Jezebel
crappy hour
Posts Tagged “
jezenomics
”
Beatrice Biira, the "Beatrice" of Beatrice's Goat, graduated from Connecticut College last weekend and is headed to the Clinton School of Public Service in Arkansas for her Master's degree before going back to Uganda to work for a non-profit. Beatrice's family's rise out of poverty was aided by Heifer International, which allows people like us to purchase livestock for families like Beatrice's. The goat Beatrice's family received served as a source of nutrition and income for her family, which allowed Beatrice to attend school, which led to scholarships and to her being the first person in her village to get a college degree from America. [NY Times, Heifer International]
crappy hour
jezenomics
Ma'am, That Uterus Will Cost You Extra
It used to be that insurance companies justified charging women more for health insurance because they could get pregnant and be more expensive, but then someone pointed out the business fallacy that many insurance plans didn't cover birth control, either, so they came up with insurance plans (like mine) that don't cover pre-natal care if you get preggers. Unfortunately, now they're charging more for those plans, too. Their excuse?
"Our egghead actuaries crunched the numbers based on all the data we have about healthcare," explained Tom Epstein, a Blue Shield spokesman. "This is what they found."
But once you exempt pregnancy, what do men and women do significantly different? Men die young more often, and women seek preventative care (which is supposed to lower the cost of health insurance in the long term). Naturally, that's a problem.
More »
work sucks
Do You Wanna Make More Money? Sure, We All Do. (But Is That Really Your Biggest Problem With Your Job?)
A new survey of 12,000 working women says you'd like a raise. I mean, duh. But no, here's the most troubling part: more of you could use a 10% raise than those of you who would rather have better health coverage, a pension, accessible child care or more time off combined. Depending on the opportunity costs and net present values and so forth, this could make total rational sense. But my fear is that, you know, it's more because so many years scraping by on salaries far lower than those of your male counterparts has rendered you all incapable of recognizing your rights and needs. A bank teller who completed the survey offered as much when she volunteered that another guy in her position had told her he made $5 more an hour than she did. Not that she could do anything about it! “We can get in trouble for discussing that with each other so I didn’t say anything.” So okay: you need a raise; women are notorious non-negotiators. But is there something else you really need? See, I was just in the UK, and they have this amazing concept there… More »
jezenomics
Child Care Professionals: Worked Like Dogs, Paid Like Stay-At-Home Moms
In Emily Yoffe's Human Guinea Pigs column today, the Slate writer tries out being a day care worker in D.C.'s Gap Community Child Care Center, which mostly provides subsidized child care to low-income women so that they can work. It is, to say the least, not a fun job. There's screaming and fighting and crap-filled diapers, runny noses and messy meals and the constant need to entertain a squirming mass of children to prevent even more screaming, fighting and snotting (because nothing can stem the tide of shit). At the end of a long say, Emily (a mother herself) catches herself thinking, "This is the reason television and cocktails were invented, " and, amen to that! But Emily also points out one sad but true fact of the child care industry: expensive though it might be for to put kids in child care, some of the women least likely to be able to afford child care are the women who provide it. More »
bright future in sales
Five New Job Titles That Are Corporate Code For "Hot Girl"
This will shock you, but apparently some women get jobs at hedge funds solely on the basis that they are hot. “You meet these bimbos and they say, ‘Oh, I work at a hedge fund,’ and you think, What?!?” one "head of an investment bank who pals around with high net worth investors" tells W Magazine. “And then you realize, Oh, this is, like, the PR girl. And it's a wildly successful strategy." Yeah, sure, until the only women working on Wall Street are brainless bimbos because all the smart women have been driven away by the financial sector's overpowering, self-destructive atmosphere of misogyny…oh wait. Anyway, the story — while it's annoyingly absent of internal memos detailing illegal hiring practices or, for that matter, pictures of any of these hedge fund hos — reminded me how, no matter which way the economy blows, the American workforce, since the days of flight attendants in hot pants, has always found a place — and a visa! — for a sufficiently hot girl. In fact, as those hedge fund gurus are well-aware, opportunities have never been brighter! More »
jezenomics
Money Might Buy Some People Happiness, Just Not You
"Money can't buy me love," as the song goes, but most people think it'll buy you a bunch of reasons to be happy. At the lower end, according to most studies, that's probably true — relative improvements in economic conditions can mean a substantive difference in the subjective judgment of happiness. But, up here at the top of the worldwide economic scale, it's not really as true. More »
jezenomics
Yes, Idiot, It Is Harder To Be A Woman Than A Man
How can you say it's easier to be a man than to be a woman? What data do you have to support such a position? That's the type of mail you get when you write something for a news outlet other than Jezebel, and I thought fondly of it today when I read the latest from Wall Street, where Lehman Brothers chief financial officer Erin Callan, a Harvard-educated attorney known for "speaking more clearly and revealing more financial data than most Wall Street CFOs" all while wearing five-inch stilettos, had been demoted after seven months in the job, some internet pundit just skewered CNBC anchor Maria "Money Honey" Bartiromo for her "hysterical" statements on tax policy and her collagen injections, and Marie Claire just interviewed CNBC anchor Becky Quick about her wardrobe. "Nothing less than impeccable is what flies on Wall Street," she told the magazine. "If your lipstick's a mess or your skirt is too trendy, it instantly devalues you." Yup, devalues. More »
home as hell
Why Do Women Insist On Buying Houses?
"The scariest money mistake women can make (Hint: It's not shoes!)" sure sooounds like your average "Hey, it's O.K.…" Glamour enablement missive. (This month: Hey, it's O.K… to think about your eBay bid during sex!) But actually, "Welcome To My Mortgage Hell", penned by Meghan Daum, who knows a little bit about money mistakes, is interesting/depressing/important. Women, particularly single women, are addicted to acquiring real estate. "You use your home as a way to express who you are," says one lawyer and expert. Like shoes! But this is a newer development: until the 1970s single women were rarely allowed to buy homes without somehow proving the veracity of their intention to never have kids; today the rate of homeownership (or, you know, "ownership") among single women — single women who've been taking on half-million dollar double adjustable-rate crackpot mortgages with no down payment and that sort of thing — is twice that of single dudes. But why? More »
closing the deal
How Leveraging Your Date Rape Skills Can Make You A Tech Billionaire: The Inspiring Story Of Henry T. Nicholas III
Oh. My. God. Okay: Henry T. Nicholas III is the former CEO of Broadcom. Broadcom makes chips that run your cable boxes and cell phones and modems and crap, but that is so beside the point here. (Well, there is this theory that porn drives all communications and media innovation, but let's cut to the chase.) In the midst of investigating Broadcom on a run-of-the-mill options backdating scandal, the Feds learned something interesting about how Henry T. Nicholas III would close a deal with a cable box manufacturer or a modem maker or whatever: he'd slip drugs into their drinks. Generally Ecstasy. Sometimes meth or coke. No seriously. The indictment is here. He'd do this, among other places, at concerts, the Super Bowl, Rome, and in an underground room and tunnel he'd built under his Rodeo Drive apartment. Seriously, check it out. And now, thoughts. More »
jezenomics
Attention, Hot Fashion Industry Chicks! Hedge Fund Managers Are Desperate Enough To Bone You Now
Great news, gender! The recession is upon us, and investment bankers are being forced to lower their standards! Admission into the ranks of women they will fuck is no longer being exclusively limited to models! For a limited time only, any women in the fashion industry can be screened for (heh) interest. This momentous expansion of the pussy supply is being launched by an outfit called PocketChange NYC, whose charming slogan you will find after the jump, and it kicks off tonight at a bar called Taj. Apply now, because the guest list is already buzzing with potential M&A activity. Will Goldman buy Marc Jacobs? Can Versace find synergy with Credit Suisse? Can Tracie and I pull a Jerome Kerviel and get in on the action undetected? I'm still waiting to hear if I make the cut. (If I puke now, my gag reflexes will be perfectly primed!) (And to think I was just bemoaning the dearth of eligible men in this town!) More »
american appar-hell
American Apparel CEO Orders Subordinate To Pleasure Herself; She Services Him With Lawsuit
Perhaps you've heard enough out of American Apparel Chief Executive Onanist Dov Charney. He masturbated in front of a reporter, sleeps with his employees, promotes hot 17-year-olds to replace veterans, took himself public in one of the shadiest entries to the public markets in the history of financial engineering, told the Wall Street Journal the CFO hired to straighten up his finances was a "loser," and generally perpetuates the kind of working environment I'd vilify as the Worst Thing Ever if I didn't kind of respect that he owns the largest remaining clothing factory in the country. Okay, so…he got sued again, this time by three year company veteran Jeneleen Floyd, after going completely batshit in a Perry Edward Smith-esque fit of preordained craziness one day. An eyewitnesses says the catalyst for the outburst appeared to be a combination of anxiety that his L.A. factory would be the target of an immigration raid, and fury over his Wikipedia page, which has since endured quite a few revisions, including a few at the hands of his right-hand woman Iris Alonso. How not to manage people, in a few simple clauses, after the jump. (And yeah, there's sex.) More »
drunk email from my little sister
Will Sex & The City Make You Into A Communist?
Last midnight my sister somehow saw the Sex & The City movie and furiously wrote me a review that made me wonder, could this be the movie that finally shakes my faith in the virtues of market capitalism? Seriously, ever since she took this Marxism seminar my sister has hated her fellow man too much to want to extend him the benefit of any sort of social safety net, but this movie seemed to force her to reconsider. Is Sex & The City just a movie cashing in on a cash cow, or a tool of dialectical materialists designed to incite class struggle? Does this movie have a "message" other than"feel free to wear absurd outfits to work"? Yeah, probably not, but check the amusing email — and, uh, note the time stamp — after the Leap. More »
vagina monoblogs
Washington Post Magazine Runs Livejournal-y Cover Story By Unemployed Male Blogger. So Where's The Sultry Photo Shoot?
Because one can never get one's fill of first-person newspaper Sunday magazine stories by unemployed people in which nothing much happens, I read a cover story in the Washington Post Magazine called "Terminated," wherein a man named T.M. Shine — and, you will be shocked to learn, he blogs! — gets laid off from his job and watches life collapse into a long malaisey mope-rock montage involving blueberry pancakes, paperwork, tear-inducing episodes of Extreme Makeover, and feeling like a john while meeting his old office manager in an abandoned Krispy Kreme parking lot to pick up the possessions the corporate overlords wouldn't give him time to pack. Unlike Emily Gould, Shine is not pictured in revealing loungewear, or at all. We learn he is: "a little older than Prince and not nearly as old as Jerry Seinfeld." We also learn that Laura, the office manager, is concerned his age/looks make him somehow unappetizing as a prospective hire. More »
"It's Kind Of A Spartan Lifestyle…"
Meet Laura Werkheiser, just one of so many young and fabulous New Yorkers who has devised "ingenious" ways of living fabulously on a sub-six figure budget. "It's easy for me to give up manicures and pedicures and hair appointments in lieu of of clothing," she says. (That and so many more hints are also available for your listening pleasure, from the clotheshorse's mouth itself.) This story - they attend open bar parties! they share Wi-Fi signals! they buy DRUGSTORE MAKEUP! — is too comprehensively beyond-loathsome for me to sufficiently respond at this hour but I have some choice quotes if you click the pic. [NYT]
failure to launch
Living At Home In Your 20s Is Not Really Ideal For Anyone Involved
Every year when a new crop of grads emerges from that beer-sticky collegiate womb, this article gets written — you know the one, about how more and more 20-somethings are living with their parents instead of living on their own. All of these articles, including the most recent ones from the Wall Street Journal and the AP, claim a demographic shift since the 60s, when only 10.9% of men aged 25-24 lived with their parents, compared with 14.3% today. The reasons given for the preponderance of "incomplete launches" are usually the rising costs of housing, wage stagnation, and the extended adolescence that is currently in societal vogue. More »
jezenomics
Women Are The Economic Backbone Of The New Rwanda
Those Rwandan women who are employed making "peace baskets" for Macy's — a job that helps them to repair the fissures of the ethnic civil war that saw the deaths of some 800,000 people fourteen years ago? They are part of a wave of women helping to lift Rwanda out of the poverty caused by the Hutu/Tutsi conflict. Not surprisingly, the economic and political contributions of women are the main fuel for Rwanda's current economic revival. According to Washington Post's Anthony Faiola, the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu militias and subsequent retributions left Rwanda with a population that's 60% female. This, along with new laws passed in 1999 that allowed women to inherit property, left the door open for more women to start businesses, even though in Rwanda's more patriarchal society, many women must still ask their husbands for permission before making economic choices. Now, women are running coffee plantations and graining mills, and often, they're out-earning their male counterparts. More »
jezenomics
