taconite miners by male coworkers. Years of abuse was condoned by company management: The women "asked for it" by choosing to work in an industry traditionally run by men. The film (and real-life story) concludes with Jenson's landmark 1988 class-action lawsuit, which ended sexual harassment as an acceptable work practice.

My teenage daughter couldn't believe the injustice, inequity and outdated gender roles portrayed in the film. I wanted to tell her these were things of the past. But Carrie Lukas ("Women's choices explain the wage gap," April 9) underscored how premature this statement would be. And according to Lukas, women have "asked for it" again -- this time, for the wage gap.

Women's personal choices are to blame for lower earnings? Systemic workplace discrimination for women is a myth? Rubbish. Lukas presumes that her choices represent the preferences and complex geographic, social, racial and economic realities of women everywhere. Her assumption is that if women sought "the dirtiest, most dangerous and depressing [of] jobs" like men did, we would achieve equal pay. Tell that to Lois Jenson and other women across the nation who "get dirty" fighting to earn a livable wage.

Forbes.com lists the top 10 best places for business and careers.

The news on the economy in recent months has been uninspiring. The subprime lending mess threatens to accelerate the housing slowdown. Gas prices are at their highest in eight months. Gross domestic product growth this year is expected to be less than 3% for the first time since 2003. But one part of the country consistently manages to produce strong economic growth and still keep costs down. For the second straight year the Southeast placed 5 metros in the Top 10 of our Best Places for Business and Careers. While most economies in the West have also outperformed their peers in the Northeast and Midwest over the past four years, living costs there have risen dramatically. Housing prices in Phoenix, spurred in part by easy lending, are up 57% in the past two years, knocking it off our Top 10.

For this year's ranking we relied on economic research firm Economy.com (owned by Moody's) for its indexes on business and living costs. It also supplied five-year historical figures on job and income growth, as well as migration trends. Other data used in the rankings came courtesy of Portland, Ore. researcher Bertrand Sperling. He considered the education of the workforce in each metro area, as well as such quality-of-life issues as crime rates and cultural opportunities.

We're coming up on Equal Pay Day again, writes Martha Burk for Ms. Magazine.

Survey by Executive Jobs Website TheLadders.com, 72% of Execs Say Men Get Paid More than Women for Same Work

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Half of all managers at US employers are female, yet when it comes to senior posts, men outnumber the women by almost 6 to 1. Amidst a surge of news reports about the unique challenges that high performing women face in the workplace, and as the nation considers a electing a woman to the top job in the country, gender discrimination is still a factor in the American workplace.

Tory Johnson helps one Mom get a second income for the family while not having to leave the house.

Skye Starner is a Colorado mother of three whose husband, Eric, works on a railroad. His job provides the family with much needed health insurance, but it also keeps him away from home on a regular basis.

Skye Starner was forced to quit her job to care for their young kids. That presented another problem — the Starners need a second income to make ends meet.
"I want to be able to bring in the extra income so my husband I are not stressing out on a daily basis," she said. "I was hoping that I would have somebody who could help me find a job that I could do at home. Steer me in the right direction."

Via webcam, Johnson did just that, coaching Starner on how to market her computer skills to find a job.

"You have the skills that they're looking for, and you have the set-up in your home that you require," Johnson said. "So for those two reasons, I would be willing to go to bat for you, to do what I can on my end to help you do some of the research."

Johnson offered tips every at-home job seeker should know, including information on how many people who work from home get paid.

The economy added a total of 180,000 jobs in March. Here are some of the winners and losers.

The Sun News reports on women’s rights and the U.S Constitution.

Fortunately, the Equal Rights Amendment is getting new life in Congress, 25 years after the time limit for its ratification expired. It overwhelmingly passed the House and Senate in 1972 only to fall three states short of the 38 states necessary to win ratification 10 years later.

Now renamed the Women's Equality Amendment, it could finally help end sex discrimination.
We should be ashamed that our Constitution - held up as a template for democracy around the world - does not guarantee equality for both sexes.

The amendment's key phrase states simply, "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

A lot has changed for women in the past quarter century, but not enough.

Women who work full time still earn 76.5 cents for every dollar men do, according to the 2004 Census data. And women continue to face discrimination on the job.

David Ellis, CNNMoney.com staff writer, reports that Grad salaries are on the rise.

Salary offers made to soon-to-be college graduates are on the rise in just about every field, according to a quarterly survey of 81 schools published this week by the National Association of Colleges & Employers' (NACE).

This year engineering majors were once again some of the most handsomely compensated, according to NACE. Chemical engineers topped the list with the average offer climbing 5.6 percent over the past year to $59,707. Civil and mechanical engineering majors saw job offers climb by roughly 5 percent or more.

Lisa Belkin, for The New York Times, writes about the upside of illness.

Betty Rollin, a best-selling author and a former NBC News correspondent, woke up one morning and realized that she was happy. Not an unusual realization for a woman with a good marriage, a good job and good health.

Scientists call it “paradoxical growth.” They found it while looking for its opposite: depression and downward spirals in women who have been treated for breast cancer. What their data showed instead was that a striking percentage of the subjects stressed the good that had come from their disease.

Ms. Rollin sums up the phenomenon this way: “Having coped, you now know, as you didn’t before, that you can Do It.” And as thrilled as she is by the changes in her love life, she is equally giddy about what she says cancer did to her professional life.

For starters, it gave her the courage to take chances. She was a correspondent at NBC when she had the first of two mastectomies. (The first was 30 years ago, the second nine years later.) What she really wanted to do, though, was write, and her first book, “First, You Cry” was groundbreaking in that it talked openly about a disease that was not commonly discussed in 1975.

March 8 was International Women's Day and to shine a spotlight on women in the workplace, Accenture conducted a survey of 140 executives in senior management positions in U.S. companies. The results show how the personal expectations of both men and women have influenced their achievement in the workplace. Women are achieving on a par with their male counterparts, despite a sometimes slower pace of advancement and a greater pressure to be there for their families.

Survey responses revealed that only 66 percent of women envisioned reaching the senior management level when they started their careers, but 79 percent see themselves reaching this level now. Men, according to the survey, are more likely to see themselves in the C-Suite, implying that women still perceive the glass ceiling to exist at the highest level. Interestingly, women nearing the end of their careers, those over age 55, are most likely to perceive gender as career hindering.

PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has been named one of the "2007 Top 35 Companies for Executive Women" by the National Association for Female Executives (NAFE). NAFE selected the company for its programs and initiatives designed to
support female participation and leadership in the workplace.

NAFE selected the companies based upon their innovative programs that foster women's advancement to influential positions. They also examined the number of women within each company overall, in senior management and on the Board of Directors. Only those companies with two or more women serving on the Board were considered for this honor; Wal-Mart currently has three females serving on its 14-member Board of Directors, accounting for 21
percent of the board. Wal-Mart and other companies honored this year demonstrated significant representation of women in executive positions.

Additionally, the honored companies emphasize compensation equality, manager accountability for the advancement of women and successful training programs.

Harmony Trevino says that women are their own worst enemy and offers an explanation why.

Females have always had to work twice as hard to prove themselves worthy in a male-dominated workplace, whether it is the working mom juggling two jobs or the single working woman trying to earn a higher position in a company.

While we can blame the males until we are blue in the face, the major problem is really females.

Women, more often than not, tear each other down rather than build each other up. We are a powerful sex yet women don't recognize their power and potential, settling for the standards set by the women who make it on television. And not only do we tear each other down, but we create barriers within our sex.
Being a strong woman doesn't mean abusing the sexual liberation women fought for in the past. A woman who has brains, a sense of worth and self-esteem is one who has strength.

“Good Morning America” workplace contributor Tory Johnson answers more of your career questions.

Join the “Take Control” Tour Friday in Denver!

Martha Burk, writing for TomPaine.com, is a political psychologist and director of the Corporate Acountability Project for the National Council of Women's Organizations.

We’re coming up on Equal Pay Day again. That’s the day in April every year—this year the 24th—when women’s earnings finally catch up with what men made by December 31 of the previous year. Women’s groups, led by the National Committee on Pay Equity, will rally on Capitol Hill to call attention to the issue.

The pay gap is still a stubborn problem, with women who work full time, year-round making 76 cents to a man’s dollar. Though it consistently polls number one with female voters in election years, politicians don’t seem motivated to do much about it.

Some people say pay disparities between women and men are an illusion—women just like to choose jobs that pay less because they’re not as risky or have shorter hours. But the data don’t back up these claims. Even when researchers take into account such factors as part-time work or time out of the work force to care for kids, the numbers show that men make more. Another problem that just won’t go away is that so-called “men’s jobs” like plumbing, pay more than “women’s jobs,” like nursing. That tells us something about what we value as a society, and it’s not women’s work.

In February, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a sex discrimination suit against Wal-Mart could proceed as a class action, writes Sally C. Pipes. Though applauded by feminists, this ruling will not help individual women in the workplace, as a dissent in the case recognized.

Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote that the ruling threatens the rights of women injured by sex discrimination. Women could file individual lawsuits, and that would ensure that they received just compensation and protect Wal-Mart from paying undeserving plaintiffs. There are bound to be plenty of those, along with undeserving attorneys.

The original case, Dukes v. Wal-Mart, began with only six women, from states such as South Carolina, Florida, and Indiana. The class-action ruling swells it to nearly two million, the biggest in American history, with a much bigger potential pay-off. Lawyers filed the original suit in San Francisco as a result of careful judge-shopping, with an eye to the liberal, politically correct Ninth Circuit.

From Finding Balance to Working From Home, 'GMA's' Workplace Contributor Has Solutions

"Good Morning America" has launched the "Take Control of Your Life" tour with co-anchor Diane Sawyer and workplace contributor Tory Johnson.

As Johnson tours three cities — Chicago, Atlanta and Denver — she will answer your questions about how to find better balance between your work and your life.

Katie Ruark for The Desert Sun reports on a program for young girls provided by Women Leaders Forum.

Though the seminar was initially created six years ago to help young women understand personal finance, it now encompasses information about résumé preparing, self-esteem, dressing and doing make-up for work and even understanding the differences between men and women in the workplace.

"This is the largest turnout we've ever had," said Patti Gribow, president of Women Leaders Forum. "We had people call and ask if their daughters could come. It's very rewarding."
Maggie Elguera, 17, from Palm Springs High School not only attended the event but encouraged others from her school to do so as well.

"It's interesting to learn about the business world," she said. "It's been great."

Christian Zappone, CNNMoney.com staff writer, reports the Senate passed the Iraq war spending bill that included language that will increase the federal minimum wage for the first time in 10 years.

The raise in the wage, however, is unlikely to pass with this legislation since President Bush has vowed to veto it because the bill calls for a March 2008 pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq.
The spending bill passed on a 51-47 vote Thursday morning.

The addition of the minimum wage issue to the Iraq spending bill, however, allows House and Senate Democrats to begin negotiations on the size of small business tax cuts that have divided House and Senate Democrats.

Although the minimum wage increase is likely doomed when the bill reaches the White House, minimum wage supporters see value in its inclusion.

Once a compromise on the size of the tax breaks is hammered out, a new minimum wage bill can be brought forward later and possibly passed, either as stand alone legislation or as part of a less controversial budget package.

Hispanic Business Magazine reports that businesses are going to need to fill jobs that baby boomers are leaving.

Over the next decade, retiring baby boomers should create an abundance of openings for ambitious Hispanic women and other minorities seeking high-profile management positions. Companies will have no choice – hire more minorities and women to fill slots vacated by boomers, or face a severe worker shortage, according to demographers and workplace consultants.

It's an opportunity that will allow other Hispanic women to follow in the footsteps of the members of this year's Hispanic Business Elite Women list and reach the heights of our five finalists for Woman of the Year.

"So many management and executive positions have been dominated by white males over 50. Because that segment will be retiring in significant numbers, it will create a vacuum that will pull in a lot of talented women and minorities," says Rick Miners, an executive search and outplacement consultant and co-author of the business best seller "Don't Retire, Rewire!" "There are already employee shortages in health care, defense, and the federal government, and utilities, energy, gas, and oil. And they will get worse."

The severity of the shortage will depend on how many boomers choose to continue working past retirement age. Many companies are adopting policies to help their best older employees continue to work at least part time. But the sheer size of the Boomer Nation makes a shortage inevitable, experts predict.

What can entrepreneurs expect from the rest of 2007--and beyond?

Forbes.com looks at everything from which regions of the U.S. have the best growth prospects to where expat entrepreneurs may want to set up shop overseas. (Georgia, anyone?) Other stories tackle challenging issues like universal health care and business schools' impact (or lack thereof) on U.S. entrepreneurship. And for a little fun, we show you which celebrity entrepreneurs are turning heads in the increasingly crowded fashion business.

Paul D. Rosevear reports on the online certificate programs that lead to in-demand jobs

Online certificate programs are offering learners yet another way of navigating toward rewarding careers -- both personally and financially. For established professionals, certificates offer a practical means for strengthening the degrees they've already earned without taking on the hefty commitment of an additional full-blown degree program. However, certificate education has also proven a means for the career changer to establish a foundation to break into new, lucrative lines of work without emptying their pockets to get there.

Here are 10 hot certificate programs that are not only on the rise in popularity, but are scorching hot when it comes to igniting salary potential

Yahoo! Finance reports on leadership by example.

How much are your honor and reputation worth? In the case of Gerald Grinstein, CEO of Delta Air Lines, it's worth well over $10 million.

This past week, Grinstein announced that he's refusing any and all of the compensation due to him, including cash, stock options, and restricted stock, when the No. 3 airline in the U.S. emerges from bankruptcy this spring or summer.
Instead, Grinstein has said that he'll contribute what he would have gotten in the post-bankruptcy pay due to him under his employment agreement to scholarships and hardship assistance for Delta employees, families, and retirees.

WASHINGTON, March 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The U.S. Women's
Chamber of Commerce is joining the fight in the largest employment
discrimination class action suit in American history, Dukes v. Wal-Mart,
and actively seeking redress for the giant retailer's treatment of female
employees over the past 25 years.

The U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce opposes Wal-Mart's recent petition
for a rehearing on the suit's class action status in this historic case (a
culmination of sex-discrimination lawsuits brought against Wal-Mart dating
back to 1981) and has expressed this view through the filing of an amicus
curiae (friend of the court) letter with the United States Court of Appeals
for the Ninth Circuit (http://www.uswcc.org/amicus.pdf). The legal team
submitting this filing on behalf of the U.S. Women's Chamber of Commerce
and its over 500,000 members includes attorneys from Legal Momentum, Hersh
& Hersh LLP, and Bondurant, Mixson & Elmore, LLP.

ABC's "Good Morning America" is set to launch Take Control of Your Life - The Tour with co-anchor Diane Sawyer and its workplace contributor, Tory Johnson. The tour will consist of "GMA" and Johnson visiting three cities: Chicago, Atlanta and Denver. At each stop, Johnson will report live on "GMA" with local women. They will cultivate strategies and present steps designed to motivate and inspire women around the country to bring balance back into their lives. In addition to the live segments, Diane Sawyer will travel to Chicago at the start of the tour and spend time with the women participating in the tour for taped segments that will air as part of the "GMA" morning event.

Take Control of Your Life is an ongoing series in which Johnson provides morning viewers tips and information regarding work/life balance issues. Since launching the series on air,"Good Morning America" has received tremendous interest from viewers. In response to this audience demand, the morning program created a tour with Johnson where she will have the chance to visit cities and viewers - live and direct - around the country to engage them in a dialogue that can further the conversation of workplace issues confronting women each and every day. Tune in to "GMA" as Johnson reports live from Chicago on Monday, April 2, Atlanta on Wednesday, April 4 and Denver on Friday, April 6. Viewers can also track the tour by visiting the "GMA" web site at abcnews.com.

The Brady campaign highlights a bill being considered where employees may bring guns to work.

With multiple states considering bills that would force businesses to allow employees to bring guns to work, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence has sent key state legislators across the country important data to consider. Dozens of workplace shootings occur every year.

Research by Money Magazine and Salary.com provides a list of where you can find the best jobs.

You've been in the job long enough to know what you want: more pay, more upside and more control over where you're going. You traded working lunches for PTA meetings and PB&Js. Now you want a challenging job that can bend to make room for family life.

Whether you are fresh out of college or a parent returning to the work force, discover what some of the best jobs in America are.

The National Science Foundation reports that a new study says women and their managers differ on career advancement in chemical companies

During this Women's History Month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has released a report called It's Elemental, the results of a 3-year study of women's careers in the chemical industry. The first study of its kind, the findings reveal that women and their managers have differing attitudes and perceptions about career advancement.

"While there have been some surveys of women on academic career tracks, no comprehensive work exists on women and their managers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) intensive industrial settings," said Judith Giordan, who is currently on detail from the University of Southern Mississippi as a program director for NSF's Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship Program. "As industry is the largest employer of these graduates, we wanted to determine and share how women can get ahead and what could hold them back from the career success they want."

One finding reveals that managers, particularly male managers, rated the ability to relocate higher than women did as a factor for career success. Whereas women rated two items as high on their list--"blowing your own horn is a key element for success and recognition" and "…to be on highly visible projects where contributions can be recognized and rewarded"--managers rated those components as lower priorities for career advancement.

As the federal government considers clarifications to the Family Medical Leave Act, reports Paula Burkes Erickson, human resources professionals nationwide lobbied legislators last week to maintain, not broaden, the 14-year-old law.

Meanwhile, a bill was introduced in Congress last week that would require employers with 15 or more workers to give seven paid sick days per year to employees for family health issues.

According to a survey released last week by the Society of Human Resources Management, most human resources professionals have problems managing family medical leave – the up to 12 weeks of unpaid annual leave companies with 50 or more workers must give eligible employees to care for a newborn or manage serious illness in their families. Of more than 600 polled, 80 percent have difficulties tracking and administering intermittent family medical leave; 57 percent find it difficult to determine those serious health conditions that qualify for leave; and 40 percent said they had to grant illegitimate requests because of Labor Department regulations or interpretations.

Daily Business News reports Catalyst Honors Goldman Sachs, PepsiCo, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Scotiabank with 2007 Catalyst Award Recognizing Innovative Initiatives that Advance Women and Business

Celebrating its 20th anniversary recognizing corporate initiatives that advance women and business, Catalyst presented the 2007 Catalyst Award to The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., PepsiCo, Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and Scotiabank at its annual gala dinner this evening. Close to 70 CEOs of major organizations and firms attended the event that drew over 1600 senior executives, top corporate officers, and industry leaders from nearly 200 national and global companies.

“The 2007 Catalyst award-winning initiatives recognize that advancing women and diversity are strategic business imperatives,” said Ilene H. Lang, President of Catalyst. “When we look ahead to the future, we foresee a world where business leaders will hardly recall what it was like to work in a world without women’s business leadership. The groundbreaking initiatives which the Catalyst Award honors today will be commonplace and the business case for women in leadership will quite simply go without saying.”

Even star employees often shy away from asking for more, says Anne Fisher, Fortune Senior Writer. Here are 6 tips for women on how to get a raise.

•Research the going rates in your field, by checking out salary ranges in want ads and on Web sites like salary.com. Then ask for the high end of the spectrum. It's easier to negotiate down than up.

•"No" often means "Not now." Even if a pay hike just isn't in the budget at the moment, that doesn't mean it never will be. Don't get discouraged.

•Negotiate more than plain dollars and cents. Your total compensation might include other items you may want more of, like performance bonuses, profit sharing, paid time off, flexible work hours, tuition reimbursement, and club memberships.

•Act confident (even if you don't feel it). Communicate with authority. "Perceived confidence has a big impact," Stanny says.

•Remember, the best time to negotiate is when you have other offers.

•Have points prepared and build a case around your value and what you bring to the company.

In 1857, women garment workers in New York City staged a massive demonstration to protest the 12-hour work day, poverty-level wages and sexual harassment -- common on their jobs. Fifty-one years later, they held the same demonstration calling for legislation against child labor and for the right to vote, in addition to shorter work days and equal pay. In 1910, the women labor leaders in Germany proposed March 8 as International Women's Day to honor the struggles of these American working women.

Laurel Brennan writes, while March also gives us the opportunity to reflect on the progress that's been made, it also allows us to assess the challenges working women still face. Women continue to face discrimination on the job and are still fighting for political influence and economic equality. However, unions have made positive strides that have greatly improved conditions for women in the workplace. In fact, union women earn an average $95 more a week that non-union women. According to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Sta tistics, union women also receive more and better-quality health care and retirement benefits than non-union workers. Union workers receive more than double what their non-union counterparts receive in employer contributions to their health-care plans. The gap is even wider for retirement benefits.

Heather Boushey for the American Prospect reports on the struggle to balance work and family.

Americans are said to be deeply concerned about family values. One of those values, surely, is the need to reconcile the ability to be a responsible parent, a loving partner in a relationship, and a successful worker. What is the economy for, if not to enable families to live and thrive? We work to live, not live to work.

Compared to a generation ago, families have lost 539 hours per year to the U.S. economy -- 13.5 weeks of full-time work. Where did the hours go? Intuitively, we all know the answer: Mom got a job (see figure on next page). But while families put in more hours at work than their parents did, their inflation-adjusted incomes are only a tad. And, when you adjust for the additional hours worked, median living standards are actually lower. Because Mom works, families have been able to keep their incomes from falling -- but, this doesn't mean that the economy is working for families.

Families are angry, frustrated, and confused about this time grab. According to the Families and Work Institute in New York, two-thirds of parents say that they don't have enough time with their children and nearly two-thirds of married workers say that they don't have enough time with their spouse. Nearly half of all employees with families report conflicts between their job and their family lives, more so than a generation ago.

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Delta Air Lines Inc. plans to reward employees and managers, but not its chief executive, with about $720 million in cash and stock when it exits bankruptcy in the coming weeks, the airline said.

The No. 3 U.S. carrier, which squeezed $1 billion in savings from its employees, is trying to make up for a tumultuous year-and-a-half in bankruptcy. Since filing for Chapter 11 in September 2005, Delta slashed wages to below industry rates and dropped a pension plans for its pilots.

"These are the employees who saved the company," Chief Financial Officer Edward Bastian said in a phone interview.

As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar -- turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts, reports Stephanie Armour.

The giant in the industry -- LinkedIn, of Palo Alto, Calif., which provides an online social-networking site for business professionals -- went live in 2003 and had 8,500 members by the end of that year. Today, it has more than 9 million, and much of the explosion in growth has occurred in the past year.

Individuals can join and get a basic account for free, but companies can pay for corporate accounts where they get extra benefits.

Major companies pay from $10,000 to $250,000 a year to be able to contact all users directly and to post job offers. The company membership includes all 500 of the Fortune 500 companies. Fees for corporate users vary depending on how often companies use the site.
The rise in membership and use of the business site is transforming recruiting, says Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School who has studied the strategies behind such networking sites.

Have you always dreamed of retiring before your 60th birthday? You may be closer to that goal than you think. Money Magazine shows you how to 'Retire Early.'

In the New York Times Magazine, writer Sara Corbett takes a disturbing look at the experiences of American women serving in Iraq--both while overseas and once they return home.

"...Iraq is a chaotic war in which an unprecedented number of women have been exposed to high levels of stress. So far, more than 160,000 female soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as compared with the 7,500 who served in Vietnam and the 41,000 who were dispatched to the gulf war in the early '90s. Today one of every 10 US soldiers in Iraq is female."

Corbet continues: "There appears to have been little, too, in the way of female bonding in the war zone: most reported that they avoided friendships with other women during the deployment, in part because of the fact that there were fewer women to choose from and in part because of the ridicule that came with having a close friend. 'You're one of three things in the military--a bitch, a whore or a dyke,' says Abbie Pickett, who is 24 and a combat-support specialist with the Wisconsin Army National Guard. 'As a female, you get classified pretty quickly.'"

E.J. Graff, for the Columbia Journalism Review, looks more closely at the topic of Opting-Out.

On October 26, 2003, The New York Times Magazine jump-started a century-long debate about women who work. On the cover it featured “The Opt Out Revolution,” Lisa Belkin’s semipersonal essay, with this banner: "Why don’t more women get to the top? They choose not to." Inside, by telling stories about herself and eight other Princeton grads who no longer work full-time, Belkin concluded that women were just too smart to believe that ladder-climbing counted as real success.

The moms-go-home story keeps coming back, in part, because it’s based on some kernels of truth. Women do feel forced to choose between work and family. Women do face a sharp conflict between cultural expectations and economic realities. The workplace is still demonstrably more hostile to mothers than to fathers. Faced with the “choice” of feeling that they’ve failed to be either good mothers or good workers, many women wish they could—or worry that they should—abandon the struggle and stay home with the kids.

The problem is that the moms-go-home storyline presents all those issues as personal rather than public—and does so in misleading ways. The stories’ statistics are selective, their anecdotes about upper-echelon white women are misleading, and their “counterintuitive” narrative line parrots conventional ideas about gender roles. Thus they erase most American families’ real experiences and the resulting social policy needs from view.

PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Women's Edge
Coalition (Edge) has been named one of "25 Working Mother Best Small
Companies" for 2007 by "Working Mother" magazine. Launched in 2006, the
Working Mother Best Small Companies initiative honors organizations with
between five and 100 employees that are using innovative combinations of
traditional and creative benefits to improve work-life balance. Edge is one
of two Washington metro-area organizations on the 2007 list.

"The Women's Edge Coalition is exceptional for its commitment to
working mothers, and Working Mother commends it for providing a model to
small businesses across the country," said Carol Evans, CEO of Working
Mother Media. "The common misconception is that small companies can't
afford to provide generous employee benefits, but these innovators are
proving that working mom- friendly policies and success go hand in hand."

Stephanie Armour, for USA Today, shares workers’ struggles in relocating.

Gone are the days when companies could move employees and new hires around like puppets on strings. Now, the sluggish housing market is creating hassles for employers and employees struggling to move and to sell homes in what has quickly turned into a buyer's market.

Employers are sweetening incentive packages to get workers to move and, for the first time in years, fielding questions from leery job candidates about what sort of relocation benefits the company provides. Employees are turning down relocations, selling their homes at a loss, spending months in corporate housing while they wait for properties to sell, or in some cases, renting out their homes and becoming long-distance landlords. It's a major shift from just a couple of years ago when employees were eager to move and cash out on their appreciating home values.

Forty-six percent of companies say recruiting employees is becoming more difficult as the housing market turns tepid, according to a 2006 survey by Prudential Relocation

A weak job market could make it difficult for recent college graduates to get hired, according to a report.

College students who plan on graduating this year may find it more difficult to obtain entry-level positions than originally expected amid a tighter job market, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

The global outplacement consultancy said last week's government report on the nation's job growth could make it tough for this year's estimated 1.3 million college graduates to get hired.
According to the Labor Department, the economy created 97,000 jobs in February, the weakest in two years, which was down from a revised 146,000 gain in January.

Fortune asks, How Good a Boss Are You?

True or False: If you are a direct supervisor or manager, you are probably the cause of most of your subordinates' problems at work.

Thinking about combining motherhood with a career (or a job hunt)? Wondering whether you can pull it off? Answer the 12 questions to see how prepared you are.

People’s Daily Online reports that manufactures can learn from one US firm.

For the fiscal year ended on July 1, 2006, US handbag maker Coach reported almost 40 percent growth in its net profit with a gross margin of 77 percent, up from 75 percent a year ago. But one fact seldom revealed when it comes to Coach's high profitability is that 90 percent of its handbags are made in China, according to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Coach's impressive performance shows its worldwide appeal, but also gives Chinese companies direction in terms of how to improve their positioning in the global value chain from pure and meager-income contract manufacturers.

Behind the Coach success story is a paradigmatic change in the way people spend their money.

In the United States, 57 percent of undergraduate students are women and they also account for 59 percent of graduate school students.

However, these career women also face heavy loads both at work and at home. They work for 45 to 50 hours a week and when they get home they spend another 20 hours a week cooking, cleaning and taking care of children.

Most of these women are also in charge of family budgets, with a focus on how to spend less to get good-quality products.

This leads to a critical change in the way Americans spend their money. They tend to cut spending on mid-range products, while expenditure on trade-up and trade-down goods and services rises.

Users say business-networking sites are increasingly becoming a legitimate work tool, reports Stephanie Armour.

As the job market heats up, interest in online business networking is starting to soar -- turning a one-time novelty into a necessity for millions of business professionals in search of jobs or business contacts.
The giant in the industry -- LinkedIn, of Palo Alto, Calif., which provides an online social-networking site for business professionals -- went live in 2003 and had 8,500 members by the end of that year. Today, it has more than 9 million, and much of the explosion in growth has occurred in the past year.

A growing number of professional women appear to be abandoning their careers in order to become full-time moms. It's become known as 'opting out.’ In the following report, Cheryl Wills explores the issue as NY1 observes Women’s History Month.

For years, Jennifer Winig was an account supervisor at a large advertising agency. But she gave it all up shortly after giving birth to her son, Hayden. She loved her job, but she felt there was no flexibility to raise her toddler.

"It was all or nothing,” says Winig. “There was no part-time option. There was no two days a week or job share. So it was stay home."
Pamela Stone is a professor at Hunter College and the author of the new book, "Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home."

"The workplace is increasing a tough place to be a mom,” says Stone. “The maternal wall is starting to be a bigger barrier than the so-called ‘glass ceiling.’"

Stone studied professional women for several years and she believes working moms are not so much opting out as they are being pushed out by corporate America when they request more time to spend with their children.

Time Magazine’s Lisa Takeuchi Cullen takes a look at professionals, at the choices they make and the paths they pursue.

Whatever our motives, American society presents few barriers today to a professional seeking change. An oboist can become a lawyer, an accountant an agent, a lawyer a baker--and that may be the problem, says Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice. "There's a restless dissatisfaction that comes from always wondering if there's something better out there," he says. Indeed, more than half of global executives wish they could start over in a different career, according to a survey by search firm Korn/Ferry International. "People define their work as a job, a career or a calling," says Schwartz. "Jobs are to support yourself. Careers today require a lot of hopping. If we're lucky, we wind up with a calling."

We are undergoing a moment of immense economic transformation, Anna Burger for the Huffington Post, writes. The global economy and rapidly changing technology are profoundly shifting our industries and the way we live.

A century ago, America was amidst the industrial revolution, another moment of great economic expansion, but like today, many workers weren't seeing the benefits. So in 1908, 15,000 women took matters into their own hands, and into the streets of New York to demand safer working conditions in the factories, decent pay, and the right to vote.

Change to Win is committed to helping American workers unite and enact their agenda for change, particularly one that will help women achieve full equality and meet the realities of today's global economy. On International Women's Day, we celebrate the achievements of the ordinary women who together, can accomplish the extraordinary. Today we renew the call to use our strength and our voices to win a better life on the job, for our families, in the community, and for our world.

Time Magazine shares advice from the University of Southern California's planning and placement center:

1) Your handbag should not be bigger than your skirt.
2) You've gotten an offer. Don't take it!
3) Memo to the Me Generation: It's not all about you.
4) Loyalty isn't only for dogs.
5) Parents are not a reference.
6) Your major is a minor thing.
7) Think outside your area code.
8) Know when to say when to technology.

LA Times reports that pay for women in California rose a median 5.3% from 2000 to 2006, versus a 1.7% drop for men.

Wage gains for women have sharply surpassed those for men in California this decade, reflecting the concentration of women in fast-growing sectors such as healthcare and financial services and their higher college graduation rates, according to a report released Thursday.

Median inflation-adjusted hourly wages for women rose 5.3% from 2000 to 2006, versus a 1.7% decline for men, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by the California Budget Project, a Sacramento-based nonprofit research organization.

"Women are more willing to speak up for what they think they're entitled to instead of just what's offered to them," said Tory Johnson, founder of Women for Hire, a New York-based recruitment firm.

Political Affairs writes about the strength of working-class women.

When we think of 20th century U.S. women’s movements, the events that come to mind are the feminist battles of the 1960s and before that, the suffragettes of the early 20th century.

But in between those two eras, working women were not silent. And many of the women in the 1940s and 1950s who agitated for fair pay, equal access to jobs and other fundamental workplace rights not only laid the groundwork for the gains of the recent years, they did so from a strong foundation: Their unions.

These women, largely forgotten in popular memory, were instrumental in maintaining the drumbeat for a workplace environment that benefited women and men, and set the stage for the successes that followed.

Forbes.com offers suggestions on how to have a commute without stress.

Studies have shown that long commutes can lead to loss of short-term memory, more days of missed work and physical ailments such as higher blood pressure, muscle tension and an accelerated heart rate, not to mention the impact on your mood and relationships.

"You take that bad experience on the freeway right into the door of your home or into your workplace," Rizzo says. "It carries over and takes a while to wear off."

Though it takes Americans an average of 25 minutes to drive to work, according to 2005 U.S. Census Bureau figures, if you're logging longer drive times there are some solutions.

Supply and demand dictates that retirees are hot. By 2010 — just three years from now — almost one in three workers will be at least 50, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, reports Tory Johnson, GMA’s workplace contributor and CEO of Women for Hire.

Savvy employers should hustle to tap into the 50+ crowd, which would be welcome news for the 80 percent of workers ages 50 to 70 who, according to a recent AARP survey, say they plan to work in some capacity during retirement years or never retire at all.

Fortune Small Business reports on employees from hell and how to avoid them.

You can't fault Clark Glavé's interviewing process. When hiring a driver for his storage facility business, Glavé, 44, grilled several candidates using a seven-page questionnaire that asked about such topics as job expectations and potential ethical dilemmas.

When he pinpointed the best candidate, Glavé checked that person's references, driving record and health record and then asked for a drug test. As an offsite employer - Glavé lived in Richmond; his warehouse was in Raleigh - he had to be careful. His new driver passed all his screens.

"The first few months everything was hunky-dory," Glavé says. He remembers working beside Jerry (not his real name) for three weeks, establishing performance expectations. After he had broken in his new worker, Glavé says, he went back home, checking in periodically with phone calls. That's when the first signs of trouble appeared.

How do you know that you've hired the wrong employee - or waited too long to fire him? If you find two duffel bags full of semiautomatic weapons under his desk, that's a pretty good sign. No, that's not a hypothetical example, although the small-company CEO who told us the story asked that we not use his name. (We can't say we blame him.)

Unfortunately, it's become easier than ever for problem employees to build up the kind of ammunition that makes it difficult to discipline them, thanks to recent court decisions that affect employers of all sizes.

Associated Content says, Celebrate International Women's Day on March 8, 2007!

On March 8, International Women's Day is celebrated all over the world in countries like the United States, Australia, Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria and Vietnam. International Women's Day has been celebrated, in many forms, since the 1900's. International Women's Day began as a political event meant to shed light on women's working conditions and low wages but eventually turned into a day meant to celebrate women and everything they have done to make our world better. Today, International Women's Day is celebrated through events like business conferences, fashion parades, government activities, political rallies, networking events, women's craft markets and theatrical performances.

Without condoning ageism, we need to admit one uncomfortable truth: Older job seekers often make it too easy for companies to reject them, reports Forbes.com.

True, job seekers over 40 often face discrimination and may confront hurdles getting an interview that younger applicants do not. But before putting the spotlight on others, let's examine ourselves, the over-40 job seekers.

Lisa Takeuchi Cullen for Time Magazine reports on YouTube for résumés.

Video résumés have long tickled imaginations in Hollywood (can a blond legally apply to Harvard via VHS?) without making much of a dent in the real world. Enter Aleksey Vayner. The Yale student submitted his video résumé, titled Impossible Is Nothing, to investment bank UBS last fall. It became a YouTube classic, while its karate-chopping, tennis-acing, deep-thought-having star became the joke of Wall Street. But another funny thing happened: Vayner's vanity creation awakened recruiters and job seekers to the possibilities of marrying the video CV to the Internet--and that may just revolutionize the job-search process as we know it.

Job seekers aren't waiting. On YouTube, there are already 1,590 entries listed under résumé. Not all are what you would call serious ("After losing his powers at the end of X-Men 3, Magneto is forced to apply for a job at the local Starbucks"). The best ones, though, are smart, colorful and effective. Benjamin Hampton, a recent graduate of Washington State University in Pullman, posted a 5 1/2-min. video on YouTube last fall, thinking it would be something different to send to employers. (To view Hampton's video résumé, go to TIME.com. With his brother at the camera, the résumé "took me 45 minutes to film and 30 minutes to edit," says Hampton, 23. But that was enough to impress Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. The public relations firm interviewed him--in person--a short time ago.

(Media-Newswire.com) - GOVERNMENT COMMITTTED TO BREAKING DOWN GENDER STEREOTYPING FROM THE PLAYGROUND TO THE BOARDROOM ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIRST FEMALE CABBIES

This month marks the 90th anniversary since women first gained the right to become licensed cab drivers. But 90 years on and there are still only a handful of women cab drivers across the country, with many people still seeing the profession as a 'man's job'. But now, cab driving, along with other traditionally male dominated professions, is being targeted by Government as part of a raft of measures to break down the barriers to women's achievement in the workplace.

Elizabeth Olson for The New York Times writes about an annual rite that is a tool for teaching entrepreneurial skills.

In an annual rite that is still going strong, Girl Scouts across the country have kicked off their 90th season of cookie sales— but with some modern entrepreneurial twists.
The Thin Mints, Samoas, Tagalongs and other cookie stalwarts remain remarkably the same (although trans fats were removed this year). And Girl Scout cookies remain a sales juggernaut: some 200 million boxes now generate $700 million in sales yearly.

But the Scouts, with a sales force of 2.7 million, have moved from traditional box-by-box selling methods to more varied approaches to get bulk sales. Now there are cookie academies and cookie colleges, as well as more intense sessions in marketing, selling and business skills for girls 11 and over.

The cookie season today is all about individual entrepreneurship — using cookie selling to teach Girl Scouts how to manage money, create a business plan and win customers.

WorldWIT™, the world's largest online community for professional women, observes the nearly 100-year-old holiday of International Women's Day (IWD) by partnering with ReadyTalk to host The Year of the Woman: Movers, Shakers and Policy Makers, a week-long, free web seminar series beginning March 6th.

The 50,000-women-strong WorldWIT organization and ReadyTalk, the premiere web conference service provider, have teamed up to recognize International Women's Day, celebrated on March 8th during Women's History Month, as the perfect opportunity to gather 'virtual-ly' together and celebrate women's strength and resilience and the desire to gain economic and political parity through a week-long series of Web-seminar events.

According to the research published in the latest edition of the Economic Journal, when a woman is single doing housework takes nearly ten hours a week. But after marriage, she normally does fifteen hours of housework every week.

On the other hand, a single man does an average of seven hours of housework a week. But, after marriage, his housework hours reduce to five hours a week.

Helene Couprie, who conducted the research, said: "The division of labor within families may explain the influence of household inequalities on gender inequalities in the workplace."

The strongest job market New York City has had in decades has not helped the city’s youngest workers find jobs, leaving them at risk of becoming permanently unemployable, according to a report an anti-poverty group released yesterday, the New York Times writes.

The report from the group, Community Service Society, an advocacy group for low-income New Yorkers, cited sharp decreases in employment among residents aged 16 to 24 from 2000 to 2006, a period in which employment rose for most other groups.

Slightly more than one-third of all city residents 16 to 24 held jobs last year, down from 44 percent in 2000, according to the report, which was based on federal census and labor statistics. Among people in that age group who were not attending school, employment also declined to 56 percent last year, from 64 percent in 2000.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Twelve months have passed since we introduced the first Next Net 25 - our picks for the Web 2.0 wannabes most likely to break out of the pack. The moment seemed propitious: Hardware was cheap, broadband was ubiquitous, software was open-source, and venture capitalists were once again flooding Silicon Valley with ready cash.

Many of our choices were prescient: Digg, Trulia, Technorati, JotSpot, Writely. (The last two were snapped up by Google (Charts).) But one of the 25 succeeded even beyond our most bubble-icious expectations: YouTube, purchased in October by Google for a game-changing $1.65 billion. Web 2.0, for better or worse, had gone mainstream.

Historian and journalist Ruth Rosen writes for TomPaine.com about burdens that affect American families today.

A baby is born. A child develops a high fever. A spouse breaks a leg. A parent suffers a stroke. These are the events that throw a working woman's delicate balance between work and family into chaos.

Although we read endless stories and reports about the problems faced by working women, we possess inadequate language for what most people view as a private rather than a political problem. "That's life," we tell each other, instead of trying to forge common solutions to these dilemmas.

That's exactly what housewives used to say when they felt unhappy and unfulfilled in the 1950s: "That's life." Although magazines often referred to housewives' unexplained depressions, it took Betty Friedan's 1963 bestseller to turn "the problem that has no name" into a household phrase, "the feminine mystique"—the belief that a woman should find identity and fulfillment exclusively through her family and home.

The great accomplishment of the modern women's movement was to name such private experiences—domestic violence, sexual harassment, economic discrimination, date rape—and turn them into public problems that could be debated, changed by new laws and policies or altered by social customs. That is how the personal became political.

Although we have shelves full of books that address work/family problems, we still have not named the burdens that affect most of America's working families.

Call it the care crisis.

Once dominated by males, colleges across the country are seeing higher female enrollment with those females more likely to graduate, writes Ryan Strong.

At NIU, women make up a slightly higher percentage of the undergraduate student body, according to the school's Web site.

A perceived shift in higher education achievement is evident at colleges across the nation. Women now make up 56 percent of the total college population, and are more likely to receive a bachelor's or master's degree, according to a PBS study.

Staff at NIU are starting to notice this trend.

Men tend to settle and not strive for as much," said elementary education major Shannice Berry. "I'm not surprised that there aren't more [men in college]."
Berry said she thinks the days of gender discrimination are over and women are valued as much as men.

"People are starting to realize that women can work just as hard as men," she said. "Women are a valuable asset in school and in the workplace." Whether or not this gap in higher education will increase or decrease is yet to be seen. Pumilia remained optimistic toward the future of the gender gap in higher education institutions.

CNNMoney.com provides a list of the 50 Best Business Schools for Getting Hired

In which MBA programs do new grads receive lots of job offers, get hired quickly, and earn big paychecks in their first jobs? Fortune and its partner QS ranked top U.S. business schools based on their reputation with recruiters and strength of career placement.

For years, women have been starting businesses at a rapid rate -- nearly double that of all businesses nationally reports Todd Nelson for the Star Tribune.

Yet a closer look reveals that those companies often are small, in employees and revenue, said Nancy Carter, who holds the Richard M. Schulze Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas Opus College of Business.

"We began to scratch our heads and say, 'How can this be?' " Carter said. "With the rapid increase in women-owned businesses, the opportunity to enhance personal wealth creation, to enhance the communities in which they live and the economy as a whole, why is it those businesses would be substantially smaller?"

Carter teamed with other scholars, experts in business and sociology, to seek answers. Taking inspiration from the mythical goddess of the hunt, they named their work the Diana Project.

Megan Dowd for Fox News reports on the differences between the brain of a male and female.

Never send a man to do a woman's job.

No, I'm not attempting to start a battle of the sexes. Instead, I'm using the well-known saying to get your mind focused on the topic of comparing the male and female brains and how they may affect their respective owners professionally, both in principle and in practice.

Most likely you've either heard or said (in jest, of course) a variation of the above statement. But in all earnestness: Is there such thing as a "woman's" or a "man's" job? Is one gender more capable of succeeding in certain professions than the other?

A recent Development Dimensions International (DDI) survey on leadership transition discovered that, in general, while male and females DON'T differ much in terms of capabilities, they DO show notable differences in feelings about their skills and a variety of other workplace issues.

NEW YORK (AP) -- At the current rate of change, it could take women 47 years to reach parity with men as corporate officers of Fortune 500 companies, according to a survey released Wednesday.

The survey, conducted by Catalyst, an independent nonprofit that tracks women's progress in executive offices and boards, found that women held just 15.6 percent of Fortune 500 corporate officer positions, down from 16.4 percent in 2005. The number of companies with three or more women corporate officers also decreased.

Bloomberg reports that Wimbledon will pay men and women tennis players the same prize money this year, bringing the tournament in line with the three other Grand Slams.

The decision ends a wrangle between southwest London's All England Tennis and Croquet Club, where Wimbledon is staged, and the women's WTA Tour. U.K. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell said last year that the disparity ``tarnished the image'' of the 130- year-old event, which will run for two weeks from June 25.

``Our decision to offer equal prize money provides a boost for the game as a whole and recognizes the enormous contribution that women players make to the game and to Wimbledon,'' All England Club Chairman Tim Phillips said in a statement today.

Today, IBM's Fran Allen becomes the first woman to win the most prestigious prize in computing, the A.M. Turing Award, reports Kevin Maney for USA Today.

And tomorrow? Well, Thursday is officially Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day. Together, these items add up to a pretty sad statement: Technology companies have failed colossally at making women a bigger part of the industry's amazing expansion.

Allen, now retired from IBM Research, started in computing in 1957 — a time when tech companies, believe it or not, seemed like wide-open and exciting places for women to build careers. Allen was a math teacher when IBM recruited her along with a boatload of other women.

Yet 50 years later, Allen is the only female Turing winner, and the tech profession has to fan out and make PowerPoint presentations to Brownie troops, hoping to get girls interested.

Aaron Frazier married his college sweetheart, Danielle, four years ago knowing that she outearned him by $10,000 a year. Now, that gap is bigger.

The Los Angeles Times reports that couples such as the Fraziers, with the wife bringing home most of the bacon, are becoming increasingly common and accepted among America's twenty- and thirtysomethings, the result of shifting educational and job-market patterns, and new attitudes toward work, family and gender differences.

That could fuel a growing number of marriages in which women are the sole or primary breadwinners. Census Bureau data show that 25.3 percent of women in two-income marriages bring home the bigger paycheck, up from 17.8 percent in 1987.

In a recent survey, Staples found that half of all U.S. small business owners and managers said it would take two to four people to replace them. Office managers don't have the luxury of saying, "That's not my job," even as they handle more tasks than ever before.

With this in mind, we’re proud to support the Staples’ My Real Job program, a national campaign to recognize and reward office managers. All office managers are invited to visit www.staples.com/myrealjob to “rewrite” their job descriptions to learn their adjusted My Real Job salary, provided by Salary.com; find helpful suggestions and solutions to address workplace and work-life challenges, provided by Women For Hire CEO Tory Johnson; and enter to win prizes such a grand prize getaway to Aruba.

New York, NY (PRWEB) February 15, 2007 -- A new survey of working mothers conducted by Working Mother magazine found that one in three Moms have sent their child to school or childcare sick. The most common reason? Mom was unable to take a day off from work to care for the sick child.

Cold & flu season upsets work/life balance for working mothers - More than 90% of Moms surveyed by Working Mother believe seasonal flu is a serious illness - Only 54% of Moms surveyed by Working Mother have flexibility to work from home - February/March 2007 issue of Working Mother provides practical cold & flu tips for Moms - Flu symptoms usually come on quickly (within 3-6 hours) and consist of a fever, body aches, dry cough and extreme tiredness.

To learn more about the steps you can take to help protect your family this flu season, visit http://www.fluFACTS.com.

The FMLA guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave a year for illness or other family crises at companies that have 50 or more employees. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., reports the Star Tribune, plans to introduce legislation to require at least six of those weeks be paid. Also, the U.S. Department of Labor is reviewing its regulations around the FMLA, some say in response to employer complaints, and regulatory changes in terms and definitions can have as great an impact as new legislation. The department is accepting public comment until Friday.
• More than 50 million Americans have used the FMLA over its 14 years in existence, said Kate Kahan, director of work and family programs at the National Partnership for Women and Families in Washington.
Advocates have said that the intermittent leaves are intended for people who have chronic conditions or long-term treatments, such as physical rehabilitation.

The Daily Journal’s Katie Mintz reports that women are making strides in the political world. With U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., now sitting as the first female Speaker of the House and former first lady and U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., vying to become the first female president, it seems women, who historically have been underrepresented in government, are gaining momentum.

"Women elected officials, I think, tend to work in a more collaborative way and they try to build consensus, and that's an important civic value that women bring to the political arena and the governance," Mendocino County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Kendall Smith said, adding that focusing on long-term relationships helps to build public trust in government.

Every year, a new batch of young workers dives into this tangled maze of credits and deductions without the benefit of experience, reports Marc Hogan for BusinessWeek Online.

According to IRS demographic data, nearly a quarter of all individual income tax returns processed in 2004 were filed by taxpayers under 30. Many members of this age group face their own unique tax situations, whether it's not having a mortgage to pay or not receiving benefits at work.

Hannah Clark for Forbes.com compiles By The Numbers, the 25 Best U.S. Cities For Jobs

To compile the rankings, we used five data points, weighted equally: Unemployment rate, job growth, income growth, median household income, and cost of living. We measured the largest 100 metropolitan areas, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, and obtained the data from Moody's (nyse: MC - news - people ) economy.com. But we've updated the methodology since the last time we did this survey. In 2006, we used a five-year average for job growth and income growth, so the 2001 economic downturn was included in the data. That disproportionately hurt financial centers like New York and technology hubs like San Francisco and San Jose. This year, we only used growth data for 2003 through 2006, which boosted the major cities a bit. Last year, New York, San Francisco and Chicago were all in the bottom 15.

Financial Media Group, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: FNGP), a diversified advertising and media
company, today announced that the Company will be featured in an upcoming
story on employee relations that is scheduled to air on Monday, February
19, between 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. on ABC's Good Morning America.
After receiving hundreds of e-mails from other companies wishing to be
a part of the story, producers chose to profile Financial Media Group
because they felt it represented a typical company with typical quibbles.

Producers, along with Good Morning America's workplace contributor Tory
Johnson, and a camera crew, spent an entire day at the Company's Irvine
headquarters recording material for the piece. Johnson interviewed several
employees of the Company who candidly spoke about their colleagues for the
story. She also mediated a conflict resolution session where she suggested
strategies to cope with irksome colleagues and their quirks.

The U.S. economy will grow slowly during the first half of the year, but pick up strength as the months pass, a survey of top forecasters showed on Saturday, reports Lisa Lambert, for Reuters.

Panelists surveyed in the Blue Chip Economic Indicators newsletter said real gross domestic product, the government's broadest measure of economic output, would likely increase by 2.7 percent this year from last year.

This was somewhat stronger than the forecast of 2.3 percent last month, with more than half of those surveyed increasing their predictions.

Reuters reports on the job markets hardest hit by sending U.S. service jobs offshore.

Sending U.S. service jobs offshore will affect the country only modestly overall, but job markets in some cities will be hit much harder than others, according to a report released Monday.

Most vulnerable are large metropolitan areas, mainly in northeastern and western states, with many information technology and back-office jobs, said the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based liberal research group.

The researchers said they expect employers to have sent about 3.4 million U.S. service jobs to lower wage countries between 2000 and 2015, out of a civilian labor force that now stands at about 153 million.

Erin Feher for the Bay Area Business Woman, connecting women in commerce, community and the arts, reports on female geeks who rule cyberspace.

In a packed room filled with fellow computer geeks, Annalee Newitz, a nationally-known science and technology writer, and her colleague, Wendy Seltzer, are preparing to speak on a civil liberties panel at a global computer conference. In lieu of a formal introduction, such as noting their credentials or accomplishments, the man at the podium simply barks, “These are the only two chicks at the conference.”

For the dozens of women in attendance, the all too familiar feeling of being simultaneously singled out for their sex and made invisible despite their skills, creeps over them. For Newitz, the experience signals the need for a call to arms.

Newitz paired up with award-winning writer Charlie Anders and together they set out on a search for geek-girl manifestos from all over the world. Hundreds of submissions poured in from women who were computer programmers, math teachers, geneticists, video game designers and scientists. The celebratory and thought-provoking results are compiled in She’s Such a Geek: Women Write About Science, Technology and Other Nerdy Stuff.

“Hearing these other women’s stories was very gratifying. A lot of them were saying the same things that we’d been saying to each other, which is that we want to tell our stories, we want people to know that we exist and that our contributions to the science and technology fields are just as valuable and interesting as male contributions,” says Newitz.

According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), 38 percent of American video game players are women, 47 percent of parents who play games are women, and nearly half (42 percent) of online gamers are women. This agreement between ECD and WIGI underlines ECD’s commitment to meeting the specific needs of both independent and women developers and gamers.

“As the creator of the Independent Game Developers Showcase, ECD supports developers and gamers whose influence is critical for creating a dynamic, diverse and exciting gaming environment,” said ECD Systems CEO Jack Hart. “We are proud to sponsor Women in Games International, a champion for women gamers and developers, as part of our activities at GDC.”

Harvard University named Drew Gilpin Faust on Sunday as the 28th president and first woman to hold the office in the school’s 371-year history, reports the Associated Press.

Faust, a Civil War scholar and respected university insider, emerged as a candidate the school’s governing body thought suited to cool tensions within the faculty after the tumultuous five-year presidency of Lawrence Summers.

”This is a great day, and a historic day, for Harvard,” James R. Houghton, chairman of the presidential search committee, said in Harvard’s announcement. ”Drew Faust is an inspiring and accomplished leader, a superb scholar, a dedicated teacher, and a wonderful human being.”

The newest census numbers show women earn 77 cents for every $1 men make, Ben Tracy reports.

So, why do women get smaller checks?

"Men and women do get paid equally for the same work for the most part," said Dr. Pat Hedberg with the University of St. Thomas.

The pay disparity reflects what working men and women make on average and not for the exact same job.

Women are also more likely to choose flexible jobs, especially when they decide to have children.

"Flexibility does not necessarily equate to great pay," Hedberg said.

It is part of the reason why the median income for men is about $41,000, while for women, it is just $31,000.

However, even when lifestyle choices are accounted for, working women in America still make less than men.

Mark Trumbull, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor, weighs in on the Wal-Mart suit.

A lawsuit against America's largest employer is serving as a reminder that concerns about gender discrimination persist, despite four decades of focus on equal workplace rights.

Wal-Mart hasn't been found guilty of sex discrimination – and it may never be, in part because class-action cases on this issue are often settled out of court.

But the very fact that such a large case against the retailer has made it this far – with a federal appeals court giving the go-ahead Tuesday for a class-action lawsuit involving more than 1.5 million women – puts the issue back in the national spotlight more than at any other time in recent years.

Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer, reports on what degrees are the most beneficial for 2007 graduates.

Employers have said they expect to hire 17.4 percent more college grads than they did last year, and in many instances they plan to pay them more, too, according to a survey released this week by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE).

The students faring the best are marketing and business administration majors.

The Associated Press reports Angela E.V. King, a Jamaican diplomat who became a leading advocate for women's equality and the first special adviser to the U.N. secretary-general on women's advancement, died Monday at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital. She was 68 years old and had been suffering from lung cancer.

During a 38-year career at the United Nations, King led efforts to end discrimination against women and promote gender equality within the organization and globally. She was also one of a handful of women to lead a U.N. peacebuilding mission in South Africa from 1992-94 during the country's first democratic, non-racial elections.

(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to a socializing-in-the-workplace-themed survey released today by Randstad USA, a leading workforce solutions company, the flirtiest co-workers reside in the Western United States, and men are most likely to be the culprit. Forty-five percent of working adults residing in the Western U.S. said they have flirted with a colleague, compared with respondents in the Midwest (32%), Northeast (34%) and South (37%).
Nationwide, 41 percent of working men admitted that they have flirted with a co-worker, compared to 32 percent of women. Men are also twice as likely as women to be set up on a date by a colleague (12% of men indicated a colleague has played matchmaker for them) and three times as likely to have a secret crush at work (12% of men, compared to 4% of women).

It's a sexy idea--until you realize how hard starting a restaurant really is. Soon enough, questions will be flying like grains of sea salt. What permits do you need? What are your start-up costs? Where should you buy your produce? What corporate structure should you choose?

In other words, you need to know the fundamentals.

Forbes.com gives you the fundamentals about owning your own restaurant.

Carlos Santos, Times-Dispatch Staff Writer, reports on Charlottesville University of Virginia psychiatrist Anita H. Clayton’s findings in her new book.

Clayton, an expert on women's sexuality and mental health, said she has noticed that growing trend from her observations and studies and through her psychiatric practice.

Sexual satisfaction for women is plummeting as more of them become achievers and overachievers in the workplace and in every part of their lives.

The pressure to juggle all those responsibilities is borne more by women than by men, not only because of cultural forces but also perhaps because of biological differences, said Clayton.
Clayton has written a book on her findings titled "Satisfaction: Women, Sex, and the Quest for Intimacy," published by Ballentine/Random House. The book was written with Robin Cantor-Cook, a writer and an adjunct instructor at the College of William and Mary.

Tory Johnson offers encouragement to the dubious.

Everyday I receive e-mails and phone calls from women and men who say they’re having trouble reaching their career goals. They express serious doubt about their abilities to accomplish what they really want to do.

Each time I tell them an anecdote about a young Michael Gelman.

It’s been 35 years since Helen Reddy belted out, “I Am Woman,” yet out of hundreds of law firms across the city only seven female attorneys have attained the coveted office of managing partner, reports The Boston Herald.

And it only takes her 10-year-old daughter Sara Ann pointedly calling her “the manager” instead of “mom,” to remind Jody Newman, the newest inductee to this uber-exclusive club, that to gain a little, one sometimes sacrifices a lot.

“The workplace culture has not changed significantly, nor has the family culture,” said Newman, a crackerjack employment-law litigator for Dwyer & Collora. “I want to show (Sara Ann) that mothers can be good mothers, still make a difference in the world and have a career that’s satisfying.

St. Petersburg Times Alan Snel reports that many women are beginning to leave their jobs to begin their own business.

Denise Moore unlocked the door, strolled inside and glanced at the quiet, darkened construction scene of concrete, dirt and piping. The former TV traffic reporter hopes the empty shopping plaza store site near Westchase will be an attractive 2,236-square-foot toy business stocked with kids' goodies in two months.

After ditching her TV news career, the 32-year-old Moore is plowing $250,000 to $300,000 into a Learning Express Toys franchise and making a business leap of faith along her new career path. Moore decided to start her business after her TV station, WFLA-Channel 8, picked a new traffic reporting service last year. She spent a decade in the TV news business.

"As much as I liked being a TV reporter, I always knew that I wanted more. I could have continued in the news business, but I didn't want to do it any more," said Moore, a Brandon mother of a 2 1/2-year-old daughter. "I always had the itch to do more than (TV reporting). I had the desire to be my own boss."

"You have to make sure you do your research. I talked with past and current Learning Express owners," Moore said.

Investors Business Daily takes a closer look at the National Study of the Changing Workforce.

In the Family and Work Institute's 2003 National Study of the Changing Workforce, 59% of women were taking only the normal 12- to 16- week maternity leave before returning to work, 13% of women were returning to work immediately after giving birth, and 28% planned to stay out more than a year, says Ellen Galinsky, president of the nonprofit Family and Work Institute.

Galinsky says firms such as Deloitte & Touche and Lehman Bros. (LEH) have been on the cutting edge of creating strategies to retain the services of talented women who take leaves. "They've created initiatives to allow people to take time off, but stay in touch with the company and then come back," she said. "They've created a designated Web site, invited them to do projects, had them cover for people on vacation. The goal is to keep them connected."

Tory Johnson will be a part of the World Leadership Conference in Atlanta in May.

Joining Tory willl be Atlanta's own TV personality, Judge Glenda Hatchett; Mexico's 1st Lady, Marta Sahagun de Fox; Shuttle Commander Eileen Collins and Jim Huling Will Keynote at 'Dare to Dream' Conference. Today Show and CNN regular Robyn Spizman and Georgia's Attorney General, Thurbert Baker will address women's leadership conference in Atlanta at the Georgia World Congress Center, May 2, 2007 at 7:30 AM.

About Possible Woman Leadership Conferences
With the reputation of offering world-class business conferences and corporate training programs that target the Fortune 500 and women-owned companies, PWE's Women's Leadership Development Conference is quickly becoming the premier women's business conference in the Southeast.

Marc Hogan for Yahoo.com reports on a boost for your nest egg.

The next revolution in retirement savings may be taking place without your even knowing about it. With the "automatic" features increasingly cropping up in workplace retirement plans, the point is that you don't have to.

Over the past few years, employers have turned to new 401(k) programs that aim to make smart savings habits the default option. More recently, retirement plan vendors have started introducing what could be a new generation of automatic savings options.

One woman asks if there is a certain look to a feminist.

The place of women in our culture has changed, but many unfortunate prejudices against women still exist just beneath the surface in our society.

The twentieth century was a time of great accomplishment for feminism. Women have gradually been gaining equality legally, beginning with gaining the right to vote in 1919 and continuing with the expansion of reproductive rights and laws against discrimination in the workplace. Culturally, society is beginning to accept women who are more outspoken or occupying roles traditionally held by men.

Since its inception, however, feminism has been looked upon by men and women as a philosophy that dictates a certain female personality. Try to picture a feminist. Does she have long, blonde hair? Is she wearing a low-cut shirt and makeup? Would you consider her attractive?

Men are not expected to hide their sexuality in order to be considered intelligent. Men who are more successful in their pursuits may even gain respect from their peers for their behavior. Why should women be chastised for being as expressive as men? If we truly believe in equality, we should not criticize women and praise men for the same kind of behavior.

Good Morning America’s workplace contributor and Women For Hire CEO Tory Johnson says that $200 could be all you’d need to start your own business. But first, you must ask yourself some important questions.

(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Leader’s Edge™, a Philadelphia-based organization that promotes the leadership development and advancement of high level executive women, has been certified as an official Women’s Business Enterprise by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).

The WBENC certification for women-owned businesses is one of the most widely recognized and respected certifications in the country. According to WBENC, research shows that women are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. economy, with more than half of the businesses in the nation owned by women. Women are also dominant consumers in the marketplace spending more than $3.7 trillion dollars annually. Therefore, the goal of WBENC is to provide “expanded marketing opportunities for women’s business enterprises and connect them with corporations that seek a diverse supplier base.”

The Wall Street Journal’s Dana Mattioli writes about an organization that rewards those who value women’s influence in the workplace.

Last week, Catalyst, a New York research organization that seeks to expand workplace opportunities for women, presented awards to Goldman Sachs Group Inc., PepsiCo Inc., PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Canada's Scotiabank for approaches that have significantly increased female representation in senior-level positions.
Catalyst picked the companies because they created original and replicable programs to promote women that had measurable results, says Ilene Lang, Catalyst's president.

Jeff Cox, CNNMoney.com contributing writer, reports that the minimum wage will have marginal impact.

Supporters of increasing the federal minimum wage contend it will offer significant changes to the lives of millions of working-class Americans.

Opponents insist the measure will cost the economy hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide only marginal help to a relatively small group of wage earners.

The numbers suggest the answer lies somewhere in between.

Read the details from the Simmons College study of 400 professional women released this month that shows how women are gaining flexibility in their jobs.

Kerrie Rossi’s career started in the classroom. After four years as an art teacher, she decided it was time to try something else, Walt Frank reports for the Altoona Mirror.

“I realized there was a lot more that I could do,” Rossi said. “I knew I could make a living at home. I didn’t have to work for someone else.”

The U.S. Census Bureau says women own nearly 30 percent of nonfarm businesses in the United States. While 14 percent of women-owned firms employ more than 7.1 million people, the vast majority of businesses owned by women — nearly 5.6 million — have no employees.

Women decide to work for themselves because they want to do something they are passionate about, Rossi said.

Women’s Enews points out how the media perceives female politicians from their male counterparts.

In her first appearance as a formally declared presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton made the case for children's health insurance. During the event she held the hand of a small girl and kids squirmed in the audience.

The maternal atmosphere recalled a similar recent debut by Nancy Pelosi, when she took up the hammer as Speaker of the House surrounded by swarms of children. The day before, the New York Times ran a photo of her hugging a co-worker's child. A week later the San Francisco Chronicle ran a front page picture with Pelosi sitting next to her granddaughter.

Both Clinton and Pelosi are obviously doing what they can to emphasize their maternal and matriarchal aspects in what I can only speculate is an effort to soften hard-working, hard-driving identities that still aren't as palatable in women as in men, even in the year 2007.

Bill Leonard, senior writer for HR News, reports that three key workplace issues received top billing in President Bush’s State of the Union speech on Jan. 23.

The president renewed his call for Social Security reform, saying changes were needed to ensure the financial security of millions of U.S. citizens who are rapidly approaching retirement age.

“To keep this economy strong, we must take on the challenge of entitlements. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are commitments of conscience, and so it is our duty to keep them permanently sound,” the president said. “Yet we’re failing in that duty. And this failure will one day leave our children with three bad options: huge tax increases, huge deficits, or huge and immediate cuts in benefits.”

Oprah’s recent program featuring Elizabeth Vargas and her decision to step down as news anchor when she found out she was pregnant stirred much discussion that will not end anytime soon. Amy Green for the Orlando Sentinel sums it up by saying that women are in charge of their own decisions, but not without some angst.

The difficult balance of work and family forces compromise upon all of us, although recent news seems to point in women's favor. I hadn't thought of Nancy Pelosi as an example for American mothers, but Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman held her up not only as the first woman but also the first stay-at-home mom to be speaker of the U.S. House. A New York Times report that more than half of American women for the first time are living without a spouse implies a growing independence among women.

Weighing work and family is tough because while we want to put family first, we feel a big part of that involves providing for our families. There is no doubt today's women have many more choices available to us than past generations, and we thank trailblazers such as Pelosi for that. But the debate continues on whether women are choosing to put careers on hold to be stay-at-home moms, the premise of the phrase the "opt-out revolution," or whether we are forced out by an inflexible workplace and ongoing bias.

Encouraging women to major in engineering in college does not automatically increase the number of women pursuing engineering careers.

A new survey of college students in the United Kingdom finds that women often see an engineering degree as a good starting point for many careers outside of engineering, so they may pursue the degree with no intention of working in the male-dominated field.

Julie Kirkwood, Staff writer for the Eagle-Tribune reports on these findings.

Megan Down for Fox News reports on a new study.

Go ahead. Call me the b-word. Make my day.
That may not be the most appropriate way to ask your supervisor for a promotion, but many women in business would agree that the b-word is nothing to avoid being called. On the contrary, some would say it's actually worth blood, sweat and tears to be "boss."

(For those who were expecting a different word, one that rhymes with "witch," you're probably not alone).

However, statistics show that although women have made some strides over time in the corporate arena, too many have simply been running in place. The majority of women employed at Fortune 500 companies have been getting stuck at the bottom of the leadership totem pole over the last decade, according to a census study released in 2006 by Catalyst, an organization that tracks women in business.

Gannett New Jersey’s Michael L. Diamond considers how employees handle diversity on the job.

Employers are more devoted to diversity than a decade ago, but many of them aren't taking advantage of the different skills, styles and ideas that diversity brings.
Getting Martin Luther King Jr. Day off last week was certainly nice, but to Jennifer Lee, a black employee at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey's Wall office, the company's commitment to diversity comes through in more subtle ways.

Lee's managers take her seriously when she suggests ways to work more ef