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How we track our economy influences everything from government spending and taxes to home lending and business investment. The Conversation series The Way We Measure takes a close look at economic indicators to better understand what's going on. Ever since 1944, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been a primary measure of economic growth. It's in the news regularly and, even though few can define what it means, there is general acceptance that when GDP is growing, things are good. There are problems with this simplistic formulation.

Advancement toward gender equality at work has slowed since the 1990s for three major reasons: people's attitudes stopped becoming more gender egalitarian, occupations stopped gender integrating, and the gender wage gap began decreasing at slower rates. Sociologist Paula England has called this phenomenon an "uneven and stalled" gender revolution, and there have been dozens of studies showing how the progress in gender equality experienced during and immediately after the feminist movement of the 1970s has not been sustained through the 1990s and 2000s. Does this stalled revolution play out in management positions, too? And if so, how? To explore this, I used data on full-time managers obtained from the U.S. Census and American Community Survey for the years 1980 and 2010 to examine three major factors that contribute to gender equality in the labor force: women's representation in management, the occupational gender segregation among managers, and the gender wage gaps that vary across managerial occupations.

Most of the poor people in the world are women. In no country on earth are women economically equal to men, and Australia is no exception. Research from Acoss and the University of New South Wales last year showed that a higher share of people living in poverty in Australia are women. The experience of living below the breadline in our very wealthy nation is a gendered one, for reasons that are complex and intertwined. As women progress through life, they encounter a series of barriers and setbacks that simply do not encumber men in the same way. The cause of gendered poverty is structural. It is entrenched in our workplace settings, and embedded in our personal relationships. It is at play at every stage of a woman's life, from childhood to the grave, making its mark on our education, our employment, our homes, our familial responsibilities and our retirement options. At its heart is the simple fact that women do the lion's share of caring for others. Caring is women's work, and our society does not value women's work.

A BBC episode (30 mins) on changing minds. There's a widespread belief that there's no point talking to people you disagree with because they will never change their minds. Everyone is too polarized and attempts to discuss will merely result in greater polarization. But the history of the world is defined by changes of mind -that's how progress (or even regress) is made: shifts in political, cultural, scientific beliefs and paradigms. So how do we ever change our minds about something? What are the perspectives that foster constructive discussion and what conditions destroy it? Margaret Heffernan talks to international academics at the forefront of research into new forms of democratic discourse, to journalists involved in facilitating national conversations and to members of the public who seized the opportunity to talk to a stranger with opposing political views: