Thought leaders across the web

Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Ripa Rashid, authors of “Winning the War for Talent in Emerging Markets: Why Women Are the Solution.” Click here to view full post and listen to podcast Additional resource: Winning the War for Talent book review

Tapping its rich mine of educated female talent has been an important factor in allowing India to become one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. But recently this particular dynamo has been showing signs of strain. According to “Women of Tomorrow,” a recent Nielsen survey of 6,500 women across 21 different nations, Indian women are the [...]

Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile, executive director of UN Women. Click here to view full post and listen to podcast

Walmart’s legal team is busier than it would like to be. They just won a nationwide sexual discrimination lawsuit, settled by the Supreme Court in their favor. But, their troubles may be far from over, as similar, though smaller, suits on the way – possibly a lot of them. What’s really happening, Walmart? Walmart won [...]

Experts and observers have long argued that there is a benefit to firms of having more women in senior decision-making roles.  The reasons are many, including the importance of diversity, the fact that senior women more readily represent female customers (the majority of buyers in many industries), and a general openness to talent.  Some new [...]

I can’t believe that I missed this study reported by BPS research last January.  Way cool.  It compared the performance of men working in pairs to women working pairs.  The researchers placed them under performance pressure, and varied whether they drank caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.   The “caffeinated” men performed worse, while the women performed better.  [...]

What will it take for men to get it? In the last five years, women and minorities actually lost ground in U.S. corporate boardroom representation, despite solid evidence that greater women’s representation in corporate leadership correlates directly with improved business performance. A 2010 McKinsey study finds that across all industry sectors, companies with the most [...]

Mao Zedong may have famously proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky,” but many of today’s Chinese career women feel their high-flying ambitions have feet of clay. “Yeah, we hold up half the sky,” recently quipped a female senior manager for a multinational pharmaceutical company, “but there are 5,000 years of history dragging us [...]

This post was co-authored with Ripa Rashid. In the decades since Deng Xiaoping instituted market reform, millions of women have profitably followed Deng’s dictate that “to get rich is glorious.” Half of the 14 billionaires on Forbes magazine’s 2010 list of the world’s richest self-made women are from mainland China. Chinese women in powerful business [...]

This post was co-authored with Melinda Marshall. In real life, as in the film Black Swan, Natalie Portman wants to win not only the leading role, but also its attendant accolades. And on February 27, she may well fulfill her ambition: the 29-year-old Harvard grad is within a jeté of the Oscar for Best Actress. [...]