Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men.

That’s one finding from a series of recently released studies titled: “Who Is Willing to Sacrifice Ethical Values for Money and Social Status? Gender Differences in Reactions to Ethical Compromises.”

More from the studies conducted by Jessica Kennedy of Wharton and Laura Kray of Berkeley:

* Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men.

* In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged.

The research points to the very good possibility that women may have more integrity than men.

What does this mean? (more…)

A while back I tweeted this to my nearly 16,000 followers on Twitter and I got an avalanche of responses and retweets:

#1 issue facing women in the workforce today: How we topple the 1950s-company-man sustained model, where women have no say.

Why did it get so much attention? Because women are sick and tired of trying to fit their lives into an out-dated workplace model that no longer fits for today’s realities. Women are juggling children and careers, caring for aging family members, and all the while penalized for it with less pay and little to no representation the nation’s leadership ranks, in everything from Corporate America to the halls of Congress.

That’s why I’m calling for a working-woman revolution. And I don’t mean only waging war against the male-dominated management model, but battling our own fears and baggage when it comes to fighting for what we want and need. Working gals are finally poised to launch an offensive because we are at “the tipping point” of a female revolution. Women now make up the majority of the workforce in America, and many working gals are starting to think the out-dated career template based on the 1950s “Company Man” needs an overhaul.

For too long women have had to accept token work-life changes bestowed by male-dominated workplaces. And moms have become too obsessed with battling the mommy wars, working moms against stay-at-home moms. But now women are realizing they need the keys to the executive bathrooms, not just the lactations rooms; and all that mommy infighting has meant women took their eyes off the prize – a workplace, a world, with women leaders who truly understand family responsibilities.

Family and love trumps egos!

Christine Lagarde, the first woman to head the powerful International Monetary Fund, gets the realities of life.

She understands the global economy and what needs to be done, but her most moving words come when she discusses the egos she confronts in her job, mainly the egos of men who control money and power around the globe.

“When my father passed away and then when later on I gave birth, those are sort of ground-breaking experiences that put everything else into perspective. You know, when I sit in meetings and things are very tense and people take things extremely seriously and they invest a lot of their ego, I sometimes think to myself, ‘Come on, you know, there’s life and there’s death and there is love.’ And all of that ego business is nonsense compared to that.”

Only women can carry this torch.

We need to focus on what we women can bring to the table, and what we need to do, and what many working women pioneers are already doing, to make the nation’s offices, factories, congressional halls, etc., work for us. It’s not shoehorning your way into the existing anti-family, anti-woman workplace structure. It’s about how to go about changing the workplace to better fit the lives of today’s woman.

It’s about the two co-engineers at Ford who share a job so they can spend more time raising their kids, and even so, they’re credited with being the brains behind the success of the auto giant’s Explorer SUV. It’s about the lawyer who left a high-powered law firm for academia because she wanted flexibility for her family, and is now the head of a renowned women’s leadership institute. It’s about the applications engineer at Intel who went part time when her kids were young, and is now a high level manager at the computer chip giant. It’s about a Congresswoman from Illinois who missed votes on the House because she wanted to attend her daughter’s concert and is serving her third term.

A growing number of working women are defining success on their own terms, and while they’re career trajectory seems atypical and they’ve made job decisions based on their family — something which would have doomed most corporate climbers in the past — it works for them.

Almost every story about working mothers lately has focused on how they just haven’t been able to accomplish as much as their male counterparts in the workplace. I’ve just started reading “Lean In” by Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, and she’s right, we desperately need more women leaders and we as women have to stop being afraid to stand up and speak up.

But I don’t think the lives women live today are that dire, especially when women go after what they want, just like Sandberg has done. Women who know what they want and go after it don’t feel like they’re getting the shaft.

That’s the biggest lesson women need to learn. Being bossy and demanding what you want isn’t bad gals, as Sandberg points out. My own daughter Circe was given a book by a good female friend of mine when she was around 2 years old titled “Little Miss Bossy.” Hopefully Circe will some day be proud of that!

Indeed, there are many proud and happy working women out there. A survey by Kenexa Research Institute looked at whether women thought their futures looked promising, and 62 percent said: “I can meet my career goals and still devote sufficient attention to my family/personal life.” That compares to 59 percent among men who feel that way.

For women, said Brenda Kowske, a former research manager and at Kenexa, “having a fulfilled or satisfied personal life is an aspect of achieving a promising future at an organization for women in the U.S.”

Women are in a keen position to reshape the linear ladder upward. For the first time, women represent 51 percent of the total U.S. workforce; and the number of working moms as sole family breadwinners hit a record high last year. Many women are realizing they just can’t shoe horn their family lives into an arcane work model.

But one big question remains: “Are we being pioneers, or simply giving in?” asked Pamela Stone, associate professor of sociology at Hunter College and author of “Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home.”

If women are just changing their idea of success because they’ve given up fighting a society that deprives working moms of opportunities to advance, then it’s not a good thing, said Stone. But, if working moms are essentially transforming the work dynamic to meet their needs, then it’s a great thing.

The growing power of working moms may alter the landscape once and for all. “When you get a critical mass of women in any professions you do get changes,” said William Doherty, professor 
and director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Program in the Department of Family Social Science, College of Education and Human Development, at the University of Minnesota.

“Women are reshaping the workforce, and I think a cultural change is underway,” he continued, pointed to the healthcare industry. “You have 50 percent or more of the young doctors today are women and as a result there is much more part time work available. You don’t have the expectation of 90-hour weeks anymore.”

Rewriting the rules, however, has not been easy because so much of meshing child rearing and career rearing is unknown.

“We have no clue what it’s going to be like when we become a working mother,” stressed Susan Wenner Jackson, one of the founders of the website, Working Moms Against Guilt, because few women do any preplanning. “It completely blows your mind and you have to put the pieces back together.”

We need to build a template for how many working women were able to put the pieces back together and climb their definition of the ladder of success. It would be like a “Fast Food Nation” for working women everywhere. No more being force-fed the metaphorical career chicken McNuggets by “Da Corporate Man,” who says women need to be penalized for being mothers, daughters, and wives. We are going to rethink how we live and breath at work and in our careers. It’s time for women to demand a new, emotionally healthier workplace and a road to the top that takes into account a more organic approach to success and a balanced life.

Here’s the plan I propose we think about: (more…)

The CEO of Bank of America is a man.

The CEO of Yahoo is a woman.

That’s the only reason I can find for why the media went crazy this week over Yahoo’s top dog Marissa Mayer deciding to cut telecommuting for her employees; but barely covered Bank of America’s CEO Brian T. Moynihan doing something similar.

Yes, you didn’t hear that in the mass media this week. There actually was another company — Bank of America — that did this and made it public, and that company has way more employees than Yahoo, about 300,000, compared to Yahoo’s 11,000 or so.

I wrote about it for Families and Work Institute late last year, and I was sort of surprised back then that few reporters, beyond local media in North Carolina where the mega bank is based, gave it any ink.

This from the Winston-Salem Journal in December:

Bank of America is preparing to add more restrictions to its popular work-from-home program, meaning more employees across the company will be sent back to the office more often.

The program, known as “My Work,” had grown significantly since it was introduced in 2005 and was widely touted as a cost-saver. It also has proved popular with employees who say it saves on commuting costs and helps them balance work and family.

In addition to scaling back telecommuting, Bank of America also announced they were shuttering their child care centers. Where was all the outrage hurled at Bank of America’s CEO?

I know, people expect a female leader to get the whole work-life thing. But maybe it’s time we accepted that women won’t lead a certain way just because they’re women.

That’s probably what’s held women back from leadership.

You would think that when a woman finally makes it to one of the most prestigious tech companies in the world she’s be able to toot her own horn.

Well, think again.

I was disturbed to read an article in the New York Times today about Google’s inability to keep and promote women at the search engine giant. What got me perturbed wasn’t the fact that they were having trouble getting women to the corner office. Alas, that’s nothing new throughout the work world.

What got me crazy was their own internal research as to why this is happening.

Turns out, Google women aren’t stepping up and demanding power at the company. Seriously, women at the top of their careers games think they suck. (more…)

I got a reality check from a friend on Facebook yesterday.

I had just finished a story on NBCNews.com yesterday about Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer and how she plans to balance her new gig and the new born she’s expecting in October, and after posting a link on my Facebook page a friend Kathryn wrote:

“Wow. I’m just really shocked that no one even mentioned the father. We don’t even blink when men return to work after having a child.”

She is so right. I wrote the story looking at her decision to take only a few weeks off after the baby comes, and her plan to answer emails from work right after giving birth. Many women, and men, got on her case saying she doesn’t know what she’s in for. (more…)

Are you gals ready for a rumble tonight?

A year ago this week, the Supreme Court decision to strike down a class action gender bias suit against Walmart had a sweeping and symbolic impact on women’s rights.

That ruling, and a host of other actions including moves by religious employers to derail contraceptive coverage for workers, a recent legislation defeat of pay equity legislation for women, and the rise in the number of pregnancy discrimination claims have all culminated into what many women advocates call a “War on Women.”

On Thursday, it was time to rally the troops, maintained Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, during a luncheon with a focus on stopping the war with more advocacy and also legislation to turn back the high court’s Walmart ruling.

“Who would have thought that in 2012, we’d be arguing over providing contraception for women, or debating the idea of equal pay,” Ness told a 1,500 member audience of mainly women gathered in the Washington Hilton including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton who gave the keynote address. “Yet here we are.” (more…)

There are two new women in the boardroom of Italian automaker Fiat — Joyce Victoria Bigio and Patience Wheatcroft.

It’s great news, but don’t get all warm and fuzzy over Fiat. The company was pretty much strong-armed into adding women to its all-male board because of a new law that requires Italian firms to have at least one-third women board members by 2015, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal today.

Other countries, including Norway, have imposed such quotas and many have reaped the benefits of having more women voices in the big chairs. But it’s not even something that’s seriously considered in the United States, even though less than 20 percent of board seats are held by women at U.S. firms.

In fact, some firms won’t even consider women board members when asked by their shareholders to just think about more gals for board positions. (more…)

Sometimes a graphic is worth a thousand blog words:

Yes, women can have it all. But just like men, sometimes we need a little help, especially working moms.

If you have a husband, or significant other, and this person isn’t supportive of your career you might as well throw dreams of keys to the executive bathroom down the toilet.

You actually may be better off if you’re a single mom so there’s no illusion that you have support to balance it all.

I’ve heard this from executive women for some time, and this week a great Wall Street Journal article on the top women in the CEO pipeline just reinforces this notion.

The piece talks about all the women at corporations right now who are seen as potential successors to existing CEOs, and with so many women waiting in the wings, experts predict the number of women top executives will double by 2017. Don’t get too excited. The number of gals holding the big corner office seats are only about 14 percent, but hey, any increases would be great.

There was one line in the story that really hit home for me, and it points to how important it is to have a spouse who realizes how important what you’re doing is. Of the ten women identified as potential CEOs:

“… of the nine in the group who have children, many have husbands who abandoned the fast track to support their wives’ careers.”

It’s not an easy thing to hear because it points to how difficult these jobs can be, and how little has changed in Corporate America when it comes to being family friendly. But it should be a wake up call for women considering hooking up with a lover who may say they love you but don’t provide loving support.

You can’t changed him honey, especially when you’re climbing the ladder.

I’ve written extensively about the lack of women board members in Corporate America but I’m especially peeved this morning about the problem.

Turns out the guys who sit on boards today — and we’re talking about 95 percent men who hold these powerful positions — aren’t there because they’re any great shakes. In fact, quite a few of them are actually unprincipled.

There’s a great piece in the New York Times by Andrew Ross Sorkin today titled “‘Tainted,’ But Sheltered On Boards,” that looks at why some men who’ve been disgraced in their fields for a host of reasons are still sitting on the nation’s top boards.

These are seats that someone with integrity should hold, and I would argue that these bad boys should be replaced with good girls. Clearly, women have proven themselves as potentially more ethical than men when it comes to ethics and business. (more…)