“An authoritative guide to help women navigate the workplace and their everyday life with greater success and impact” (Forbes). So, you’ve earned a seat at the table. What happens next? We all face hard decisions every day—and the choices we make, and how others perceive them, can be life changing. There are countless books on how to make those tough calls, but How Women Decide is the first to examine a much overlooked truth: Men and women reach verdicts differently, and often in surprising ways. Stress? It makes women more focused. Confidence? Caution can lead to stronger resolutions. And despite popular misconceptions, women are just as decisive as men—though they may pay for it. Pulling from the latest science on decision-making, as well as lively stories of real women and their experiences, cognitive scientist Therese Huston teaches us how we can better shape our habits, perceptions, and strategies, not just to make the most of our own opportunities, but to reform the culture and bring out the best results—regardless of who’s behind them.
There has been an increase in women entrepreneurs participating in the growth of local, regional, national, and global economies. While these women showcase crucial skills for strategic leadership and strategy that can advance companies, they face cultural, educational, social, and political barriers that impede their development and participation within the global economy. Women Entrepreneurs and Strategic Decision Making in the Global Economy is a pivotal reference source that provides vital research on understanding the value of women entrepreneurs and the strategies they can use on the economy and examines gender impact on strategic management and entrepreneurship. While highlighting topics such as emotional intelligence, global economy, and strategic leadership, this book is ideally designed for managers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, academicians, and students.
Theories of descriptive representation among female legislators consistently document the ways in which women are marginalized in office. However, they tend to treat identity as constant over time and context and so fail to account for the substantive work of legislators. Sisters in the Statehouse looks at the situation from a different angle, taking an in-depth look at African American female state legislators to examine the impact of race and gender on Black women's political experiences, policy preferences, and legislative influence. Brown links personal narratives to the political behavior of her interview subjects to understand how their experiences with racism and sexism have influenced their legislative decision-making and policy preferences. As such, this is the first study that empirically examines how difference is recognized and put into practice among Black women legislators. Brown demonstrates that identity influences political decision making in ways that distinguish the work of Black women from that of other state legislators. Sisters in the Statehouse is a groundbreaking inquiry into how an intersectional approach can enhance our understanding of political representation.
This volume assesses one of the most important developments in contemporary Latin American women's movements: the engagement with rights-based discourses. Organised women have played a central role in the continued struggle for democracy in the region and with it gender justice. The foregrounding of human rights, and within them the recognition of women's rights, has offered women a strategic advantage in pursuing their goals of an inclusive citizenship. The country-based chapters analyse specific bodies of rights: rights and representation, domestic violence, labour rights, reproductive rights, legal advocacy, socio-economic rights, rights and ethnicity, and rights, the state and autonomy.
With roots planted firmly in the industrial age, the corporate ladder has been the metaphor used to describe the prevailing one-size-fits-all model for success. At its heart, the ladder is derived from inflexible, hierarchical, organization models in which prestige, individual rewards, information flow, power and influence are tied to the rung each employee occupies. Yet the workplace as we know it is in transition -- evolving away from the linear, one-size-fits-all model of the corporate ladder toward a multidimensional approach that Cathy Benko calls the corporate lattice. This book will serve to widen an organization's strategic lens, representing a fundamentally new way to work and run a company. It offers a framework to help senior leaders and HR directors harness the talent in their company in a way that provides a strategic advantage, not only for recruiting but also for achieving and maintain better individual performance. In the bestselling book Mass Career Customization (Harvard Business Press/2007), Cathy Benko and Deloitte provided the breakthrough MCC dashboard for understanding the important variables of individual employees' career-life profiles, but she also coined a new metaphor -- the corporate lattice -- as a way to think about the changed career landscape. This book delves much deeper into the power of the lattice for organizations, fully exploring its contours and applying it to real-life practice throughout a company. It explores how the corporate lattice model creates value by: 1. Ensuring a flow of talent into and through the organization. 2. Increasing the efficiency of and return on organizational investments. 3. Improving financial and operating results through greater employee engagement. The three-part framework of the book presents specific ways managers and organizations can use The Corporate Lattice to manage talent, measure results, collaborate across teams, engage employees, and reor"
The empowerment of women by their increased participation in all aspects of political, social and economic life has become one of the major goals of democratic and participatory movements, as well as women's organizations, throughout the world. This book examines the vital interaction of women's increasing participation, decision-making and empowerment. Marilee Karl also examines the legal, economic and social obstacles faced by women around the world. She provides vivid examples of women responding to those challenges. Beyond offering an understanding of what participation and empowerment are and can be, this book seeks to promote women's participation whether at the grassroots or at national and international levels. The book looks at the growing involvement of women in different organizations, politics and public life, development programmes and international decision-making. It outlines the strategies, mechanisms and tools that women are using for their empowerment and explains new priorities and perspectives that women are bringing to today's key issues.
Do women participate in and influence meetings equally with men? Does gender shape how a meeting is run and whose voices are heard? The Silent Sex shows how the gender composition and rules of a deliberative body dramatically affect who speaks, how the group interacts, the kinds of issues the group takes up, whose voices prevail, and what the group ultimately decides. It argues that efforts to improve the representation of women will fall short unless they address institutional rules that impede women's voices. Using groundbreaking experimental research supplemented with analysis of school boards, Christopher Karpowitz and Tali Mendelberg demonstrate how the effects of rules depend on women’s numbers, so that small numbers are not fatal with a consensus process, but consensus is not always beneficial when there are large numbers of women. Men and women enter deliberative settings facing different expectations about their influence and authority. Karpowitz and Mendelberg reveal how the wrong institutional rules can exacerbate women’s deficit of authority while the right rules can close it, and, in the process, establish more cooperative norms of group behavior and more generous policies for the disadvantaged. Rules and numbers have far-reaching implications for the representation of women and their interests. Bringing clarity and insight to one of today’s most contentious debates, The Silent Sex provides important new findings on ways to bring women’s voices into the conversation on matters of common concern.
Women’s minimal leadership role in national and local political spheres remains a serious concern worldwide. The Commonwealth Gender Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005–2015 calls on governments to introduce measures to promote at least 30 per cent representation of women in parliament, government and business. The Impact of Women’s Political Leadership on Democracy and Development describes the barriers to women’s political participation and explains why the contribution of women is so crucial to democracy. It identifies established strategies – electoral reform (New Zealand), party voluntary quotas (South Africa), and legislative quotas (Bangladesh and India) – that have helped these Commonwealth countries to meet the global target of 30 per cent and thus to effectively advance the participation of women in decision-making at all levels.
In this paper, the authors describe the adaptation and validation of a project-level WEAI (or pro-WEAI) that agricultural development projects can use to identify key areas of women’s (and men’s) disempowerment, design appropriate strategies to address identified deficiencies, and monitor project outcomes related to women’s empowerment. The 12 pro-WEAI indicators are mapped to three domains: intrinsic agency (power within), instrumental agency (power to), and collective agency (power with). A gender parity index compares the empowerment scores of men and women in the same household. The authors describe the development of pro-WEAI, including: (1) pro-WEAI’s distinctiveness from other versions of the WEAI; (2) the process of piloting pro-WEAI in 13 agricultural development projects during the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project, phase 2 (GAAP2); (3) analysis of quantitative data from the GAAP2 projects, including intrahousehold patterns of empowerment; and (4) a summary of the findings from the qualitative work exploring concepts of women’s empowerment in the project sites. The paper concludes with a discussion of lessons learned from pro-WEAI and possibilities for further development of empowerment metrics.
While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.
