"I liked what he said. In fact, I thumbed through my book quickly this morning, saying, 'Wow, that really sounded familiar,'" she told USA Today. "I talked in my book, too, about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times, and history's lessons when it comes to knowing when it is when we engage in warfare." Hubris, thy name is Sarah. •  But even if we don't believe Obama is stealing ideas from Palin, there are a good number of people out there who do care about what she has to say - or are at least curious enough to read her garbled writing. Palin's op-ed in the Washington Post on climate change was (sadly) one of the most read WaPo op-eds of the year. • Amazon is offering Going Rogue, the e-book at the discounted price of $7.99, if you preorder now. Going Rogue wont be available for Kindle until December 24th. • In Oprah Winfrey's Christmas at the White House special, which airs Sunday night, Michelle Obama says her favorite childhood gift was a metal dollhouse with plastic furniture. "I really didn't know how to set up a house so I had all the furniture lined up along the walls as opposed to nestled around the fireplace, but I loved that little dollhouse," she said. Another Obama Christmas revelation: Bo has his own stocking. • A new study found that female hedge fund managers are better at managing money than men. On average, funds managed by women produced annual returns of 9%, compared with only 5.82% for those run by men. They concluded that "on average, women tend to be more consistent investors, holding investments longer and processing a greater level of informational detail, including contradictory data, in making decisions." • A 30-year-old Las Vegas woman claims that when she went into labor on November 30th, the staff at the region's only hospital, the University Medical Center, ignored her for so long that she went home and gave birth to a premature baby. The child did not survive. Witnesses from the waiting room have corroborated her story, and hospital chief Kathy Silver has promised to take actions against any staff if her allegations are proven true. •  The New York Fire Department is considering, for the first time ever, electing a woman to serve as fire commissioner. More specifically, they are thinking of promoting Mylan Denerstein, who has executive deputy attorney general for social justice for the state since January 2007. • Liberal blog Firedoglake is trying to get Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, kicked out of her position as "Global Ambassador" for breast cancer foundation Susan G. Komen for the Cure. "As Hadassah travels the globe under the banner of Susan G. Komen for the cure, decrying the inadequacies of our health care system and the desperate need to reform it, her husband is at home to kill the reform efforts we so desperately need," wrote blogger Jane Hamsher. • There are still laws on the books in Minnesota that make it illegal for a married woman to cheat on her husband and for a single woman to have sex. The decades-old laws are not enforced, but a woman could be fined $3,000 and jailed for a year if she cheats. Some Minnesota lawmakers want them repealed, but others say they should be expanded to apply to men as well. "We think they're important. They send a message," said Tom Prichard of the Minnesota Family Council, "When you are dealing with a marriage, it's not just a private activity or a private institution. It's a very public institution. It has enormous consequences for the rest of society." •

Universities have begun to notice that women are greatly underrepresented in business programs. Only 20% of most executive M.B.A. classes are female, and for certain top programs, the percentage is even lower- sometimes as small as 5%. To put this in perspective, women currently make up nearly 30% of the class at full-time M.B.A. programs and more than 40% in part-time programs.

Several reasons have been given for this disparity. Experts say that fewer women attend E.M.B.A. programs because of the time commitment, and that "some women are deterred because the programs' formats interfere with raising a family, something experts say men don't worry about as much." The Wall Street Journal also cites another reason fewer women are tempted to enroll in E.M.B.A. programs: they are discouraged by the glass ceiling. Women who perceive that they have already climbed as far as they possibly can on the corporate latter are more likely to believe that a degree won't help their careers.

Mori Taheripour, vice president of corporate diversity at the American Red Cross and outreach coordinator for University of Pennsylvania's Wharton west coast school of business, says that schools have a difficult time reaching women because they don't factor in the difficulties of balancing family and career:

(You must) be able to show women that even though they have all of these other commitments in their lives, this is something that others can do, and others have done it. We ask for about 10 years work experience, so the average age of our students is 35 and that's a point in their life where most of them have families and have senior level positions or are entrepreneurs. So it's a challenge to get them to say "I can add one more thing to my plate."

Taheripour has organized many events designed to bring in female students. She says spending face-to-face time with the candidates is also useful; fostering relationships between the prospective students is important, she says. Since Taheripour started her outreach efforts in 2006, the number of women enrolling in the executive program has risen by more than 10%. Columbia University has tried a similar tactic: through launching a women's outreach group and mentoring programs, Columbia has so far reached hundreds of potential female applicants.

Some schools have even changed the program's format to be more appealing to women. Emory University's has started a modular E.M.B.A. program, which meets for nine residency periods over 21 months. And it seems that their efforts are working. The program's current class is 33% female, as compared with Emory's traditional E.M.B.A. program, which is still at only 20%. However, some aren't so positive about the change. Susan Ashford, associate dean of the executive M.B.A. program at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business says that the glass ceiling is still in place for many women on the executive track. She points out that although 50.6% of U.S. women in business hold management or professional positions, only 15.7% of Fortune 500 corporate officers are women.

A Female Face on Executive M.B.A.s [WSJ]
Q&A: How to Attract Women To Executive M.B.A. Programs [WSJ]

Anecdotally speaking, even as the numbers of women in law and medical school have begun to match and even exceed the number of men, women continue to comprise less than a third of business school students. To a degree, this is because business school applicants are expected to have at least 5 years of work experience before taking on two years of additional (and expensive) schooling. What that means in a practical sense is that just as women graduates are finishing the "average" track, they're about to enter their thirties (and their prime years for marriage and child-bearing, if those are alternate goals) at the start of a new stage of their career or a new career entirely.

In addition, most business careers are extremely demanding and younger workers are expected to work 60-80 hour weeks, at least, making little time for much else. As Business Week explains, a recent study showed that 30 percent of female Harvard undergrads that went on to get MBAs were stay-at-home mothers fifteen years later, compared to 6 percent of doctors and 30 percent of lawyers. Part of the problem for women in business is the lack of flex-time or part-time options, which doctors are much more likely to take advantage of. In addition, evidence suggests that businessmen with stay-at-home wives earn an average of 30 percent more than their counterparts with working wives — and businesswoman are reportedly more likely to marry businessmen.

But, as many businesses are finding out, a diversity of perspectives and experiences is actually beneficial to the bottom line (not that you'll convince the MBA programs of that any time soon). Hopefully, as the upper ranks of the business world continue to bleed women and men who choose to try to find some semblance of a work-life balance, the people who run these companies like meat grinders will begin to recognize that a person looking to escape the grind is just as important an asset as those who stick around to be ground down.

The Mommy M.B.A.: Schools Try to Attract More Women [Wall Street Journal]
MBA Moms Most Likely to Opt Out [Business Week]

Carly Fiorina [Wikipedia]

Might Kituka requested a loan on January 14th, and as of today enough people have donated to raise $1,650, the amount she needs to increase her stock of supplies. We'll be keeping tabs and report back how she does when we know more.

Female Business Owners Fault New Rules on U.S. Contracts [NY Times]
Kiva [Kiva.org]