The Celebration of the Centennial of International Women’s Day was indeed a celebration of women’s achievements around the world. It was also a time to realize that there is still much more to do. Part one of Breaking the Glass Ceiling presents how far women have come since that day, one hundred years ago, when garment workers in New York City, fed up with low wages and poor working conditions started this movement.
For Chinese feminists who have campaigned for more parity between sexes in workplace, a recent call for equality may have trapped them in dilemma.
"I suggest government adjust the early retirement age of women, which has made us politically and economically unprivileged," said Xu Chonghua, female deputy from Anhui Province, at the top legislative meeting.
China allows female cadres to retire at 55 and women workers at 50, five years earlier than men. But Xu deemed this gender division stipulated by a 1978 statute to be dated and problematic.
While Canada performs well in the UN’s Gender Inequality Index, at the highest levels of Canadian business, women have yet to achieve parity. The 2010 Catalyst Census: Financial Post 500 Women Senior Officers and Top Earners, points to a lack of progress in advancing women in leadership positions in Canada’s most powerful companies.
On Tuesday, the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, Lynne Gangone, dean of the Women's College of the University of Denver, sat on a plane planning her upcoming class on women's leadership, reflecting on past and future.
"Women have made all these gains in education and economically, but we still have in 10 sectors only 18 percent of women at the very top level of leadership," she said.
Women looking to make it to the C-suite stand a better chance if they can get a boost from other women, according to a new study from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
The study shows that companies with more women on their boards of directors have a greater share of women in top executive positions.
In a study of 13 European countries, Poland ranks as one of the top in terms of number of women in directorial and managerial positions, daily Puls Biznesu reports.
In fact, one out of every three directorial positions in Poland is occupied by a woman, a report by market research firm Grant Thornton shows. However, only four percent of CEO positions belong to women in Poland, compared to almost 13 percent in Germany and 10 percent in France and Sweden.
Last month employees from three breweries met in Cambridge, Massachusetts to cook up a beer. That's nothing special: these days any brewery worth its hops is involved in at least one collaboration project. What made this brew session notable were the people involved: Cambridge Brewing's Megan Parisi, Victory Brewing's Whitney Thompson, and Stone Brewing's Laura Ulrich—three women working in an industry long defined as the manliest of male domains.
Kat Banyard wants to challenge the complacent notion that parity between the sexes has been achieved.
Her research shows that the proverbial glass ceiling remains very much intact: on average, women in the UK are paid 23 per cent less per hour than men.
She is particularly incisive on underlying sexist attitudes that perpetuate this inequality, which manifest in such pernicious developments as the normalisation of pornography. Society, she says, shows a "yogic ability to bend over backwards to ... accept and
