Erin Abrams writes for PWC’s The Glass Hammer - professional women are not opting out as much as previously thought, and are hit by recessions more deeply. Abrams writes:

“Last week, we posited that women are being hit harder by job loss than men in this recession. This week, we bring you some compelling evidence for that theory. On July 22, 2008, the Majority Staff of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee, led by Senator Charles Schumer and Rep. Carolyn Maloney issued a report with their findings. Called “Equality in Job Loss: Women Are Increasingly Vulnerable during Recessions,” this report argues that women began losing jobs in the recession of 2001 and never fully recovered in the labor market, making this downturn all the more painful.”

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Sharon Jayson for the USA Today reports that men are happier than women later in life. She writes:

Researchers analyzed decades of national data on 47,000 men and women to create a statistical model that shows women’s happiness decreases, while men’s increases, exceeding women’s by age 48.

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Flexibility for working women is an increasing necessity for any company
wanting to attract and retain not only women, but Gen Y as well.

Urbanmoms.ca focuses on this permanent trend with their unique recruiting services company and blog.

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Michael Noer writes for the Soy Chicano forum:

How do women, careers and marriage mix? Not well, say social scientists.

Guys: a word of advice. Marry pretty women or ugly ones. Short ones or tall ones. Blondes or brunettes. Just, whatever you do, don’t marry a woman with a career.

Why? Because if many social scientists are to be believed, you run a higher risk of having a rocky marriage. While everyone knows that marriage can be stressful, recent studies have found professional women are more likely to get divorced, more likely to cheat and less likely to have children. And if they do have kids, they are more likely to be unhappy about it. A recent study in Social Forces, a research journal, found that women–even those with a “feminist” outlook–are happier when their husband is the primary breadwinner.

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The Gulf Daily News reports:

With Bahrain already recognised as a leading regional financial hub, its financial services sector is increasingly acknowledged as being among the frontrunners in promoting career development for women.

In keeping with the upward trend in women entering Bahrain’s workforce, financial services companies boast one of the highest ratios of female to male employment across the business sector, with female employees comprising in excess of 25% of employees.

Interesting that this number exceeds that in the U.S…

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Ana Patricia Ferrey of Inc.com writes in the NY Times that most women don’t have trouble re-entering the workforce after a leave of absence. However, the longer they are out, the harder it is to re-entry. Six months seems to be the longest “safe” length of time away.

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Rachel Breitman in the AM LawDaily blog today talks about the growing urgency for law firms to offer flex schedules in order to retain women attorneys. This discussion directly applies to corporations and professional women as well

Why the urgency? According to Patricia Gillette, a San Francisco partner in employment law at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, waves of baby boomers soon will be retiring from partnership positions, and when that happens, law firms will be hard-pressed to replace those lawyers.

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The Seamless Web blog posted an interesting commentary on how professional women are depicted on television and the connection to women’s challenges in real life. What are the real issues? Why did Hillary have such a hard time?

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SCORE, long known for its support and guidance for entrepreneurs, has created a blog for women business owners. I see several relevant and valuable topics, such as finance, marketing, HR, life balance, and more. Authors will include several female SCORE managers and counselors.

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The Eide Neurolearning blog reports a Cincinnati Children’s Hospital study that indicated intelligent boys and girls use different pathways in the brain for verbal comprehension and learning. They can get to the same place, but via different processes. Men and women are different!

Here’s the full posting