Paid Maternity Leave Could Be The Key To Making More Women Leaders

There are all kinds of good reasons for the U.S. to finally catch up to the rest of the world when it comes to paid maternity leave.

Here’s another: Giving parents paid time off after a child is born helps launch women up the corporate ladder and into the boardroom, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, commissioned by Bank of New York Mellon.

The report, presented at a conference this week in London, looked at the percentage of women on boards at 1,002 companies worldwide from 2004-2013. Unlike many other studies of gender in the boardroom, the researchers also considered how long women stayed on boards.

“Getting women on the board is very different from keeping them there,” lead researcher Sucheta Nadkarni, a management professor at Cambridge, told The Huffington Post.

The study looked across different countries to see what kinds of policies and cultural traits were linked to more women in the boardroom. They found that simply having a quota, requiring a certain percentage of women, doesn’t cut it when it comes to longevity. Quotas lend themselves to tokenism -- women for the sake of women.

Norway, which mandates that women make up 40 percent of a corporate board, leads the pack on gender diversity in the boardroom -- but is nowhere near the top when it comes to retaining women on the board.

The study found that the strongest driver of women in the boardroom was what the authors call “female empowerment” -- the percentage of educated and employed women in a country.

“If educated and employed women play a stronger role in the marketplace, there’s a strong incentive for companies to make a board gender-inclusive to better serve their markets,” Nadkarni said.

Procter & Gamble is a good example here. The company, which makes a broad array of household products, caters heavily to women. And it's made gender inclusiveness a priority. Right now P&G’s board is 50 percent female.

A higher percentage of working, employed women also widens the labor pool -- meaning there are more women with a shot at the top.

Here are the top 10 countries for female empowerment, according to the data:

1. Australia

2. Norway

3. Denmark

4. Finland

5. Ireland

6. USA

7. Sweden

8. Netherlands

9. United Kingdom

10. France

Not only do Australia, Norway and Denmark rank highest for female empowerment, they have better maternity and child-care provisions than the United States. The researchers also found that the Scandinavian countries on the list more strongly value gender egalitarianism, another key factor in getting women up the ladder.

The U.S. ranks sixth for female empowerment.

Part of the problem in the U.S. is the percentage of females who are in the labor force hasn’t budged much over the years. The percentage of U.S. women working has ticked up only one percentage point to 75 percent since 1990. We're held back, in part, by pitiful maternity leave and child-care policies. Without supportive policies, more women find themselves forced out of the workforce.

The authors of this report emphasize that to help keep women working (and get them onto boards), you need strong policies like paid leave for mothers and fathers, breast-feeding work breaks, the right to return to work and flexible hours. The more women who can stay in the workforce, the more likely it is that a few of them reach the boardroom.

The U.S. federal governmen offers new parents only 12 weeks unpaid leave -- if they work at a company with more than 50 employees. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn't require employers to offer workers some kind of paid parental leave. And until the 2010 passage of Obamacare there were no concrete federal protections for women to take lactation breaks at work.

The report found other societal factors and cultural proclivities that help get women in the boardroom -- including the number of women in politics and corporate governance guidelines that focus on gender (not quotas, but more general provisions).

Provocatively, the researchers found that the more assertiveness is valued in a country, the more likely it is that women who obtain board seats, keep them. The U.S. ranks high for assertiveness, and is among the most successful countries at keeping women in the boardroom.

If we could only get our act together on the policy side, we could really move the needle.

The Future Of Driving, In One Provocative Chart

In the future, only rich people will own cars and only robots will drive them.

That’s the takeaway from a new research note from Morgan Stanley auto analyst Adam Jonas. Like Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, he predicts that improvements in self-driving technology will eventually lead to bans on human driving on most roads.

Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, which have already been widely adopted in major urban centers, have paved the way for cities, and eventually suburbs, to adopt mega-fleets of public vehicles that will taxi passengers around. This will dramatically lower the cost per ride to about 25 cents per mile, which is roughly one-tenth of what a traditional taxi costs, Jonas said. He provides no clear timeline for when this might occur.

By contrast, wealthy people -- at least in the near-term -- will own self-driving vehicles, a fact on which Mercedes-Benz and Tesla seem to be banking.

Again, Jonas provides no clear timeline. But an increasing number of luxury carmakers are already adding autonomous features to their vehicles. In October, Tesla's Musk estimated that fully driverless cars will be on the road by 2023.

Here’s how the chart breaks down:

• Quadrant 1: Today, most drivers own or lease their own vehicles, which they drive themselves. Autonomous driving technology is only beginning to emerge.
• Quadrant 2: Over the past few years, ride-hailing services such as Uber, Lyft and Sidecar have alleviated the need to own a car in many major cities, making a driver much more accessible. Jonas said this is a logical step toward the so-called mega-fleets of public, autonomous cars.
• Quadrant 3: Over the next decade, rich people will likely swap out the cars they drive for cars that drive themselves. Already, Tesla is planning to roll out a version of its Model S sedan that has limited autopilot features sometime this summer. The latest version of the car, announced on Wednesday, starts at $67,500 after a Federal Tax Credit.
• Quadrant 4: This is the final evolution in the car industry and there is no clear date for when this will come to fruition. But with few exceptions, most people will be driven by cars that are either a public utility or part of a privately-owned fleet that users subscribe to use. At this point, laws will likely restrict human driving to select roads, Jonas wrote. Other forms of public transportation, such as subway systems, may become obsolete.

The CEO Who Took On Indiana's Anti-LGBT Law -- And Won

For Marc Benioff, the fight against Indiana's widely criticized "religious freedom" law was personal.

The Salesforce CEO was a leading voice in the national outcry against Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Gov. Mike Pence (R) signed last last month. Critics argued that the original version of the RFRA would have permitted businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.

Benioff said his advocacy was an effort to help his employees and customers whom the law might have affected, something he describes as being key to his personal philosophy.

“I’m all for a healthy mind and a healthy body, but I’m also about having a healthy planet and a healthy country and taking care of others that don’t have as much,” Benioff, a habitual meditator, told The Huffington Post on Monday from his vacation home in Hawaii. “That’s my spirituality.”

On March 25, a day before Pence first signed Indiana's RFRA, Benioff became the first major business leader to speak out against the law by threatening to scale back his company's investment in the state. After the governor approved the measure, Benioff swung back even harder, posting what he called the "tweet heard 'round the world," in which he announced plans to cancel all Salesforce programs that would require customers or employees to travel to Indiana. Indeed, it was retweeted nearly 9,800 times and favorited more than 8,300 times and became part part of the national conversation.

The following week, he stepped up his campaign again, promising relocation packages to Salesforce employees in Indiana who wanted to transfer elsewhere.

“CEOs are very much the advocates of their customers and employees, as well as of the environment and local communities,” Benioff said. “The most successful CEOs today are advocates for their stakeholders, not just their shareholders.”

After a week of backlash, Pence approved a revised version of the measure, this time explicitly banning businesses from refusing service because of a person's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Benioff may have been the first major CEO to express his opposition to the legislation, but he was soon joined by others. Corporate giants and organizations from Apple to NASCAR rallied behind LGBT rights groups in Indiana to fight the law.

Still, the Salesforce chief may have been uniquely positioned to champion the cause in Indiana. For starters, San Francisco-based Salesforce became the state's largest tech employer when it acquired the marketing software firm ExactTarget in 2013.

And, Benioff has a lot of powerful friends.

The day after the law passed, he said, he emailed the people he regularly meets and dines with in San Francisco, many of whom are top tech industry executives. Among them was Max Levchin, one of the co-founders of PayPal and the chief executive of financial management site Affirm. Four days after Benioff sent the email, when he flicked on CNBC as he started his morning workout at the gym, he saw Levchin railing against Indiana’s law.

“I was completely blown away,” Benioff said, noting that Levchin went on to organize more than 70 top executives to sign a joint statement condemning the law last week. “This is really the first time that we have started something, and the reason it got started -- the reason it was successful -- is because it was so many different CEOs banding together.”

Benioff has long practiced the "stakeholder theory," a philosophy advocated by World Economic Forum founder and chairman Klaus Schwab, among others. The ideology views shareholders as second to employees, customers, suppliers, communities, trade unions and others who are affected by a company’s commerce. Imbued with a strong sense of corporate responsibility and connected with its community, a firm that's guided by these principles might, the philosophy suggests, earn greater profits over time, translating into higher returns for investors. It’s the corporate equivalent of building good karma.

In the two weeks since Benioff began his campaign, emails have poured in from workers thanking him for stepping up. He said he's never received so much positive employee feedback in his 16-year tenure at Salesforce.

“When the economic hammer came down, that’s when things really started to change,” he said. “There’s one word that was continually used by everyone in Indiana, which was ‘historic.’ That’s something that we in San Francisco, or those of us who don’t live in Indiana, don’t have the perspective to understand, but for them this was historic.”

Benioff pledged to continue the fight by urging the Indiana legislature to add the LGBT community as a protected class under local civil rights laws in its next session.

“The conversation happened the right way,” he said. “It opens the door for another change and another change, probably in the next legislature.”

The CEO admits that not every step in this push to change the law has been graceful. He became the target of some criticism after a CNN interview last Wednesday, in which he said, "One thing that you're seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs." The comment provoked pushback from those who already fear the influx of money in politics. Benioff said he misspoke as a result of his excitement over the business community’s rapid response to the situation in Indiana.

Benioff hopes business leaders can continue to push for important legislation that affects their stakeholders, and cites patent and immigration reform as specific examples.

Asked whether Indiana just happened to provide the right place and time for business leaders to unite behind a particular political cause, or whether the momentum would continue to grow, Benioff said he was unsure.

"This was so spontaneous, it happened so quickly," he said. "But CEOs do have a lot of power, like it or not, so they need to bring on a stakeholder philosophy."

Reddit Hopes Ending Salary Negotiations Will Help Women

Ellen Pao is still fighting.

Just weeks after losing a courtroom battle that highlighted tech's glaring gender problems, Pao is trying to solve some of them closer to home: at Reddit, where she is interim CEO.

In an effort to promote gender diversity, Reddit is no longer negotiating salaries with potential hires, Pao told The Wall Street Journal. It was her first interview since losing a gender-discrimination lawsuit against the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers last month.

“Men negotiate harder than women do, and sometimes women get penalized when they do negotiate. So as part of our recruiting process we don’t negotiate with candidates,” Pao told the WSJ. “We come up with an offer that we think is fair. If you want more equity, we’ll let you swap a little bit of your cash salary for equity, but we aren’t going to reward people who are better negotiators with more compensation."

More broadly, Reddit is trying to build a team that values diversity, and it's working with diversity expert Freada Kapor Klein to find other ways to create an inclusive environment, Pao told the WSJ.

"We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.

Numerous studies suggest a disparity between men and women who haggle with employers about pay. Not only are men typically more likely to negotiate salaries than women, women are also penalized more than men when they do negotiate.

And when the conversation does turn to money, women are more likely to be judged for their social skills than for their competence, an issue that men rarely face.

Still, it remains to be seen how Pao’s mandate will work in practice.

“If you’ve got a talented female who has another offer from a competitor, are you really going to expect that they’ll take a big salary hit to come to your firm?” asked Malia Mason, a professor at Columbia Business School.

Pao sued Kleiner in 2012, alleging that it discriminated against her because of her gender and later retaliated by firing her. A jury voted in Kleiner's favor on March 27, after a four-week trial, which delved deeply into Pao’s personal life and ultimately focused on her performance at work.

But the lawsuit against Kleiner, which was an early investor in Amazon and Google, renewed scrutiny on the overwhelming gender disparity in tech. Few women hold leadership roles at tech companies, and reports of sexual harassment and misogynistic behavior have plagued Silicon Valley for years.

Pao said she got messages of support from other women throughout the trial. One group of women in the tech industry, led by Lori Hobson, took out a full-page ad in the Palo Alto Daily Post that read, “Thanks Ellen.”

“If I have helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it,” Pao said after the trial.

East Village's Iconic Pommes Frites Plans To Reopen After Devastating Fire

NEW YORK -- Omer Shorshi’s 18-year-old business is in charred ruins, but he feels lucky.

On most days, the co-owner of Pommes Frites worked in a basement office of the Belgian fry shop, a beloved staple of Manhattan’s East Village. But on the day a gas explosion ripped through the next-door sushi restaurant, sparking a fire that gutted the neighboring buildings, including the one where Shorshi worked, the 43-year-old wasn't there; he had stayed home with his sick son.

The March 26 accident left two people dead and 22 injured. But all seven customers and employees who were in Pommes Frites emerged unscathed. For that, Shorshi said he’s grateful.

Omer Shorshi posing for a photo shoot just weeks before a fire destroyed his restaurant.

“Miraculously, no one [in Pommes Frites] got hurt,” the Israeli-born restaurateur told The Huffington Post on Friday. “No one got even a scratch, so that’s really amazing.”

Now, Shorshi said he and his business partner, Suzanne Levinson, are in the market for a new location to reopen Pommes Frites. Preferably, somewhere in the East Village.

But it’s proving difficult to find something reasonably priced in the same heavily trafficked area, near the neighborhood’s iconic St. Mark’s Place.

“We already had a good relationship with our landlord. We had a good rent over there. It was a really good location,” Shorshi said. “Now we’re probably going to have to go more east to find something affordable.”

Days after the fire, fans of Pommes Frites began offering donations to help resurrect the eatery. But Shorshi refused. The injured victims should be the priority, he insisted.

“But they kept asking us,” he said.

And, at a fries-only restaurant where bills rarely exceed $7, Pommes Frites doesn’t exactly have a massive surplus of cash with which to start over.

The eatery on Thursday began accepting donations via mobile payment platform Square. Just under $1,000 had been raised as of Friday, according to Shorshi.

“We’re going to need to raise quite a lot,” he said. “I don’t think the donations will bring in the big money, but hopefully it will do something.”

It’s difficult to estimate how much money the business needs. Rent is unpredictable, and the renovations needed to refit a retail space into a restaurant -- which is a possibility any restaurant owner faces when looking for a new location -- can drive up the price even further. Plus, Shorshi hopes the next Pommes Frites will be even bigger than the one that burned down.

The quaint-looking fry shop remained in the same location for 18 years.

Once he reopens his doors, Shorshi said he plans to rehire as many of his workers as possible.

“We had people who worked for us for, like, eight years,” he said. “In the fast-food business, that’s unheard of. We try to take care of them as best we can.”

Pommes Frites wants to take care of its fans, too. Shorshi said once the new location is ready, he plans to feed to everyone who donated money to help get it started.

“We can invite everybody for free fries,” he said. “We’re humbled from all this support.”

To donate, tap here.

U.S. Adds 126,000 Jobs In March; Unemployment Rate Lingers At 5.5 Percent

The U.S. economy added 126,000 jobs in March, as the unemployment rate lingered at 5.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.

More from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The weakening U.S. economy spilled into the job market in March as employers added only 126,000 jobs, snapping a streak of 12 consecutive months of job gains above 200,000.

The Labor Department says the unemployment rate remained at 5.5 percent. Economic growth has been hammered this year by winter weather, factory slowdowns and lackluster construction activity. The manufacturing, construction and government sectors each shed workers, while hiring at restaurants plunged from February.

Job gains in February and January were revised down by 69,000.

Wage growth remains modest. Average hourly wages rose 7 cents to $24.86 an hour in March.

Past job growth along with cheaper gasoline has yet to significantly boost consumer spending. A continued deceleration in hiring could delay the Federal Reserve from raising interest rates mid-year.

This story is developing...

McDonald's Is Raising Wages For Some Workers

McDonald's is finally giving some of its workers a raise.

The fast-food giant on Wednesday announced plans to give employees a 10 percent pay bump and some extra benefits.

The raise will affect about 90,000 workers at a small fraction of McDonald’s stores. Employees at franchises, which make up the majority of the burger chain's locations, won't be affected.

The increase will lift the average hourly wage at McDonald’s to $9.90, and to more than $10 by the end of next year. The rate currently sits at $9.01, according to the Wall Street Journal.

McDonald's will also let workers at non-franchised locations who have been with the company for more than a year earn up to five days of paid time off each year. Additionally, the company will pay for workers to earn a high school diploma and offer some college tuition assistance. Franchise workers will have access to the educational perks, but not the paid time off.

“We’ve been working on a comprehensive benefits package for our employees -- the people who bring our brand to life for customers every day in our U.S. restaurants,” CEO Steve Easterbrook said in a statement. “We’ve listened to our employees and learned that -- in addition to increased wages -- paid personal leave and financial assistance for completing their education would make a real different in their careers and lives.”

McDonald's did not immediately respond to a request for further comment.

The move comes two weeks ahead of a planned international strike organized by the movement Fight for $15, which urges fast-food employers to pay workers a minimum wage of $15 per hour.

The group condemned McDonald’s announcement as a “weak move for a company that made $5.6 billion in profits last year.”

“This is too little to make a real difference, and only covers a fraction of workers,” Kwanza Brooks, a McDonald’s employee earning $7.25 per hour in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in a statement. “We’re going to keep fighting until we win $15 and union rights for all fast-food workers and our families.”

McDonald's joins a growing list of low-wage employers, including Walmart and Target, that have raised wages in recent months. Labor advocates point out that wages of $9 or $10 an hour, though well above the national minimum wage of $7.25, are still not enough to pull many families out of poverty.

The raise also marks the latest step by McDonald’s to revitalize its ailing brand amid slumping sales. The company kicked off an aggressive campaign last October to present its food as authentic, going as far as to tout the fact that its meals can, in fact, rot. In January, McDonald's said it would cut more items from its menu as it tries to slim down options. Last month, the chain said it would eliminate human antibiotics from its chicken supply.