Lake Hits Back After Home Birth Row

Ricki Lake has taken aim at a leading U.S. doctor’s group after officially publicly criticized her for promoting home births, insisting she was merely championing womens’ right to choose.

Lake’s documentary “The Business of Being Born” showed footage of her giving birth at home to her son Owen, now 7, and suggested hospital births could be problematic.

Officials at the American Medical Association reacted angrily, warning expectant mothers not to follow the star’s example and insisting hospital births are still the safest option.

But Lake insists she was misunderstood. She explains, “Home birth was around long before hospitals were taking over. And I just think women need to know (the information) so that they can make the best choice for them.

“It’s scary that (the groups) have sort of targetted me. And, you know, I’m all about choice. This is not unlike the abortion issue. I am pro-choice when it comes to childbirth and choices in birth. I’m not anti-doctor, I’m not anti-hospital.”

San Francisco Organization Celebrates 20 Years of Helping Women Launch Businesses

Krista Bray suffered from severe back pain five years ago, while she was starting a career in advertising. Missing a lot of workdays because of doctor appointments, surgeries and physical therapy cost her job advancement opportunities, but it also led her to a new career. She became a certified physical therapist and dreamed of having her own practice.

“I was working for someone else,” she says. “I had really limited credit. I had surgery without insurance while I was between jobs. So I pretty much lost everything financially [because] for several years I was in chronic pain and I wasn’t able to work full time. So, starting out my own studio was kind of an impossibility.”

When she learned from a friend that she could start her own business with a microloan from Women’s Initiative for Self Employment, she jumped at the chance.

“I checked it out,” she says. “It was the first time that I believed I could start my own business. It wouldn’t matter if I had terrible credit. They would actually look at my potential instead of my credit score.”

to Help Women in Business:

By Sion Barry

ROYAL Bank of Scotland Group has launched a new business ambassador initiative aimed at supporting female entrepreneurs in Wales.

The project has seen the appointment of four women in business ambassadors.

In total the group, which operates under the Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest banking brands, has created 100 female ambassadors roles across the whole of the UK.

The ambassadors, with back up support from other female banking colleagues, will provide services from women in the start-up sector through to those at the helm of large corporates with a turnover of more than pounds 25m.

The Welsh ambassadors are: Karen Flicker, South East Wales; Maria Williams, Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan; Annette Shinner, North Wales and Lynette Thomas, West Wales.

The ambassadors all have previous experience supporting small businesses, but are being provided with additional training to tailor their support to the specific needs of their female customers.

The service was launched in response to the continuing lack of female entrepreneurs in the small business sector.

At present women represent only a third of those self employed in the UK, and if they were to start businesses at the same rate as men there would be another 150,000 new start-ups every year.

Women vs. Men: Who’s better at business?

Gender science tells us that women are more likely than men to remember they even read this story.

In Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business, Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis offer decades of experience so we can decide who is better at what in the business world.

But it turns out that it’s not a question of better, just different.

“I think what we’ve been able to prove over the last 20 years is that there is not superiority or inferiority,” said co-author Gurian, who also wrote the best-selling The Wonder of Boys.

Moms find time to build businesses from home

Some moms choose to work full time. Others become full-time moms.

Lately, a category in between is gaining popularity, even inspiring a new term: mompreneur.

Mompreneurs are women who run their own businesses — usually out of their homes — while juggling the duties of motherhood, said Ellen Parlapiano, who trademarked the term and is co-author of several books on the subject.

“The No. 1 reason that they start businesses is for family flexibility — the flexibility to go to the preschool in the middle of the day without having to ask a boss for permission,” she said.

Exact numbers of mompreneurs aren’t available. But millions of women run businesses by themselves and are the sole employee, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Women’s Business Research. The number of such firms grew at twice the rate of all single-person businesses since 1992, the center said.

And with the state of the current economy, Parlapiano is expecting more.

“People are losing their jobs,” she said. “They’re turning to home employment and starting their own ventures.”

Laura Gendron of Clovis, Calif., is a mother of three and the owner of Petite Fleur Designs, an online boutique that sells the hair accessories, hats and children’s clothing she creates. She also supplies 20 other Web sites and local shops with her goods.

Her factory is a small bedroom in the family’s suburban home, and she works when the kids are at preschool, after they go to bed and occasionally while they play quietly at the desk next to her.

She estimated she earns the same amount of money as she did working part-time in pharmaceutical sales, her pre-baby career.

Balancing business and family is a big challenge, but Gendron said she always puts family first.

Tim Stearns, executive director of the Lyles Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at California State University, Fresno, said many people have probably pondered entrepreneurship before they had children, back when they were working a full-time corporate job.

Now that they’ve left that job, they’re in a better position to start the business, he said.

“A woman who’s married who’s trying to raise a kid — it’s a perfect model for someone who now needs to be at home but would like to generate some income,” he said.

For public relations consultant Suzanne Crosina-Sahm, the move from full-time worker to business-owning mother happened accidentally. Her job ended when a grant ran out, and that same day, one of the clients she served in that job asked her whether she would continue to work for it from home.

That client was a large bank, and Crosina-Sahm eventually added other prominent clients.

Her office is in a corner in her bedroom, and she works when her 3- and 7-year-old sons are at school and still has time to volunteer in their classrooms, she said.

Her clients know she has young children at home, but she said the two worlds can collide at times.

“It’s not very professional — a toddler having a tantrum in the background,” she said.

Parlapiano said presenting a professional image is important. “Luckily, technology allows so much to be done by e-mail now.”

Jaime Dillmore of Fresno launched her business after realizing she missed interacting with adults.

She left a job in sales and marketing at a cable company to care full-time for her sons, who are now 5 and 8. She became involved in photography and found being with children all day had changed her.

“I almost forgot how to be an adult. I’d say, ‘Oh, I have to go pee pee,’” Dillmore said.

But, she said photography “just sparked something in me. There was no stopping at that point.”

Now she runs Dillmore Portraits, specializing in photos of newborns and children. The business brings in 30 percent of her household’s income. She shoots on location and invites customers to her studio. The studio is her living room — her furniture is pushed into the dining room and replaced with backdrops.

Advances in technology also have made it easier for women to start such businesses from their homes.

Gendron gave up selling her wares at craft fairs in favor of marketing them online.

Dillmore doesn’t have to spend time dropping off negatives to be developed. Customers also pick which proofs they want hard copies of through her Web site.

Men are in on the trend, too. There are “dadpreneurs” out there as well, said Craig Scharton, chief executive of the Central Valley Business Incubator in Fresno, Calif., where Crosina-Sahm worked before starting her home business.

And for the mompreneur, dads also often are key to their wives’ success, particularly when it comes to presenting a professional front. Dillmore’s husband, Ronald often takes the children to the park when customers come to her studio.

“The only reason that this is working is because I have the best husband on the face of the planet,” she said.

 

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

The Power of the Pipeline

When Senator Clinton decided to suspend her candidacy after eighteen months of rigorous campaigning last Saturday, I just so happened to be in Ohio, among nearly 100 women who had come together to – of all things – learn how to run for political office. Imagine the odds; after so many months of speculation, calls to concede and cries to persevere – Senator Clinton ended her historic race on the very day that this cadre of women were launching their political aspirations.

 

It was a unique moment for all of us. For me and my staff, it was our eighteenth Go Run political leadership training – and our first in Ohio – yet we had never experienced such a historic event in the midst of our weekend programs. But what about the nearly 100 women who had come together to garner the information, inspiration, and tools to run for office? What would Senator Clinton’s concession mean for their political futures?

 

Earlier that morning, these women had learned how to build a winning campaign plan, and were coming off the heels of a training on community organizing and field work. They were learning the nuts and bolts of how to win – just as they prepared to watch a woman admit defeat.

 

Regardless of party affiliation, candidate preference, or political ideology, Senator Clinton’s withdrawal was political history, so we gave the women the option of watching the concession speech. And many of them – Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike – did choose to watch. As one participant, Annie, later remarked in her blog about the event:

 

“About two minutes into Senator Clinton’s speech, it started. It was a sniffle at first, then a sob, then frantic searching through purses and totes for tissues – there was not a dry eye in the entire room…It was a very sad, somber day for all women in America.”

 

Despite the myriad of political and partisan leanings in the room, these women were deeply moved by the woman speaking before them. Yet within this emotion-laden and reflective room sat the hope, the vision, and the future of our country – the next round of women who have entered the pipeline to political leadership. They came together despite their differences (age, race, income level, and political party, to name a few) to learn from and about each other, to pool their resources, to network, and to make a difference. Despite the familiar charges (young women weren’t connected to her candidacy; conservative women reviled her; Obama supporters wouldn’t back her), women bonded this weekend over the historic run of a trailblazing woman for the highest office in the land.

 

In the end, representation really does matter. From a room full of political hopefuls in Columbus, Ohio, to the millions of women and men, girls and boys, who watched their televisions in earnest on Saturday, the significance of Senator Clinton’s candidacy is beyond powerful. Our nation witnessed so many firsts this season, and to see a woman come so close, to hear her acknowledge defeat with poise and candor, and to watch her put her full power behind another worthy opponent in the interest of her country and her party paves the way for us all to see other women running – and winning.

 

Senator Clinton implored her listeners on Saturday: “It would break my heart if, in falling short of my goal, I in any way discouraged any of you from pursuing yours.” I think she was speaking to the women in particular, encouraging them not give up their dreams of leadership simply because she lost this time around. And I hope the women across the country – and the women this weekend at Ohio Go Run – heed her call. If they do, several of them will surely be our nation’s future presidents

Women ‘better business communicators’

WOMEN in business are far more likely than men to tap into fellow business owners and friends for advice, new research shows.

And they are much more adept at developing support networks, the study commissioned by Westpac suggests.

The research, entitled “Australian Women in Business – New Insights”, was commissioned by Westpac for the launch of its new women’s website, www.therubyconnection.com.au.

It suggests women are much more likely than men to consult other business owners and business partners, as well as family and friends, when they want advice and support for financial and business decisions.

Women are also more open to learning from the experience of their business colleagues, while men prefer a more solitary approach to seeking advice, the research suggests.

Head of Westpac’s women’s markets Larke Riemer said women seem more prepared to share their experiences with each other, and less likely to rely on systems or processes.

“Traditional channels such as accountants and independent financial advisers are still the strongest information source about running a small business, particularly for issues such as GST and other tax issues,” Ms Riemer said.

Fast Facts About Women in Business in America

NaturalNews) Women entrepreneurs are increasing at an extraordinary rate, continuing to enter fields traditionally dominated by men. Women owned firms now account for nearly 40 percent of U.S. businesses, although only 3% of these businesses gross a million or more in annual revenues. Women’s inspiration and creativity are abundant, while start up financing remains a challenging obstacle. Here is a list of fast facts recently published by the National Women’s Council that contains the most up to date information currently available on privately held women owned businesses in the U.S.

* The number of women-owned businesses continues to grow at twice the rate of all U.S. firms, and their economic influence is increasing at speeds exceeding the national average.

* Growth rates are higher than average among women-owned firms with $1 million or more in sales and 100 or more employees, yet most women-owned firms are very small, with no more than 10 employees.

* Women-owned firms continue to face challenges, including access to capital, access to markets and access to training and technical assistance.

* In 2004, women accounted for more than 51 percent of the United States population and 47 percent of the American labor force.

* As of 2006, there were an estimated 10.4 million privately-held businesses in which a woman or women owned at least 50 percent of the company. Among them, 7.7 million were majority-owned.

* Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms increased their employment by 70,000, whereas firms owned by men lost 1 million employees.

* Between 1997 and 2002, an average of 424 new women-owned firms were started every day, translating into nearly 775,000 start-ups per year and accounting for 55 percent of new firm start-ups.

* Between 1997 and 2002, women-owned firms increased by 19.8 percent and women owned employer firms (firms with one or more paid employees other than the owner) increased by 8.3 percent.

* Women-owned businesses exhibited the same tenacity and survival rates as the average U.S. firms, with more than two-thirds (68.5%) of women-owned employer business locations in existence in 1997 still in operation four years later. Among all employer establishments, 69.8 percent remained in business in 2001.

* Between 1997 and 2001, women-owned employer establishments proved to be more resilient than employer firms overall during the period, with a 9.3 percent decline in employment among those firms in business in 1997 –- compared to a 10.9 percent decline among all establishments.

* An estimated $546 billion is spent annually on salaries and benefits by women-owned businesses.

* The workforces of women-owned firms show more gender equity. Women business owners overall employ a roughly balanced workforce (52% women, 48% men), while men business owners employ 38 percent women and 62 percent men, on average.

* While women-owned family businesses are somewhat smaller in size compared with the average annual revenues of their male-owned counterparts ($26.4 million vs. 30.4 million), they generate their sales with fewer median employees, employing 26 individuals compared with 50 at male-owned family firms. This means that female-owned family businesses are 1.7 times more productive than male-owned family firms.

Additional sources:

Report from Center for Women’s Leadership at Babson College
About the author
Barbara is a school psychologist, a published author in the area of personal finance, a breast cancer survivor using “alternative” treatments, a born existentialist, and a student of nature and all things natural.

Women vs. men: Who’s better at business?

By Matthew Kirdahy, Forbes.com
June 5, 2008
Gender science tells us that women are more likely than men to remember they even read this story.

In Leadership and the Sexes: Using Gender Science to Create Success in Business, Michael Gurian and Barbara Annis offer decades of experience so we can decide who is better at what in the business world.

But it turns out that it’s not a question of better, just different.

“I think what we’ve been able to prove over the last 20 years is that there is not superiority or inferiority,” said co-author Gurian, who also wrote the best-selling The Wonder of Boys.

Leadership and the Sexes, published by Jossey-Bass, combines Gurian’s use of brain science in gender studies and Annis’ years of experience consulting top international companies on gender concerns. Annis adds real-life examples of what’s happening in business leadership.

Forget about individuals for a second, and observe everyone just as male or female on the job.

According to the book, due out in August, men are more apt to zone out in a meeting since their brains are designed to enter a “rest state” more easily than women. In that same meeting, women may run off topic before returning to the task at hand because they’re born multi-taskers.

Gurian talked to Forbes.com about how the book digs deeper into these differences and offers tips on improving communication, negotiations and leadership in the workplace based on the gender balance.

Forbes.com: Other than just years of practical experience, what type of research needs to be done to write a book on this sensitive subject matter?

Gurian: I’ve been in a number of corporations. That’s relatively anecdotal. [Barbara Annis] has done formal diagnostics and her corporation (Barbara Annis & Assoc.) has done over 2,000 workshops at corporations.

The brain science of the book is obviously the bedrock, and that’s my 20 years of that. Then my personal, anecdotal and then the book research, the scholarly research on what’s already out there. There are other reports already out there–women in leadership books, authentic leadership books–there’s a lot out there to see if I could match it with gender.

Then Barbara Annis’ workshops and all the anecdotal research she’s brought in … What I did is I basically wrote a book that brought together everything I could find that showed when you use brain-differences information, here’s the positive effect on people and on corporations.

What do you mean when you say that this gender science is a bottom-line issue?

There are two ways in which I’ve seen this happen. One thing, if you look at the endorsement blurb for Brooks Sports–I was working with them, and they saw immediately that when the folks learned about the brand differences, the workplace comfort increased, the power of that workplace increased. They understood, as leaders, how to help their sales teams. Help men market to women and women market to men. That’s an example of where it started with the HR level and the CEO level and trickled through.

Another example: Barbara and her corporation and others went into Deloitte & Touche about 10 years ago [to teach] the brain differences … the differences between males and females. In that case, their bottom line was affected by retention. They retained talent. [We] give that example in there of the $109 million that they claim they’re saving by retaining these people, especially women …

A third way to look at it is in the IBM way. They are a sort of a combination of both. They develop mentoring systems. They taught people male-female brain difference. And they made changes in both. They increased the diversity in their small business and market ability so they sold more products. They also retained more people.

Firms show flexibility on career-life balance

Like many professional women, Elaine Miller reached a point when working full time and raising three children became too difficult. In 2001, after 16 years at Sun Microsystems, she left her 50-hour-a-week job as director of software strategy to spend more time with her kids and pick up occasional consulting work.

“It felt like an all-or-nothing proposition,” said Miller, 50. “If I wanted a senior-level, challenging, strategic job, I had to be there all the time or not at all.”

But in 2005 she received a call from Laurie Cremona, vice president of strategy and marketing operations at San Jose tech company BEA Systems Inc., about the possibility of a job share. The arrangement – which included a joint phone line and e-mail address and management of all job-related responsibilities over a split 30-hour week – was so successful that within a year the two were recruited into a new role at BEA, as vice president of worldwide services marketing, managing 100 relationships weekly inside and outside the company.

Miller and Cremona’s flexible work arrangement is not the first of its kind, but it is becoming more common at large American corporations, which have watched the pool of talented women in their 30s to their 50s shrink after years of costly training. To reduce “female brain drain,” global companies such as Ernst & Young, Goldman Sachs, Booz Allen Hamilton, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and dozens of others are increasingly offering a variety of flexible work options.

Those include reduced-hour jobs, flexible workdays, job shares and telecommuting. Another popular option is the flexible career arc, in which women “off-ramp” in the years after the birth of a child or in the months needed to care for a sick relative and then “on-ramp” when they are ready to take on more hours.

Such programs are not just for women. They are attracting 20-somethings who want more work-life balance, men who want to spend more time with their children, and those ramping down their work schedules as they make the transition to retirement.

Talent retention
Business analysts and executives say talent retention and the forces of demography are the chief reasons large, traditional companies accommodate the needs of female employees.

Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are women, and nearly half of all professional and graduate degrees are earned by women, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The department projects that the number of women with graduate and professional degrees will grow by 16 percent over the next decade compared with an increase of only 1.3 percent among men.

Yet, according to the 2007 book “Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success” by Sylvia Ann Hewlett, founder of the Work-Life Policy Center at Columbia University, 37 percent of highly qualified women report they left work voluntarily at some point in their careers. Among women who have children, that statistic rises to 43 percent.

“Most professional jobs are still designed for white guys with Stepford wives,” said Hewlett.

Still, she and other analysts say American corporate culture – though far behind its European counterparts – is at last responding to a workforce that is now 46 percent female. In 2004, Hewlett created the Hidden Brain Drain Task Force, gathering senior executives from top companies and surveying 2,443 women to explore why more talented women were not ascending the corporate ladder. The primary reason: the inability to balance job responsibilities and child care.

The task force also found that getting back on track is difficult. Although the women in Hewlett’s study off-ramped an average of 2.2 years, when they did return to work, they often took less-challenging positions with less pay.

“I feel a personal responsibility to ensure that women advance at the same rates as men do, and that it’s completely equitable,” said DeAnne Aguirre, a San Francisco-based senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton and a member of the task force who helped create its 35 flexible work options.

Aguirre, 47, a mother of four and the most senior woman at her management consulting firm, said it’s “crucial that culture change be led from the top.” At Booz Allen, she has asked male executives to visualize the hourly life of a working professional mother. “I’d tell them these little stories, and they’d sense that – wow – this is different, and it’s hard, so that allows them to better understand the importance of flexibility.”

‘Free Agent Nation’
But in the midst of these changes many women – and men and young people – have created their own companies or morphed themselves into consultants to improve their lifestyles and sometimes their incomes.

Daniel Pink, author of the book “Free Agent Nation,” was among the first to spot the independent worker trend, documenting in 2001 that 22 percent of the workforce was self-employed and fewer than 1 in 10 workers was employed by a Fortune 500 company. The number has since grown, due to shorter job cycles, more project work and advances in communication technologies.

Sally Thornton is part of that statistic. Two years ago, she and two women from her mothers’ group – who opted out of full-time corporate jobs – started Flexperience Consulting, an employment firm for professionals in marketing, human resources, law and finance seeking flextime contract jobs in the Bay Area.

“I was surrounded by the most amazingly intelligent, qualified women – people with Harvard MBAs and great law degrees – who were aching to get back,” said Michelle Fowler, principal and co-founder of Flexperience. “So when Sally came to me, I thought, ‘What a great idea!’ The people I knew on the peninsula wanted flexible work, but they had no avenues through which to find companies that could provide such opportunities.”

In the past year, Flexperience has worked with 20 local companies, including Genentech, Levi Strauss and Pixar. Eighty percent of their placements are women.

Jennifer Heyman, for example, is in the midst of her first position managed by Flexperience. The University of Chicago MBA worked for Charles Schwab in San Francisco for 15 years, 10 of those as a marketing director. But after having her daughter, she left Schwab for work that would allow her more time to parent.

“My friends with full-time jobs and children can’t turn off the valve at 5 p.m., or they must be on call for meetings at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. the same day,” said Heyman. “With contracting work, I don’t get involved in office politics, all-company meetings, and I’m building my resume, especially in the technology sector.”

But Heyman allows that health insurance and the other benefits that go with salaried jobs are a drawback to contract work. “At certain point you need dental benefits for your kids,” said Heyman, a single mother.

Flexperience is not the only company that sees a strong market in flexible contract workers. Axiom Legal, founded in San Francisco in 2000, bills itself as an entirely new kind of law firm that selects promising young attorneys and offers them an alternative to 80-hour weeks and partner-track hell by matching them with individual projects. Axiom’s clients include American Express and nine of the 10 top investment banks.

D’Arcambal Levine & Ousley, a women-owned law firm in New York City, also was created to allow attorneys in commercial litigation to see their families and perhaps have a hobby.

“I always assumed part-time work would be impossible in the legal profession,” said partner Jodie Ousley. “But the legal field is very results-oriented and therefore very set up for flexibility. Plus, we have e-mail, phones, BlackBerrys – I can set up a home office easier than a Manhattan office.”

Communication challenges
Still, some warn of significant downsides to the flexible work and telecommuting trend.

“The more we are not present, the harder it is to realize the synergy that exists between individuals and teams,” said Margaret Neale, the John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. “It’s harder to problem-solve when we’re geographically dispersed. The amount of conflict increases, and the level of commitment decreases.”

Cremona and Miller, the BEA job sharers, know this well. Cremona, a 37-year-old single mother of two, works from her home office in Portland, Ore., on Mondays and Tuesdays and flies to San Jose on Wednesdays. Miller works in the San Jose office Wednesday through Friday. The two marketing directors overlap in BEA’s headquarters in San Jose only on Wednesdays, which Cremona said has presented communication challenges.

In the beginning of the share, she said, their supervisees often repeated information, “so we learned pretty early to tell people: ‘You don’t need to debrief me.’ “

Is Cremona and Miller’s ability to “work as one,” as they call it, an anomaly? Not, they say, if more companies witness the success of such flexible arrangements.

“We feel like we’ve cracked the nut,” said Miller. “We’ve figured out how to keep capable, experienced, highly educated women in the workforce at senior-level positions. We think that as people learn about it and more people do it, job sharing will not only benefit women who are struggling to find a balance but companies who want to retain talent.”

Flexperience Consulting and Foresight Management are hosting a “Future of Work” conference on how to implement a flexible work environment, June 24, San Francisco Hilton. flexperienceforum.com