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Women do better when they have a group of strong female friends, study finds

We're stronger together.

Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

Women do better when they have female friends.

Madeleine Albright once said, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." It turns out that might actually be a hell on Earth, because women just do better when they have other women to rely on, and there's research that backs it up.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that women who have a strong circle of friends are more likely to get executive positions with higher pay. "Women who were in the top quartile of centrality and had a female-dominated inner circle of 1-3 women landed leadership positions that were 2.5 times higher in authority and pay than those of their female peers lacking this combination," Brian Uzzi writes in the Harvard Business Review.

Part of the reason why women with strong women backing them up are more successful is because they can turn to their tribe for advice. Women have to face different challenges than men, such as unconscious bias, and being able to turn to other women who have had similar experiences can help you navigate a difficult situation. It's like having a road map for your goals.

​It's interesting to note that women in leadership positions who lacked this style of support system didn't make as much as the women who did. "While women who had networks that most resembled those of successful men (i.e., centrality but no female inner circle) placed into leadership positions that were among the lowest in authority and pay," Uzzi writes. Men and women have different needs, and that even extends to their tribe.


But it's not just in the workplace. A 2006 study found that women who had 10 or more friends were more likely to survive the disease than women who lacked close friends. The study found socially isolated women were 64% more likely to die from cancer, and 43% more likely to have a breast cancer reoccurrence. Friendship is literally the best medicine.

Never underestimate the power of a group text with your girlfriends. Having a place to commiserate over sexism and support other women with goofy gifs when someone succeeds can enrich your life on all fronts.


This article originally appeared on 12.03.19

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Someone named ‘Jeffrey’ or ‘Michael’ is more likely to be a CEO than a woman.

Photo by Hunters Race on Unsplash

If you're a woman and you want to be a CEO, you should probably think about changing your name to "Jeffrey" or "Michael." Or possibly even "Michael Jeffreys" or "Jeffrey Michaels."

According to Fortune, last year, more men named Jeffrey and Michael became CEOs of America's top companies than women. A whopping total of one woman became a CEO, while two men named Jeffrey took the title, and two men named Michael moved into the C-suite as well.

The "New CEO Report" for 2018, which looks at new CEOS for the 250 largest S&P 500 companies, found that 23 people were appointed to the position of CEO. Only one of those 23 people was a woman. Michelle Gass, the new CEO of Kohl's, was the lone female on the list.

Megan Rapinoe says the best way to support equal pay is by putting your money where your mouth is.

The amount of new female CEOs has slipped since the previous year. In 2017, two women became CEOs of a major corporation - Gail Boudreaux at Anthem and Geisha Williams at PG&E. But then again, women aren't occupying the C-suite as much as men, period. In the past five years, just nine out of the 134 new CEOs have been women. Currently, women are about 25 percent of America's executive talent, Fortune reports.

Women aren't groomed to hold the position of CEO the way men are, which could account for the scarcity of female CEOs. Marc Feign, the founder of Feign Advisors LLC who conducted the survey, says that women with strong potential aren't on the radar the same way men are. "Companies think about CEO succession three to five years out," Feign said, "yet they fail to develop a deep pool of female candidates who'd be ready for the top job in that short time-frame."

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Feign also chalks it up to good old-fashioned gender bias. "You also can't underestimate hidden bias by male bosses, who wrongly convince themselves that women won't have the drive necessary to succeed in key jobs running a P&L," he said.

Fortune notes this needs to change. "The tradition-bound succession process needs an upheaval, an all-out campaign to bring female talent to the top," the magazine wrote. Women with potential should receive more nurturing and guidance in their careers. And maybe it won't be so lonely for women at the top.

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Think romance novels are trash? That's a stereotype — one that's not necessarily true.

In college during summer and holiday breaks, I worked in a mall bookstore.

Our most popular promotion was a summer one: buy two books, get one free. Romance readers loved it. One afternoon, an older woman filled up a milk crate with books and told me as she paid that it was her "favorite day of the year."

Our stockroom guy, who liked parachute pants, muttered "loser" when she left. I wasn't surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if someone said it to me today, nearly 20 years later. Romance novels have been labeled as bad, stupid, insipid, and for "losers" since long before parachute pants existed.

Unfairly, romance novels are still pushed aside as "mommy porn" or the default favorite of lonely, cat-laden spinsters.

In reality, romance novels made up 23% of the U.S. fiction market in 2016 — proof that they deserve more credit than they get.

Romance gets trashed, says Sarah Wendell, co-founder and mastermind of Smart Bitches Trashy Books, because "it traffics in emotion and empathy and personal connection and values happiness."

It's also a business run by women that sells to women. The Nielsen Romance Buyer Survey has consistently tracked women as making up more than 80% of romance-novel buyers. "It is mostly women in publishing houses that work in the romance genre. It's women who are reading it. We are telling our stories to ourselves," she says.

That said, the genre isn't without its problems.

Ironically, romance novels are incredibly diverse in subject and not so much in substance. Subgenres abound: from pregnancy romances to Amish romances to shape shifter romances to male/male romances written for heterosexual women to BSDM books that make "Fifty Shades of Grey" look tame.

But when it comes to people, traditional romance publishing, like the rest of publishing, isn't as diverse as the general population (only 7.8% of books published by romance publishers in 2016 were written by people of color), but romance writers were also among the "earliest to figure out how to make self publishing work and form small group publishing enterprises to publish their stories," Wendell says. "When women of color and from other marginalized communities weren't reaching readers through traditional publishers, they made their own careers and made their own enterprises and connected with other readers."

Popular coverage doesn't often embrace the more modern, diverse side of romance novels, though, and still leans heavily into the "bodice rippers" stereotype, even though that style of romance largely fell out of popularity in the 1970s. The criticism of romance fiction often doesn't line up with the reality. "You just come back to 'it's s**t fiction because women read it,' and the people who condemn it very seldom read it themselves," says John Market, author of "Publishing Romance: The History of an Industry 1940 to Present."

When The New York Times Book Review dedicated its cover to romance novels in September 2017, for example, they gave the assignment to Robert Gotlieb, an 87-year-old white man. The results are about what you'd expect.

But in February 2018, the Times launched a romance column — indicating that, perhaps, the genre is finally being taken seriously.

Still, I don't expect it to be the norm. As long as women are treated as though their greatest value is still determined by what their bodies can provide for men, books written for and by women will be treated like dirt too.

"If those attitudes are there about the woman's place as a sexual object, then we've got a long way to go," Market says. "Since the books are about women's sexuality and focuses on the sexual aspect and emotions revolving around love, it tends to be put down as fluff."

This article was originally published by The Lily, a publication of The Washington Post, and is reprinted here with permission.

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The secret to cutting global hunger rates around the world? Hello, ladies.

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Gates Foundation: The Story of Food

There's a pretty simple way we could be feeding an additional 150 million hungry people around the world.

It's not through some super advanced technology or billion-dollar idea that someone just came up with. The answer has been right in front of us for a very long time:

‌Photo via Esther Havens/The Adventure Project. ‌

Women. Women farmers are a secret weapon to fighting hunger.

How do I know? Because they're already doing it!

Women produce half of all the food in the world – up to 80% in some countries. But most people wouldn't know it.

After all, a woman isn't the most common image that comes to mind when picturing a farmer.

Maybe it's time for it to be?

In the developing world, rural women farmers are the foundation of their local economies. Aside from being the primary caregivers of their children and in charge of domestic responsibilities, women also, on average, make up 43% of an area's agricultural labor force. Ladies get things done.

‌Photo via Esther Havens/The Adventure Project. ‌

Women farmers pull their weight – but they don't have the same access to the land, agricultural training, livestock, financial services, and equipment as men do.  

Yields for women farmers are 20% to 30% lower than for men because they have less access to the services, tools, and information as their male counterparts. When it comes to owning land, women make up only 3% to 20% of all landholders, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations.  

The world could look so different if that wasn't the case.

‌Photo via Esther Havens/The Adventure Project. ‌

Sub-Saharan Africa is a perfect example of how empowering female farmers could create significant change.

Women make up nearly 50% of the agricultural labor force there, but the region also has the highest prevalence of hunger in the world. Increasing women's access to the agricultural tools they need would help them to be more productive, reduce hunger, and lift themselves out of poverty. Just look at Kenya.

When The Adventure Project worked with Kenyan women to provide access to better irrigation pumps, the increased productivity and income that resulted was astounding. Each farmer was able to grow enough to sell produce to 50 community members, and their increased earnings allowed them to send their children to school for the first time.

One irrigation pump was enough to lift a Kenyan family out of poverty and into the middle class. That's amazing.

‌Photo via Esther Havens/The Adventure Project. ‌

Unfortunately, there are still many areas where traditional laws and cultural norms get in the way of women farmers being able to reach their full potential. It's not uncommon for women to be forbidden to own and inherit land, obtain credit, or play such a large role in the field. Those limitations and, as a result, missed opportunities are exactly why gender equality is front and center in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals.

If women farmers were simply given the same access to resources as men, the number of undernourished people could drop by 100 million to 150 million around the world.

That's like the population of Russia, people. That's a lot of mouths being fed that weren't before.

‌Photo via Esther Havens/The Adventure Project. ‌

Closing this gender gap would change the world by providing for more food where it's needed and improving global nutrition security — including in the United States.

The world misses out when women are held back. The data is there, and their impact is real. Women farmers just need an equal shot.

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