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A GROWING ECONOMIC FORCE The statistics are telling. Today, women account for nearly half of the overall labor force (compared with just over 38% in 1970).1 More than 10 million businesses, or 30% of all privately held firms, are owned by women.2 Women are also managers and senior business leaders; in fact, more than 43% of women are in management roles and 24% are in senior leadership positions. They constitute more than a third of all physicians and surgeons, and nearly a third of attorneys.3

In 2011, Dove® released the findings of its largest global study to date on women’s relationship with beauty—The Real Truth About Beauty: Revisited. The study revealed that only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful, and that anxiety about looks begins at an early age. In a study of over 1,200 10-to-17-year-olds, a majority of girls, 72%, said they felt tremendous pressure to be beautiful. The study also found that only 11% of girls around the world feel comfortable using the word beautiful to describe their looks, showing that there is a universal increase in beauty pressure and a decrease in girls' confidence as they grow older. Though Dove® efforts have moved the needle in a positive direction, there is more to be done

include differences in performance, motivations, perceptions

Right now, it is 1 am and I am sitting in my hotel room at the Renaissance Hotel in Washington, DC

Everyone is different so why is being different so different

The military has always been a great opportunity for advancement. In 2009, 375,000 service men and women were simultaneously pursuing a civilian degree. What many people find surprising, however is that three out of four students in the military were enrolled in some form of distance learning.

Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. “Did you see Babies?” asks Lois Nachamie, a couples counselor who for years has run parenting workshops and support groups on the Upper West Side. She’s referring to the recent documentary that compares the lives of four newborns—one in Japan, one in Namibia, one in Mongolia, and one in the United States (San Francisco). “I don’t mean to idealize the lives of the Namibian women,” she says. “But it was hard not to notice how calm they were. They were beading their children’s ankles and decorating them with sienna, clearly enjoying just sitting and playing with them, and we’re here often thinking of all of this stuff as labor.”