Thirty years ago, two Hungarian educators, László and Klara Polgár, decided to challenge the popular assumption that women don’t succeed in areas requiring spatial thinking, such as chess. They wanted to make a point about the power of education. The Polgárs homeschooled their three daughters, and as part of their education the girls started playing chess with their parents at a very young age. Their systematic training and daily practice paid off. By 2000, all three daughters had been ranked in the top ten female players in the world. The youngest, Judit, had become a grand master at age 15, breaking the previous record for the youngest person to earn that title, held by Bobby Fischer, by a month. Today Judit is one of the world’s top players and has defeated almost all the best male players.
It’s not only assumptions about gender differences in expertise that have started to crumble. Back in 1985, Benjamin Bloom, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, published a landmark book, Developing Talent in Young People, which examined the critical factors that contribute to talent. He took a deep retrospective look at the childhoods of 120 elite performers who had won international competitions or awards in fields ranging from music and the arts to mathematics and neurology. Surprisingly, Bloom’s work found no early indicators that could have predicted the virtuosos’ success. Subsequent research indicating that there is no correlation between IQ and expert performance in fields such as chess, music, sports, and medicine has borne out his findings. The only innate differences that turn out to be significant—and they matter primarily in sports—are height and body size.
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Women are falling victim to two types of attrition: They’re being disproportionately let go and they’re disproportionately quitting. Yet whether they’re jumping or being pushed, figures show that a female exodus is bad for business.
Research conducted by both Catalyst and McKinsey & Company demonstrates that companies with significant numbers of women in management have a much higher return on investment. While a recent study from London Business School shows that when work teams are split evenly between men and women, productivity goes up. Gender balance counters groupthink.
The facts couldn’t be clearer: smart women equal stronger companies.As we begin to emerge from the global recession, firms with a view to the future are building bench strength through programs that provide traction for both their high-performing and high-potential women.
Intel created career development workshops aimed squarely at retaining one of its most at-risk populations: midlevel female engineers. Data collected from exit interviews had revealed that many of these talented technologists were leaving not to spend time with their family but because they no longer felt challenged by or passionate about their work.
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On Jan. 5, Google (GOOG) did a very Apple-like thing. In a presentation at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif., the 11-year-old search behemoth unveiled Nexus One, a stylish touchscreen smartphone that runs on the company’s Android operating system, is sold through a Google-operated retail Web site, and greets the market with an advertising tagline (“Web meets phone”) as simple and optimistic as the one Apple used in 2007 to introduce its iPhone (“The Internet in your pocket”).
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When you don’t like your job, going to work every day can be a challenge. Your problem might be with a bad manager, that you constantly feel stretched to the breaking point, or that you are resentful about taking a pay cut. Or, the whole environment may just feel toxic. You might need to stay in your job because it provides health benefits, or maybe you’re only staying while you look for another position. Whatever your reasons for being unhappy, you need to maintain your professionalism and prevent a bad attitude from sabotaging you. What the Experts Say
Timothy Butler, Senior Fellow and Director of Career Development Programs at Harvard Business School and author of Getting Unstuck: How Dead Ends Become New Paths, believes there’s something elemental about the statement ‘I’m unhappy at work.’” Butler, whose research focuses on personality structure and work satisfaction, says that to understand your unhappiness, you need to turn towards that feeling of unhappiness, experience it in a deep way, and not try to solve things too quickly. He suggests observing the feelings and not expecting anything. You may just find yourself at a frontier, considering what you’re going to do next. “The existential nature of unhappiness is a wake-up call,” Butler says. “There’s some part of the self that is not being heard, that wants your attention, and that’s the issue.”
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Microsoft has admitted that a flaw in its Internet Explorer web browser enabled hackers to gain access to Google’s system, an event that resulted in Google threatening to pull its operations in China.In a post on its Microsoft Security Response Center, director Mike Reavey said that a bug within Internet Explorer could allow hackers to remotely run programs on infected machines.
“Based upon our investigations, we have determined that Internet Explorer was one of the vectors used in targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google and possibly other corporate networks,” Reavey Wrote.
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