If you ever needed ammo in the war to get your spouse helping out more around the house, share this new study published in Psychological Science, “The Second Shift Reflected in the Second Generation: Do Parents’ Gender Roles at Home Predict Children’s Aspirations?”
For many, the word “millennials” has become synonymous with “kids these days,” but the reality is that millennials as a generation have already aged out of the bracket of young adults and recent graduates. In fact, the majority of Generation Y is now in their mid- to late-20s, with the oldest millennials already 32 years old — married with kids and homes and retirement funds, albeit all to a lesser degree than previous generations.
“Marissa Mayer Is Wrong.” “Horrible Bosses: Marissa Mayer’s Ban on Telecommuting at Yahoo Won’t Work.” “Marissa Mayer’s Work-From-Home Ban Is the Exact Opposite of What CEOs Should Be Doing.” These headlines reflect popular responses in the blogosphere to the Yahoo CEO’s decision to end work-from-home arrangements companywide.
In the past decade, the presence of women on the boards of public companies has been increasing virtually everywhere in the world — except in the United States.
Internationally, the 16.6 percent of female directors serving on U.S. Fortune 500 boards falls somewhere in the middle; Japan sits at slightly over 1 percent and Norway at 40 percent. But that U.S. number is only 3 percent higher than it was 10 years ago.
The numbers are surprising, considering:
If you want to be a successful company, you have to sell a great product or service. That’s business 101.
But there’s a growing piece of the business equation that not enough companies are talking about: how you give back to the world around you.
It doesn’t matter if you call it “social good” or “corporate social responsibility.” What does matter to a growing section of your customers? Knowing what you and your company stand for and how you are helping the larger world.
Recently there’s been a trend to stereotype millennials as ungracious, narcissistic, social media–obsessed, lazy, self-entitled “trophy children” who are handed everything in life.
As a Bentley University senior and proud millennial, I find these insults degrading and unwarranted. Comparing the values of one generation against another is flawed and rife with inaccuracies.
Let this be a guide to respond to anyone who dismisses our generation.
The fact that many of us had to overcome significant hurdles as we banged our heads against the glass ceiling doesn’t relieve us of the responsibility to help smooth the path for the women who come after us. If we don’t, how can we expect our male colleagues to do so? As Madeleine Albright famously quipped, in her 2006 keynote address to the WNBA, “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
Editor’s note: Respondents to Bentley’s PreparedU study believe that men are more likely than women to have an entrepreneurial spirit (62 percent versus 38 percent). Even a majority of women felt this way. Yet, reports of successful women entrepreneurs continue to grow. What follows provides some insight into how and why.
