How did you celebrate International Women's Day?

Live and learn: education and the job opportunities available to women afterwards 

Source: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/infographics

Why do you think, 'Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John'

Fewer Women Run Big Companies Than Men Named John

Fewer large companies are run by women than by men named John, a sure indicator that the glass ceiling remains firmly in place in corporate America.

Among chief executives of S.&P. 1500 firms, for each woman, there are four men named John, Robert, William or James. We’re calling this ratio the Glass Ceiling Index, and an index value above one means that Jims, Bobs, Jacks and Bills — combined — outnumber the total number of women, including every women’s name, from Abby to Zara. Thus we score chief executive officers of large firms as having an index score of 4.0.

Our Glass Ceiling Index is inspired by a recent Ernst & Young report, which computed analogous numbers for board directors. That report yielded an index score of 1.03 for directors, meaning that for every one woman, there were 1.03 Jameses, Roberts, Johns and Williams — combined — serving on the boards of S.&P. 1500 companies.

 Even as this ratio falls short of the score among chief executives, it remains astonishingly high. It also understates the impermeability of the glass ceiling. After all, most companies understand that an all­male board looks bad, and so most of them appoint at least one woman, although only a minority bother to appoint more than one. Far fewer of these large firms — currently one in 25 — are run by a woman serving as C.E.O.

We can also use our index to compare the permeability of the glass ceiling in corporate life to that in the political domain. The United States, which has never had a female president, has had six named James, five named John and four named William. Thus, even if Hillary Clinton were to be elected, the Glass Ceiling Index would be 15.

Turning to Congress, there is a partisan divide in the Glass Ceiling Index. On the Republican side of the Senate, there are as many men named John as there are women. Add in the Senator Roberts, Senator Jameses and Senator Williams, and they outnumber their female colleagues by a ratio of 2.17 to one. The score in the House is slightly less unbalanced, but there are still 1.36 Jims­Bobs­Jacks­Bills for every woman.

By contrast, on the Democratic side, women outnumber the men with these particular names by quite a margin, and by my count, the Glass Ceiling Index suggests a ratio of 0.3 to one in both the House and the Senate. Likewise, within the executive branch, President Obama has appointed Secretary (John) Kerry and (Robert) McDonald, but they’re still outnumbered by six women, yielding an index score of 0.33. (Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is a Jacob, not a John, and so not relevant to this index.)

Even the index for Democratic politicians and cabinet members remains more than twice as high as the benchmark for the population as a whole. In 1990 — the last year for which the Census Bureau published data on first names — Jameses made up 1.6 percent of the population, Johns were an additional 1.6 percent, and Roberts and Williams accounted for another 1.5 and 1.2 percent. The other side of our ratio is the share of women, who were 51.2 percent of the population. Putting these numbers together, the ratio of Jims­Bobs­Jacks­Bills to women is 0.12 to 1.

Other institutions are clearly in transition. For instance, Chief Justice John Roberts is the only John on the Supreme Court, and he is outnumbered by three women, which yields a score of 0.33. But this is a more balanced court than it has historically been, and before Justice Elena Kagan took over from Justice John Paul Stevens, there were as many Justice Johns as women.

Emboldened by this new approach to quantifying the glass ceiling, I felt compelled to also track progress within my own field, which is academic economics. I took a quick count of full professors in the “top six” economics departments — typically thought to include Chicago, Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton, Stanford and Yale — and discovered 1.12 Professors James, Robert, John or William for each female economics professor, suggesting that we are still a substantial distance from gender parity.  Indeed, this is a setting where the index probably understates the problem, as economics faculty members are an internationally diverse group, and the index is unmoved by Jaimes, Robertos, Juans or Willems. 

The Glass Ceiling Index is a fun but quite imperfect way of measuring the permeability of the glass ceiling. (Especially because in a few decades, the millennial Jacobs, Tylers and Zacharys will outnumber baby boomer Bills and Bobs.) But it does point to an important truth — that in many important decision­making areas of American life, women remain vastly outnumbered. 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/upshot/fewer-women-run-big-companies-than-men-named-john.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0

Do you take a deep sniff after shaking hands with someone? Discussion topic for 10-3

After handshakes, we sniff people's scent on our hand

You won't believe you do it, but you do. After shaking hands with someone, you'll lift your hands to your face and take a deep sniff. This newly discovered behaviour – revealed by covert filming – suggests that much like other mammals, humans use bodily smells to convey information.

We know that women's tears transmit chemosensory signals - their scent lowers testosterone levels and dampens arousal in men - and that human sweat can transmit fear. But unlike other mammals, humans don't tend to go around sniffing each other.

Wondering how these kinds of signals might be exchanged, Noam Sobel and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel turned to one of the most common ways in which people touch each other - shaking hands. "We started looking at people and noticed that afterwards, the hand somehow inadvertently reached the face," says Sobel.

To find out if people really were smelling their hands, as opposed to scratching their nose, for example, his team surreptitiously filmed 153 volunteers. Some were wired up to a variety of physiological instruments so that airflow to the nose could be measured without them realising this was the intention.

Take a good sniff

The volunteers were filmed as they greeted a member of the team, either with or without a handshake. The researchers recorded how often the volunteers lifted their hands close to their nose, and how long they kept them there, the minute before and after the greeting.

Before the greeting, both men and women had their hand near their nose 22 per cent of the time, on average. Airflow in the nose more than doubled at the same time, suggesting they were smelling their hands.

After shaking hands with someone of the same sex, on average volunteers sniffed their shaking hand more than twice as much as they did before the handshake. If the person was of the opposite sex, they smelled their non-shaking hand twice as much as before the handshake. This usually happened once the experimenter had left the room.

The team also carried out the experiment with people wearing sterile gloves. The chemicals the gloves picked up from the experimenter's hand included squalene and hexadecanoic acid, both of which are involved in social signalling among dogs and rats.

"People constantly have a hand at their face, they are sniffing it, and they modify that behaviour after shaking hands. That demonstrates that the handshaking is a chemosignalling behaviour," says Sobel.

Just like rats

It may seem counter-intuitive that the volunteers smelled their shaking hand more when they encountered someone of the same sex, but that's the wrong way to think about it, says Sobel. "We tend to think of social chemosignalling as a cross-gender story but it's not." There are plenty of instances where signalling happens within the same sex, he says, such as women synchronising their menstrual cycles or rodents sniffing out dominance. The behaviour could also be context-specific, he suggests. In a bar, for example, the pattern might be reversed.

"I am convinced that this is just the tip of the iceberg," says Sobel. "This is just one more instance where chemosignalling is a driving force in human behaviour." One surprise was just how much the volunteers were smelling their hands. "When we were coding the videos we would see people sniffing themselves just like rats. It's like blindsight – you see it all the time but you just don't think of it."

Charles Wysocki at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia agrees. "It fits with the general idea that there is a lot more chemical communication going on that we are unaware of".

As well as trying to work out exactly what sort of information might be transmitted, Sobel's team is now looking at how chemosensory signalling through handshaking might be affected in behavioural conditions such as autism spectrum disorders. 

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27070-after-handshakes-we-sniff-peoples-scent-on-our-hand.html#.VPr-MfnF-Sq