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…)

Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, to few to mention.

You’ve got to love Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”

Frank Sinatra, My Way (Live at the Royal… by waytoblue

The guy didn’t regret a lot, and why should he? You live your life, make mistakes along the way, but in the end, you’ve got to leave regrets behind, right?

Not if you’re a woman!

Regrets, we have a lot.

It seems we can’t do anything right, and at every turn, especially lately, we’re told we’re either screwing up because we’re letting our desire for a good family life stand in the way of our career success, or we’re delusional to think we can have it all.

No matter what line we decide to accept, in the end, we could end up regretting it all.

One former top female executive shared her regrets in an opinion piece in the New York Times this past weekend.

“Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone,” wrote Erin Callan, the former CFO of now defunct Lehman Brothers.

Women are so consumed with regretting their work-life choices, or making other women regret their work-life choices, that they spend little time on regretting other important things, like making stupid business decisions while you were an executive at a company that ended up crashing and burning, and contributing to the biggest economic meltdown this country has ever seen. (Callan didn’t mention that in her regret oped, as the astute reporter Matthew Cooper pointed out in his must-read National Journal piece today.)

On the flip side, my mother recently told me she had regrets that she focused so much on children and family and very little on herself and her career.

Women can’t get a break in this country, or anywhere else in the world, my mother said when I asked her about why women on both sides of the spectrum have regrets.

Women, she said, “have a lot of responsibilities and we’re responsible people. Men don’t think about all these things, they just think about their koukou.” (This means penis if you couldn’t figure that out.)

OK, she added, not all men are like that, but women just put the weight of the world on their shoulders. Men tend not to, she stressed.

So I suppose in the end we can’t win this work-life game. If we accept that we may have fewer regrets and just say “I did it my way.”

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…)

I love comeback stories, and there are few as good as drug-addicted jailbird Robert Downey Jr.’s story.

The actor is now at the top of his game, and the huge opening of “The Avengers,” in which Downey stars as Iron Man, is only going to propel his career further.

I took my nine year old son to see the movie yesterday and we both agreed Iron Man was the best thing about the flick.

That’s why I was so excited to read the latest issue of Esquire with Downey on the cover, and I was even more excited when I read some of his advice about work and careers, which espoused the benefits of having crappy jobs. (more…)

I had a dream last night that IBM CEO Virginia Rometty told the Grand Poobah of the Masters Tournament to take his green blazer and shove it.

You see the golf tournament, considered the most prestigious in the country, is held at the Augusta National Golf Club and guess what, that club doesn’t accept female members.This is a tough situation for the Club and for Rometty because traditionally IBM’s top dog has been accepted into the club and ends up wearing the organization’s famous green blazer.

All four of the last IBM CEOs were offered membership, according to a Wall Street Journal article today. But the newly minted chief executive Rometty won’t be able to don it because breasts are not allowed.

Rometty isn’t commenting on the matter, and word is she’ll be attending since IBM is one of the event’s key sponsors, but here’s where the few women in power can make a difference. Instead of attending and faking a smile, she should pull the company’s long-time sponsorship and tell Masters “you’re not the master of me anymore.” (more…)

In honor of International Women’s Day, we should bring back the power suits of the 1980s. I know, they were hideous, but it turns out they may have actually given gals magical powers.

A study by researchers at Kellogg University found that what we wear impacts how we feel about ourselves and how we perform in our jobs.

“Clothes can have profound and systematic psychological and behavioral consequences for their wearers,” according to a study on the effects of clothing on employees by professors at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which was published in the recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

The research found that work garb associated with “attentiveness and carefulness” actually makes workers more attentive and careful. (more…)

My last name has been the butt of jokes and a general curiosity to people all my life. But I never thought of it as a career liability, until now!

I just read through a study by professors at a trio of universities titled “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun” and it’s not good news for the Tahminicioglus of the world.

Turns out, people with hard-to-pronounce names are judged more negatively than the Jones and Smiths out there; and, the easy to pronounce among us are more apt to have higher-ranking positions.

The report by researchers at the University of Melbourne, Australia; University of Leuven, Belgium; and New York University found: (more…)

Asking for a raise is dreaded by most employees, but many women seem to have a particular aversion to the workplace ritual. It’s not lady like to ask for money, right? WRONG! Gals need money just as much as men.

A producer with a TV station in Philadelphia recently asked me to be a guest on the show to discuss this problem because she’s seen the raise-asking fear among women as well.

Here’s the clip from the show. (more…)

I’m going to do my best not to be too pushy in this post. I don’t want to come off as a domineering white gal and scare you off.

Turns out white women and black men experience more of a blacklash when they exhibit dominant behavior than black women and white males.

Seriously! New research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, found this the be the case: (more…)

“Frankly, I am a woman, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable with a woman as president. Women are just - I just don’t know if we’re cut out to lead.”

These words came from Molly Gordon, a Christian conservative from Iowa who was interviewed by NPR at a candidate forum in Des Moines yesterday.

Her words sent a chill up and down my spine.

Maybe you can brush off Gordon’s comments as just religious dogma. Clearly some extreme Christians may deem women in a poor light, and believe women should just follow their husband’s orders, but such attitudes are more pervasive in society at large than we want to admit.

Take Corporate America. Women are just not breaking that pesky glass ceiling. Today, all-to-familiar dismal numbers on women in leadership positions at the nation’s major corporations were released. And coincidentally, one of the longest-sitting female CEOs at the Fortune 500, Avon’s Andrea Jung, just received a pink slip. (more…)