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Women Will Rule the World
Men were the main victims of the recession. The recovery will be female.
When historians write about the great recession of 2007–08, they may very well have a new name for it: the Mancession. It’s a term already being bandied about in the popular media as business writers chronicle the sad tales of the main victims of the recession: men. They were disproportionately represented in the industries hit hardest during the downturn, including financial services, manufacturing, and construction, and their higher salaries often put them first in the line of fire. Men are the victims of two thirds of the 11 million jobs lost since the recession began in 2007; in August 2009, when
If they are lucky, they’ll have wives who can take care of them. American women are already the breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two thirds of American households; in the European Union, women filled 75 percent of the 8 million new jobs created since 2000. Even with the pay gap factored into the equation, economists predict that by 2024, the average woman in the
It’s not hard to imagine that such a drastic shift has forced multinational corporations to take note—and ensure their products and services appeal to female consumers. But there are more important implications as well, like the reality that, because it’s women, not men, who are starting businesses on their own, it will be women, not men, who will one day employ a majority of workers. As with most trends involving female empowerment, the shift has begun in the
In the United States, nearly all net job creation since 1980 has been generated by firms operating for fewer than five years—and that number is only likely to rise as more multinationals send their new jobs to countries with cheaper labor. “Any economist will tell you, the job creation [we] need to fuel any kind of middle class is not going to come from corporations, it’s going to come from small businesses,” says Harvard business professor Nancy Koehn. “With that in mind, what we need to start thinking about is how we capitalize on this [vast network] of women entrepreneurs. How do we nurture them? How do we fund them? How do we use [this] national asset?”
It’s a question that policymakers all over the world are beginning to ask themselves. Nowhere is this need for talent more clear than in high-growth developing nations, most notably the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), where economic and business growth is dramatically outpacing the production of talented employees, particularly at the higher ends of the food chain. Here, the rise of female economic power will be a transformative growth engine, in large part because education levels among women have vastly improved from where they were even 10 years ago. It’s a well-known fact that in the
Educated BRIC women have already begun to gain workforce traction: they make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of BRIC workers as a whole, and in three of the four BRIC nations, female labor-force participation rose from 2007 to 2008. There’s every reason to believe the trend will only speed up. As the authors of a new Center for Work-Life Policy (CWLP) study on female talent in emerging markets note, the women in developing nations are more likely to describe themselves as ambitious than the men are. Eighty-five percent of women in India and 92 percent in the UAE consider themselves “very ambitious”; in Brazil, India, China, and the UAE, at least 75 percent of women aspire to hold a top job (compare these figures with the mere 36 percent of U.S. women who consider themselves very ambitious). Certainly, the need for greater economic parity drives some of this (in poor countries, the gender wage gap is still quite large). But experts also believe the legacy of communism may have provided a surprisingly beneficial lesson to today’s capitalists: as one Chinese HR leader told researchers, “communism has always emphasized that women can and should do whatever men can do…We often find female candidates to be as competitive, if not more so, than their male counterparts.”
The debate over women in the workforce is still fresh and exciting in the developing world. In the
With the state of the economy as it is, corporations are starting to realize that women may be their best hope. Firms like Intel spend increasing time and money mentoring female employees because they consider it a key competitive edge in the global talent wars. Many studies show that companies with more women on their boards do better financially than those with less. A recent McKinsey survey determined that, of companies who’d made efforts to empower women in emerging markets, 34 percent reported increased profits, and another 38 percent said they expected to see profit as a direct result of those efforts. There have been many theories as to why women improve business. Recent research from the
The World Economic Forum has estimated that closing the remaining employment gender gap in the United States would increase U.S. GDP by up to 9 percent; in BRIC countries, as well as the N-11 nations (Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey, and Vietnam), the Center for Work-Life Policy estimates that utilizing women could push per capita income up by 14 percent by 2020, and 20 percent by 2030. “Study after study,” says the White House director of public engagement, Christina Tchen, “shows that increasing education levels and prosperity of women and girls has been able to contribute to social stability and economic progress.” In developing countries, the social effects of female economic empowerment are particularly evident, since women reinvest 90 percent of their income into community and family, compared with 30 to 40 percent reinvested by men.
It’s clear that challenges remain—not just at home, but around the world. Women in the
That said, women in these countries also have unexpected advantages. Extended families, for example, mean they often have to grapple less with issues of child care, and feel less fraught over work/life balances than their Western peers. This unsung freedom of the developing world could help shift the standard workplace culture that was shaped mainly by white, Western males. “You can’t possibly be a highly productive, competitive country unless you engage your full workforce,” says Laura Liswood, a senior adviser at Goldman Sachs. “There is a real possibility that these [new] companies will leapfrog over the cultural norms and structure [currently in place in Western nations]. They almost have a blank slate.” Moreover, while gender issues can seem both divisive and passé in the West (CWLP found that American women care much more about them than men), in BRIC nations, it’s both women and men who believe women suffer from workplace sexism. Discrimination in these nations is more overt, but there’s also a greater willingness to acknowledge it, according to the center’s research.
But the most important shifts won’t be the result of well-meaning inclusion programs run by bosses of either gender. They will be the result of the economic facts that favor women, particularly in the world’s most vibrant markets. “The growth rate in
Certainly, history would support it. In the 1880s and 1890s, American women poured into factories, hospitals, and retail stores, typically to work as factory hands or clerks, expanding women’s sense of their own power. It was, then, no coincidence that women earned the right to vote not long after, says Harvard’s Koehn, a historian. The same connection can be drawn from women workers during WWII, who, by 1945, made up almost 30 percent of the workforce. In
GROWING OLD ALONE
Cleanup after unnoticed death now a growing industry
By MIZUHO AOKI
Staff writer
Yoshinori Ishimi could hear a high-pitched whine coming from the apartment in Nerima Ward, Tokyo, he was about to enter. When he went inside, he saw black "mini-twister" clouds of flies.
The last tenant had been a 60-year-old divorced man whose body was not found until a month after he had died.
"Every time I encounter such scenes, I hesitate to step inside. But someone has to clean up these flats . . . and be professional about it," said Ishimi of Anshin Net, a cleaning service that is part of R-Cube Co. in Ota Ward, Tokyo.
The Nerima man's case was not unique, and such unnoticed departures are only expected to increase.
According to a report by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, the number of single-person households is expected to rise from 14.46 million in 2005 to 18.24 million in 2030, or nearly 40 percent of all households.
With the growing number of single households in this graying nation, businesses specializing in dealing in what has been dubbed "lonely death" have become a fixture.
Anshin Net is one such example.
Founded in 2004, the company handles about 450 requests a year, about half of them dealing with cleaning out dwellings after the occupant has died.
The requests generally come from close relatives. But when people die alone and their corpses are not discovered for weeks or even months — the requests may also come from landlords, as well as more distant kin, because many people die childless and without a partner, Ishimi said.
"We receive about four to eight requests a month asking us to clean dwellings where the residents were found a week, a month, or, in extreme cases, a year after they passed away," Ishimi said.
Police process solitary deaths by carrying out autopsies and, if relatives can't be traced, municipalities cremate the body and inter the ashes in a shared grave, Ishimi said.
Ishimi and other specialist cleaners come in afterward and make dwellings clean again.
Although no figures are available, with the increasing media coverage about people dying lonely deaths, both the number of people engaged in this business and job requests have surged in the past two or three years, said Atsushi Takaesu, 38, an Okinawan who has run a special cleaning business in Kanagawa Prefecture since 2003.
"I had only about 10 cases a year about seven years ago. But this year, the number is likely to surpass 400. I received about 40 requests this June alone," said Takaesu, who recently published "Jiken Genba Seisonin ga Iku ("Here Comes a Crime Scene Cleaner"), a nonfiction book on his specialty of cleaning housing where people died lonely deaths, including suicides.
Takaesu said he is proud of his job but admits that at times it is heart-wrenching.
Pointing to a picture of a bathtub one-third full of a dark reddish liquid, Takaesu explained: "This is not ramen. This is a dead lady's body fluid and skin. I actually had to step into the bath to clean it."
Apart from the flies, maggots and pupae, crawling, sticking to windows and flying around, there is the hair of the dead, looking like a wig.
Also, bodily fluids and blood soak into tatami mats, and there is the stench of death that many in the business find difficult to totally remove, according to Takaesu.
"It is hard to pick up someone's hair with my own hands, but if you ask me whether I can do it, I can. But the appreciation I get after I clean up those rooms, totally removing the lingering smell of death, is the biggest thing that keeps me going," he said.
Ishimi of Anshin Net said people who die alone often share the same circumstances, and he strongly believes many can avoid this fate by changing their lifestyles.
"Many were men in their 50s or 60s, divorced, and with no job. They had not been in contact with their friends or families and they often were diabetic," Ishimi said, adding that when he goes inside their dwellings he often finds the curtains drawn and piles of empty food boxes from convenience stores, cans or bottles of alcohol, and insulin vials.
"It's sad. And to be honest with you, I ask them (the deceased), 'Why?' Because (in many cases) if they had changed their lifestyle, they could have avoided dying (in the way they did). They shut out the sunlight and fresh air with curtains, and isolated themselves from everyone," Ishimi said.
After seeing so many residences long after the occupant's death, Anshin Net is now shifting its focus on what it calls "welfare cleaning."
About half of the requests the company receives today are from care managers, helpers or sometimes municipalities asking for help cleaning the dwellings of elderly people who live alone and have huge garbage accumulations.
These people call first because they can't enter the elderly person's house unless the waste is removed, or, in some cases, following complaints made to municipalities from neighbors, Ishimi noted.
"In recent years, the number of elderly who live alone buried under a mountain of garbage has surged. Some have dementia and some are physically unable to take out the garbage. It is these people who are the ones most likely to die alone," Ishimi said.
"We want to minimize cases in which elderly people die alone. I believe cleaning their housing will act as a deterrence."
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