In the United States, female teachers vastly outnumber male. Yet that is where the parity stops. The fourth in our five-part series on International Women’s Day, this one focuses on education.
For a hundred years, March has hosted International Women’s Day, an event to recognize the achievements of women – and their struggles to make those achievements into reality. It is a day to remember how far women have come, and how far there still is to go, in terms of true equality.
Less than 3% of boards have reached gender parity, despite women’s obvious acumen and thousands of qualified executives to select from. Clearly, we all have some work to do.
When study after study has proven that businesses owned or co-founded by women have consistently outperformed those started by men, why do women-owned startups receive half the capital funding given to men?
How is what we’re experiencing different from what people have been calling the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) nature of the world?
It’s fundamentally different.
Heading into the weekend, you may as well relax with climate-positive gin and tonic. Only a thousand bottles of this Scots gin has been shipped so far, but more is on the way. The difference? It’s all in the garden peas.
The advent of DNA in forensics gave courts powerful tools for attributing blame or establishing innocence. The same is now true of forensic climate attribution. Experts can sit in courtrooms and say with “increasing statistical certainty,” that X event was increased in likelihood and severity by anthropogenic climate change.
We were warned, by Bill Gates and others, that we were unprepared for the next pandemic. Why did we fail to heed these prophetic warnings? Hubris: in this case, the presumption that humans control nature and not the other way around.
The response to this crisis makes it clear that countries, sufficiently motivated, can unleash the full range of human knowledge and expertise to solve problems. The trick that has eluded us is convincing lawmakers and citizens that the climate emergency rivals that of this pandemic.
It’s possible to apply scientific rigor to thorny issues such as the ‘glass ceiling,’ the lack of women reaching pinnacle positions of power.
There’s no doubt whatever about the problem. However, as Sloan Professor of Organization Studies Roberto Fernandez told MIT Management in August, “the glass ceiling, like dark matter in physics, cannot be observed. We know it’s there, but we’re not sure what’s causing it to endure.”
‘Close’ is – famously – only good in horseshoes. However, I’ve done enough valuation to know that hitting close to the mark on the right target – to paraphrase the late mathematician John Tukey – is better than a bullseye on the wrong one. There is value in approximate answers, as long as they’re answering the right questions.
