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International Women’s Day |
| By:deepika bajaj on Sun 07 Mar 2010 8:30 PM under Business, Career and Money, Financial Independence, Personal Success, balance |
INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day is a day of reflection – celebrating the efforts of the brave women who fought for equality, power and freedom of choice.
This day brings a lot of focus on effort of our communities, companies and countries on their efforts to enable and empower women. I was born in a world where modern women had many privileges which many women from the 1970′s had to fight for.
In the 1970′s if you found out you were pregnant, you had to quit your job. There were no maternity leaves. Working women have come a long way. Today not only do we have maternity leaves, we have paternity leaves…
The times have really changed and great improvements have been made – now we have women astronauts, prime ministers, executives, women can work and have a family – women have real choices now. This is a day to celebrate.
Here are some breakthroughs:
1. The study released today by the Pew Research Center shows that in one out of five married couples, the wife earns more than the husband. That’s a huge shift in 40 years, when this was the case in just 4 percent of American marriages.
2. Women now make up almost half of American workers (49.9% in Oct). They run some of the world’s best companies, PepsiCo, Avon and ICICI Bank (India).
3. They earn 60% of university degrees in America and Europe.
Opportunities:
1. Women of color face an enormous wealth gap when compared to the rest of society. Single black and Hispanic women are particularly hard hit, owning only a penny of wealth for every dollar owned by their male counterparts suggests report released by the Insight Center for Community Economic Development at a Capitol Hill symposium on the economic security of women.
2. Women MBAs lag behind men in jobs, pay and promotions. There’s a really interesting, albeit not all that surprising, report from Catalyst, the group working to expand opportunities for women in business.
3. The financial demands on the Indian families are becoming fiercer by day. The sky rocketing cost of living, increasing expenses on education of children, increasing cost of housing properties in India force women to go for jobs and take up even careers that were considered only suitable for men such as working in night shifts in call centers or BPOs.
