Bloomberg, Fused / September 23, 2021 September 23, 2021
(Bloomberg) – The gender pay gap for MBA graduates starts right out of school and only gets wider from there.
Female business school graduates make around $11,000 less than men with the same degree, a survey released Thursday of 1,055 alumni from MBA schools from nearly 60 elite programs around the world. A decade out, that gap widens to more than$60,000.
Women in the U.S. face a stubborn gender pay gap much of which can be attributed to them to working in lower paid industries and jobs. Less than 10% of S&P 500 chief executive officers are women, for example, and they remain underrepresented at a vast majority of business schools in the U.S., which mint some of the country’s highest earners. On average, women hold just 40% of all seats at 84 schools, according to a recent survey. At 27 schools they make up less than one-third of the class.
But even women that seek out high paying industries and jobs face a pay gap, the findings from the Forté Foundation, a non-profit focused on women’s advancement and gender equity in business and business schools, suggest. Forté found post-MBA men, on average, earn $29,700 more than similarly credentialed women. Minority women get even smaller pay checks, taking home, on average, around $52,000 less than men, the data show.
Forté Foundation chief executive Elissa Sangster said the disparities may be due, in part, to men entering MBA programs with more years of experience, on average, setting them up for different career paths and opportunities. But she also attributes some of the gap to the well-documented bias women face once in their jobs.
“I think sometimes women become disenchanted,” she said.
Current female MBA students surveyed by Forté also indicated they had less ambitious career aspirations. Men are nearly three times more likely to want a CEO job, for example.
“There’s plenty that women can continue to do to be more aggressive or ambitious about their career path,” Sangster said. “But I think that companies have to make sure that there is fertile ground for these women to move through into these leadership positions.”
(Bloomberg) – South Africa’s daily Covid-19 vaccination rate plunged this week, indicating that the inoculation drive may be losing steam amid criticism of a lack of information about the shots among more remote and impoverished communities.
On Sept. 20 just 159,542 doses were administered, the lowest amount on a week day since Aug. 13, when 147,307 vaccinations were given, according to government statistics. That’s short of the government’s yet-to-be attained target of 300,000 doses a day and also the lowest since 18-to-35 year-olds became eligible for the doses on Sept. 1.
So far South Africa has administered 16.36 million doses, with just 8.11 million of the country’s almost 40 million adults now fully vaccinated.
(Bloomberg) – Technology leaders across Texas have been privately meeting for weeks, discussing how to best combat the state’s new abortion law and challenge a cultural shift they believe will make it difficult to attract top talent. Absent from the discussion: Big Tech.
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Tesla and Microsoft have shifted tens of thousands of high-paying jobs to Texas in recent years amid a statewide economic boom. Oracle and Hewlett Packard Enterprise moved their headquarters to the state during the pandemic. And Tesla is expanding operations just outside of Austin.
Although most of these companies spoke out against the state’s controversial shifts to restrict voter-rights and eliminate mask mandates in public schools, they are not stepping up to oppose the abortion ban. That’s frustrating their Texas tech brethren, who see the law, which penalizes anyone for “aiding and abetting” anyone seeking the procedure after six weeks, as hostile to human rights and the ability to conduct business in the state. Private citizens, and not the government, are tasked with enforcement.
“We have to stop doing stuff like this,” said Josh Baer, founder of Austin-based startup accelerator Capital Factory, which is helping to spearhead a grassroots initiative to take on the issues. “It’s terrible for business and for the image of what we are trying to convey. This is not going to make more people want to move here.”
John Berkowitz, chief executive officer of Ojo Labs, is one of dozens of tech leaders in the state who is working with the Capital Factory initiative. He’s also one of dozens of CEOs who in recent weeks committed to “Don’t Ban Equality,” a petition originally written in 2019 but updated to protest Texas’ newest abortion law.
Citing research from the Institute for Women’s Policy, the pact pegs the economic losses in Texas that will result from the abortion ban at $14.5 billion a year, based on the impact it will have on the labor force and earnings.
‘Silence is Notable’
The deadline to sign the new version of “Don’t Ban Equality” was Friday, but the group extended it through the weekend hoping to attract at least a few Big Tech names. Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, was among earlier signatories.
“Their silence is notable,” said Jen Stark, senior director for corporate strategy at the California-based Tara Health Foundation, which focuses on reproductive and maternal health. The group is managing the petition drive along with Planned Parenthood Federation of America, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We’re not asking companies to weigh in on when life begins. We’re asking them to acknowledge this affects their workforces.”
Amazon.com Inc., Alphabet Inc., Facebook Inc., Tesla Inc., Oracle Corp. and Dell Technologies Inc. didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Microsoft Corp. declined to comment.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. spokesman Adam Bauer told Bloomberg News that “HPE encourages our team members to engage in the political process where they live and work and make their voices heard through advocacy and at the voting booth.”
Apple Inc. declined to comment for this story. A spokesperson pointed Bloomberg to an internal memo that said the company is “actively monitoring” legal challenges, supports employees’ rights to make their own decisions regarding reproductive care and offers benefits enabling out of state travel for medical care if it is unavailable in their home state.
Stark said about five dozen companies had signed the new version of the petition. The signatories, announced Tuesday, include Yelp Inc., Trillium Asset Management and Stitch Fix Inc. “Don’t Ban Equality” encourages companies to support workers who need access to reproductive health care and to speak out publicly against the ban.
Samantha Lewis, a venture investor with Houston-based Mercury Fund, is among those who recently signed the petition. She said although the abortion restrictions outrage her personally—and makes her job recruiting tech talent to the state harder—she refuses to abandon Texas.
“I’m not going to leave the state and leave the fight” for other people to handle, she said. “We’re working on it.”
Uber, Salesforce
Some tech companies have publicly opposed the abortion ban. Lyft and Uber both set up legal defense funds for drivers and donated $1 million to Planned Parenthood. Salesforce offered to relocate any employee worried about not being able to access reproductive health care in their state. Texas-based Bumble and Match announced they’d set up relief funds for effected women.
Tyson Tuttle, chief executive of Austin-based Silicon Labs, said Big Tech leaders need to call Texas Governor Greg Abbott and implore that “what you’re doing is making it impossible for me to move to Texas because I’ll have a revolt on my hands from employees who are minority or female.”
Tuttle said his company, which employs about 900 people in Austin, expects to recruit more heavily outside the state as a result of the law because talented workers won’t want to call Texas home.
Tuttle said he’s watched state laws become increasingly “draconian” even as some of the most powerful companies in the world have gone silent. A 2017 bill impacting transgender students quickly became a hot topic for him and other tech leaders. He and more than dozen other leaders, including the heads of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, formally opposed the bill in a letter to Abbott, saying it was discriminatory and ran against their values of “diversity and inclusion.”
Abbott has argued that many people support the new laws adopted by the state this year, including the abortion ban. He also notes the state has seen an influx of people while it has long had conservative politics. Companies have flocked to the state in recent years, attracted, in part, by the lack of individual or corporate income taxes.
Bret Hurt, the CEO of Austin-based Data.world said he still hopes to rally more companies to push back against the cultural shift sweeping the state.
“It’s tone deaf given the goal of many companies to increase representation in technical roles and at higher levels of the organization,” he said. “We need for people in California and New York to not give up on us. If they pull out of here and just say ‘screw you,’ how does that help push any agenda forward?”
Bloomberg, Video / September 21, 2021 September 21, 2021
Social media “finfluencers” are reaching millions of people each day teaching them about finance and money. One of them is 25-year old Austin Hankwitz. He’s on Quicktake “Take Stock.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Bloomberg, Video / September 21, 2021 September 21, 2021
This Australian startup wants to tackle the problem of single-use plastic with reusable trash bags good for years of use. But will consumers use the @Tombag_AU?
A conversation with Mark Beal, Rutgers professor and Gen Z expert on Gen Z’s entrepreneurial spirit, their desire to collaborate with others and their focus on doing good as the purpose generation. Also, Naamah Barbut, a junior and communication major at Rutgers, speaks about her experience as a student and looking forward to the job market. (Source: Quicktake)
Brands originally built on racist stereotypes have existed for more than a century. Now racial prejudice is also creeping into the design of tech products and algorithms. (Source: Bloomberg)
Emojis are proving to be a stumbling block for Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. as they attempt to stem a wave of online racist abuse aimed at athletes and other individuals. Bloomberg’s Ivan Levingston reports on “Quicktake Charge.” (Source: Bloomberg)
Lighter skin has long been associated with power and privilege, and the use of lightening creams remains pervasive in some parts of the world. Driven by colorism in society and the media, some consumers are now going even further. (Source: Bloomberg)
“The thing that’s really surprising here is how quickly the cows learned relative to children.” This is the MooLoo, where toilet-trained cows pee. Developed by @AucklandUni and @Loeffler_News scientists, they hope to cut emissions from cattle waste https://bloom.bg/3nJVmcb
