Project 10^100: a missed opportunity for girls and women

Well, Google’s long-delayed Project 10^100 has finally come to the voting stage. And all of the 16 bundles of ideas that have made it to this stage are worthwhile endeavors.

But they’re also a missed opportunity. None of the ideas is about empowering girls and women. In fact, the word “women” is entirely missing from the page that describes the 16 finalists.

Yet, economists have proved again and again that getting girls into education, teaching women about their reproductive rights, financing women’s ventures, and setting up services that allow women to be productive in the workplace is the hidden lever to unlocking growth and prosperity. None of the 16 ideas up there on that page recognizes this. (Sure, many women will benefit if voters choose to fund better technologies to remove landmines, or more education for African students, or early warning systems to prevent mass atrocities – including war rapes. But there is no idea up there that says  “let’s spend this money 100% on women”).

My proposal? Together with my friend Raffaele, I had submitted an idea about women’s leadership and role models. It went like this: The 1,000 member companies of the World Economic Forum would commit to having neither gender represented by more than 60% of Directors on their Board. Sure, it would primarily have impacted the West, and not so much of the developing world. But it was a very low-cost idea – all it takes is leadership, commitment and some monitoring systems – and it would have triggered a vast culture change in our business, political and civic organizations. Culture change will come anyway, you say? It doesn’t: we’ve stopped making any measurable progress at all – except for places with forcing devices, such as Norway. It didn’t fly: let me know if you find a better forum to promote it.

In the menatime, how are you voting on Project 10^100?

Where women in the workplace get treated differently: if this isn’t evidence, I don’t know what is

This week, the OECD report Education at a Glance 2009 earned a lot of well-deserved media attention (you can download it here). Of particular interest, as The Economist points out, the finding that, even as higher education becomes more widespread, it does not lose value:

“Every year we wonder if this will be the year that higher education starts to lose its value—and every year, there is no sign of it happening,” says Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s chief of education research.

Much has been made of the OECD’s measure of incremental lifetime earnings from tertiary education: across the countries surveyed, gross earnings benefits average out at $186,000 for men (in 2005 money, at purchasing power parity) and $134,000 for women. Even once you subtract the direct cost of the education and the opportunity cost in terms of wages not earned while studying, and make numerous other adjustments, the net present value of the benefits to the individual is still largely positive. National economies as well as the public coffers also come out ahead when their citizens get more education (a hot topic in times of shrinking education budgets).

You will have noticed that the OECD averages show that the individual or private gross benefit for men is 39% higher than for women. This is politely attributed to “the disparity in most countries between male and female earnings”. But how big is this disparity, education levels being equal – and what does it tell us about OECD countries?

You are welcome to look for yourself at the figures in Table A8.2 (as well as all the other tables helpfully provided), but I’ve run the numbers for you here:

Ratio of gross incremental male earnings to gross incremental female earnings from tertiary education, selected OECD countries
(100 %= men and women have the same incremental earnings from tertiary education)

• Italy: 236%
• Hungary: 182%
• Poland: 177%
• Czech Republic: 172%
• Sweden: 163%
• Average: 139%
• Norway: 111%
• Australia: 110%
• Turkey: 102%
• Spain: 95%
• Korea: 77%

In other words: it always pays off to get a degree. It pays off for everybody, men and women. In a country like Turkey or Spain, it pays off to the tune of about the same incremental earnings for men and women. In the OECD as a whole, it pays off for men about 1.4 times as much as for women. But in Italy, a university degree pays off 2.36 times as much for men as for women.

Where is our Minister for Equal Opportunity? and what does she have to say about the equality of opportunities shown in these numbers?

Mindsets and Carol Dweck

The woman in the picture is Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., a professor in the Psychology department at Stanford University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Over two years ago, I read an article about Prof. Dweck’s work in the Stanford Magazine. Today, I finally read her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, which I happen to own in an autographed copy purchased at the Stanford Bookstore.

Just like research on leadership behaviors, there is so much in Prof. Dweck’s research that resonates with what most leaders eventually learn at the school of hard knocks and we all wish we’d learned sooner. Because our behaviors, in the end, are rooted in our mindsets.

In a nutshell, people are usually of one of two mindsets. The “fixed mindset” maintains that people’s ability is innate and static; the “growth mindset” claims that ability is the result of hard work and a learning process. Each of us tends to apply one of these two beliefs, to other people as much as to ourselves, as we go through life; and this has far-reaching consequences for our success and our relationships with those around us.

Of course, empirical evidence from all sorts of fields (from neuroscience to athletic coaching) tells us that the brain has remarkable plasticity, that performance is far more likely to result from sustained effort, and that people are coachable. But they have to be open and willing to grow: no amount of coaching will improve performance if the subject is stuck in a “fixed mindset”. It has been proven experimentally that even toddlers have one of the two mindsets (I can certainly relate this to my own experience as a child, and some of my residual barriers as a grown-up); and that mindset strongly correlates with performance even when it is briefly and temporarily induced.

The book is filled with illustrations from the world of sports, business, and education; for example, it is interesting to contrast the career of a fixed-mindset athlete like John McEnroe with those of growth-mindset ones such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and many other less well-known athletes. But beyond this, there are some persuasive insights about how we could bring about societal change. For example, it is the combination of fixed mindsets with gender stereotyping that explain why many girls and young women who decide to pursue maths and science studies end up leaving the field. Only the women with the growth mindset feel a strong and stable sense of belonging and are able to maintain it in the face of challenges.

Read this diagram by Nigel Holmes about the two mindsets, and read the book if you’d like to learn more (if I’ve stimulated you into a growth mindset, so to speak). I’d love to hear whether it resonates with your experiences.

Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology, Stanford University

85Broads and the final nail in the coffin

You might recall a social network for professional women, 85Broads, which I critiqued a while ago. The good news first: the ugly green-and-orange color scheme has finally gone, in favor of a less garish burgundy livery. (I still have reservations about the typograhic design and the mishmash of fonts on the site, but let’s consider that minor for now).

The more important news, however, is that the network has ditched free membership in favor of a paid model, as I discovered today – not because I visited the site, but because I read their email. And I would probably even sign up if, in the years I’ve been a member of the free site, I had had an inkling of a sense that there could be something in it for me. There may be a wonderful community of people in the real-life-based 85Broads network – I just never felt that, whatever that was, any of it was spilling over into the site. If a user has hardly ever had any use for your site in the last two or three years, to the point that your address has ended up in the cemetery of unused browser bookmarks, trying to upgrade that user from a free to a paid membership probably isn’t going to get you an enthusiastically paying user.

So, I’m OK with being booted out. Maybe there are tons of elite or niche communities that are traying to charge for even basic access, and some are even – who knows? – pulling it off. But for a Web community, or a Web extension of a real-life community, putting monetization before engagement, or trying to get people to pay fees before they have experienced anything of value or meaning to them, seems to me like the final nail in the coffin.

On family history: Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love

Remember Joan Didion and her family history? Here is another American writer, a younger one, Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of the successful Eat, Pray, Love – a book about a year she spent in Rome, an Indian ashram, and Bali.

Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultural paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots. (My uncle calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.

(Author photo: thanks to  Steve Jurvetson!)

Myself, I know of no such exotic names among my ancestors. I always assume that, if I went digging into those old and musty parish records, I would find generations and generations of unassuming names such as Maria and Giovanna.

In fact, my only relative of any notoriety seems to have been the Blessed Giovanna Maria Bonomo, who lived in the 17th century. (For readers with a non-Catholic education: a “blessed” – “beatus” or “beata” in Latin – is someone on the third of the four steps required to be canonized as a Catholic saint: see Beatification). A Benedectine nun since the age of 15, Giovanna Bonomo seems to have been a mystic and a hothead: considered a madwoman, she was denied the Holy Communion by her confessor, and for several years was not allowed not meet visitors in the parlatory or write letters. Later in life, as her ecstasies subsided (or maybe as her prayers to go into ecstasy only at night, so that she may live a normal life during the day, were answered), she was readmitted to her convent’s rites, and once rehabilitated performed many deeds of charity. In her last decades, she was elected abbess and prioress. Her most important teaching to her sisters, apparently, was that sanctity consists not in doing great things, but in doing simple and common things with perfect patience and dedication.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a statue of her was erected in the town of Asiago, in a small square facing the home where she is said to have been born. Of course, a few years later, the town was practically razed to the ground in a furious bombing, during the senseless carnage of World War I. When I was a child, one could still buy postcards showing her statue, miracolously standing in the middle of the rubble of the surrounding houses, unscathed, save for the broken tip of a little finger.

Where I Was From: Family history, by Joan Didion

Two reflections, my dear readers, prompted by reading the early chapters of Where I Was From, by the fearless Joan Didion (she of The Year of Magical Thinking). This post is on family history; the next one will be about California and federal money.

On family history
Didion’s memoir starts with a vivid recollection of her forebears, their countenance and character, and objects and mementos that belonged to them: “My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Scott was born in 1766″… “I have, besides her recipes, a piece of appliqué she made on the crossing” … “I also have a photograph of the stone marker placed on the site of the cabin in which Nancy Hardin Cornwall and her family spent the winter of 1846-47″… “the old potato masher which the Cornwall family brought across the plains in 1846″… “a quilt made by my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Anthony Reese”… “fifty shares of Transamerica stock”.

I wonder why so many Americans (outside the Mormons, for whom it is a religious calling) are so fond of digging way back into their family history. Sure, many have an ancestor who hurried to cross the Sierra Nevada before the winter snow, or one who came to Ellis Island with a cardboard suitcase, or one who had this or that story to tell to epitomize the triumph of the human spirit over adversity and such heroic feats of will. So, perhaps, their great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers are by definition more interesting than ours. I don’t even know the names of anybody who came before my grandparents. I own a single surviving recipe book in my maternal grandmother’s handwriting, and two of her finely embroidered tablecloths; from those generations and generations of earlier forebears I have no letters or diaries, no surviving artifacts, no stock certificates, and certainly no potato mashers. (The oldest family lore I can recall is an unverified rumor about my paternal grandmother hugging and kissing a black American soldier, on or about April 25, 1945.) We regular Europeans do not reconstruct our family trees as a hobby, we do not practice ancestor worship: unless we’re in the tiny minority who has inherited a castle in the Loire valley, say, and can stare at those people’s dusty portraits in our darkened halls, and sell their furniture.

Realistically, most of our forebears must have led unremarkable lives. I guess it would be possible to reconstruct these lives’ outlines through church archives: they were born and baptized, they married, they bore children who were in turn baptized, they died and were buried. For centuries and centuries, the monotony of agrarian life wore them down. They grew crops and brought them to market. Once in a while, they sold a pig or a calf. You see, unlike Joan Didion’s ancestors, my folks, I’m afraid, never went anywhere. It just wasn’t that common to up and go somewhere. Did one of my ancestors join the Crusades and see the Holy Land? Did one see China in the footsteps of Marco Polo? Did one travel North and learn to paint in the style of Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach? It just seems so unlikely. Historians, contradict me if I’m wrong, but I think that statistically, even through wars and famines and epidemics, most people stayed put. That was what life was like. And that’s why genealogy would bore most of us to tears. On average, our ancestors must have been unremarkable, or at least less enterprising than those who got on some boat and whose children went on to build America. The mobility gene packed up and left; we are the children of those who lacked it.

Perhaps, by taking for granted that there is nothing special to learn about our forebears, we do miss out on patterns, on clues to who we might be underneath our veneer of cultural sophistication. Joan Didion, reconstructing character from the flimsiest of clues, finds a dark thread running through her family:

They were women, these women in my family, without much time for second thoughts, without much inclination toward equivocation, and later, when there was time or inclination, there developed a tendency, which I came to see as endemic, toward slight and major derangements, apparently eccentric pronouncements, opaque bewilderment and moves to places not quite on schedule.

But then, were that to be the case for me too, wouldn’t I be better off not knowing?

My new favorite fashion designer

Last weekend, an advertising image (among dozens and dozens of full-page ads in a magazine) caught my eye.

Yes, she is advertising a fashion brand. Yet, look at her.

She is not squeezed into a corset or stuck onto stiletto heels. There are no animal prints, no lace, no fur, no patent leather. No chains: she is not wearing any jewelry. No sunglasses. No handbags. Normal, healthy hair.

The clothes play with her body – concealing some features, showing others. She’s comfortable. She’s not constrained.

She may be dancing. But she’s dancing for herself – not for a male gaze.

The designer’s name is Martino Midali. I haven’t had a chance to wear his clothes yet, but based on this image alone, I think we need more designers like him.

In favor of wearing whatever the hell you want, part 2

Here is Carme Chacón, Spanish defense minister, in a supremely elegant suit by Spanish designer Purificación García, presiding over the troops’ Pascua Militar parade on January 6th (photo: EFE). The suit had been previously vetted by officials in charge of royal protocol, yet Chacón was criticized (mostly by men, obviously) for not wearing a dress.

Women across the political spectrum defended Chacón’s untraditional choice. Esperanza Aguirre, a leading member of the opposition, said: “Como mujer que se dedica a la política, me indigna que sea motivo de discusión lo que nos ponemos, cómo nos peinamos y cómo nos cortamos el pelo, eso no pasa con los hombres.” Minister of Equality Bibiana Aído said: “No se nos ocurriría comentar la indumentaria de un hombre.”

The tragedy of war rapes in Sudan: what can be done?

Sometimes your heart breaks. Your heart breaks from the pain and suffering in the world around you that seems close to ineradicable.

Consider this. The chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague recommended last July that a warrant be issued for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir. He would be accused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes in Darfur. Torching and looting of towns and villages continue; five million Darfuris are either living in refugee camps or fully dependent on aid. Eleven humanitarian workers have been killed this year and 179 kidnapped (source: The Economist).

And this is where your heart breaks:

Already, NGOs on the ground in Darfur are suffering from a government backlash prompted by the ICC charges against Mr Bashir. Harassment by security officials has got much worse. The goons have spent days in NGO offices haranguing staff to hand over sensitive documents and computer files which, they suspect, could have been used as evidence against Mr Bashir. In particular, officials have been targeting projects that help women recover from sexual violence. The massive use of rape as a weapon in the army’s counter-insurgency war is a critical part of the ICC case. If a warrant is issued, the harassment will surely worsen to the point where many counselling projects will be shut down, as at least one has been already.

Rape is an act of war, and the Court seeks justice; but the act of seeking justice may leave rape victims even more helpless than they are now.

What can be done? What in the world can be done?

Italy and the 2008 Gender Gap Report: real or apparent progress?

Last year I commented on Italy’s deservedly low position in the rankings of relative gender equality produced by the World Economic Forum. This year, the 2008 Gender Gap Report tells us that we are no longer in position number 84: we have jumped up to number 67. We are still quite far from other European and mostly Catholic countries such as Poland (49), Spain (17), France (15) and Ireland (8).

This year’s data on Italy, states the report,

show very significant improvement in the percentage of women among legislators, senior officials and managers, members of parliament and in ministerial level positions.

One would have to look beyond the raw numbers to get a sense of the real impact of those ministerial level positions, I would guess; but we’ll leave that to the next refinement of the ranking metodology.

It is also true that we have more businesswomen in position of power this year; yet, we have no way to know where Marina Berlusconi (who recently joined the board of Mediobanca) and Emma Marcegaglia (who became head of Confindustria, and is the only Italian in the Wall Street Journal’s “50 Women to Watch“) would be today if it weren’t for their fathers’ success.

And hopefully those women legislators and members of parliament will think about crafting and passing some of those laws that the rest of us need before we can feel that Italy offers true equality of opportunity, regardless of gender.