Turn on the tube and you’ll easily find Judge Amy Madison Gray handing down wise and compassionate rulings, surgeon Elizabeth Corday racing to save lives no matter what, and medical examiner Jordan Cavanaugh fearlessly investigating the most heinous of crimes.
But you’ll flip through the channels in vain looking for a sophisticated and glamorous cost accountant, or a public-spirited marketing manager with great hair. In fact, business people are routinely painted by Hollywood as greedy, self-centered or conniving.
So it shouldn’t be surprising that a survey by The Committee of 200 and Simmons College School of Management has found that the vast majority of teenage girls don’t think a business career will let them fulfill their goal of helping society.
According to the survey, while 97 percent of girls polled expect to work to help support themselves or their families, fewer than 10 percent anticipate careers in business.
Like most of the boys surveyed, the girls said the primary considerations for a career are to enjoy work, gain respect and have balance in their lives. But girls and boys differed in an interesting way: More girls (73 percent of girls vs. 55 percent of boys) ranked helping others as being extremely or very important for a career.
More boys, on the other hand, ranked making money as a priority (75 percent compared to 56 percent of girls). The survey questioned 4,292 middle school and high school students in New England, Illinois, California and Texas.
Connie K. Duckworth, chairwoman of The Committee of 200, an organization of top-level businesswoman, said girls don’t see business as a platform for contributing to society. And that’s a problem that businesses should begin to address.
“To maintain a suitable pipeline for future business leaders who are women, businesses need to focus even more on contributing in positive ways to the world and on underscoring for girls the more human- and service-oriented dimensions of business.”
Are free condoms a safe perk?
Flexible hours, on-site daycare, compressed workweeks. U.S. workplaces routinely are offering non-monetary perks to improve employees’ work/life balance.
But unions in the Philippines are adding a new wrinkle to such benefits: Many have successfully negotiated for free condoms.
According to the Philippine Star newspaper, the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines urges its affiliates to include free condoms in their collective bargaining agenda. Usually, such provisions entitle workers to three condoms a week.
Alex Aguilar of the union group said free condoms could help stem the nation’s runaway population growth, estimated to be more than 2 percent annually.
On-the-job training evolves
Not long ago, getting training for the new job often meant being locked in a conference room, squinting at overhead projections.
But more and more, companies are combining classroom instruction with Web-based, self-paced courses and e-mail correspondence, according to Management Recruiters International (MRI), a search and recruitment organization based in Cleveland.
This year, corporations are spending an estimated $50 billion on training, and an estimated 15 percent of that amount is multimedia training. By 2005, MRI predicts the training mix could be 45 percent multimedia, 55 percent in class.
Multimedia training is far less expensive than the classroom variety and, those who sell it maintain, just as effective.
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Where the jobs aren’t anymore
Here’s a distinction we’d just as soon do without: In September, downstate Decatur shared with Wichita Falls, Texas, the record for the country’s largest year-to-year increase in the unemployment rate, 2.3 points.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Decatur had the highest unemployment rate of all metropolitan areas in the state, at 7.7 percent; Bloomington-Normal had the lowest, 2.4 percent. Chicago’s rate was 6.3 percent, just above the state’s average of 5.9.