By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)
Janice Chaffin, Consumer Business Unit President at security giant Symantec, knows a little something about hard work. She got her first job at the very young age of fourteen, working her way up over time from cleaning person to receptionist in a doctor’s office.
Once in college at the University of California, San Diego, Chaffin took any job that came her way, including dishwashing, bookkeeping, acting as a Spanish-speaking tour guide at Disney World, and working as a medical school admissions office staffer, just to name a few. “Whatever I wound up becoming, I always knew I would work hard to achieve what I wanted, no matter what,” Chaffin said.
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The Future of Hedge Funds
Featured, Newsby Liz O’Donnell (Boston)
New data from Hedge Fund Research, Inc., (HFRI) shows assets invested in the industry increased by $100 billion in the second quarter of 2009, ending at $1.43 trillion. This is the first quarterly increase in assets since second quarter of 2008. HFRI attributes the growth to gains shown during the quarter. The HFRI Fund Weighted Composite Index returned 9.13 percent. This is the best quarterly gain since the last quarter of 1999, although still below the highest peak, reached in 1997. And while investors are still redeeming capital, the pace of the redemptions has slowed from recent years.
But looking past the most current returns, what does the future hold for the hedge fund industry given the tremendous impact of the global financial crisis and amid discussions of government regulations? And what about the outlook for women? Will the recent inflow mean more opportunities or will women still be virtually missing from the industry this time next year?
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Voices of Experience: Ann Oka, Senior Vice President, Supply Management, Sodexo Inc.
Voices of ExperienceShortly after graduating from high school, Ann Oka stuffed her clothes in some garbage bags, packed her record albums in a box and loaded up her $200 Vega for a three-week road trip across country with a high school friend. Destination: sunny California, where she had lived before her parents had moved her to the East Coast. The plan was to work for a year, establish residency, and start down the path to becoming a doctor.
Oka, now the senior vice president of supply management at Sodexo Inc., explained, “I’ve always been stubborn, so while my parents were perfectly willing to pay for my college education, in my mind it was something I was going to do on my own.” Read more
In Case You Missed It: Business News Round-up
NewsIn case you were too busy to have kept up with all the news, contributor Martin Mitchell has gathered some important market events from last week to help you start this week well informed:
Economic Backdrop
Mergers and Acquisitions
Professional Women Choosing to Remain Childless
Newsby Marian Schembari (New York City)
In the past ten years, the number of women who choose to remain childless has practically doubled. According to an article published last month in the Telegraph, the tides are turning as it used to be poverty and low marriage rates that contributed to childlessness. Today, women with higher education, social class and professional qualifications are more likely to actively choose not to have children.
And the numbers are going up. Research done by the Office for National Statistics (UK) shows that healthy women who are sexually active, living with long-term partners are the ones to decide not to become mothers. Apparently, 25% of women who are university educated remain childless by age 40. They also found that women in more skilled professions were four times less likely to have kids than women in more unskilled jobs.
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Queen of the City: Burning the Career Candle at Both Ends
Queen of the CityThe resulting heartbreak for her young family, and consternation and sadness among colleagues at her law firm has been widely covered in the UK press.
Ms. Bailey was a partner dealing with banking and regulatory disputes, including Financial Services Authority investigations. The current economic crisis put her skills as a financial litigator to the forefront with a significantly increased workload. Returning to work six months after the birth of her third daughter into an environment where partners regularly worked 60+ hours a week, Ms. Bailey would probably also have had to take home work in the evenings and over weekends to keep up. Read more
NAFE Names Top Companies for Executive Women
Industry Leaders, Leadershipby Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)
The National Association for Female Executives has once again released their list of the top corporations for executive women-or as the site puts it, their “annual scrutiny of America’s corporations.” The 2009 list, which takes into account succession plans, metrics for managers, and commitment to bringing women into P&L posts, was expanded to include 50 companies instead of its usual ten. According to the organization, the pool of applicants increased so drastically over the past year that the expansion was necessary.
NAFE’s top ten list features some familiar faces, as well as a number of newcomers who made their presence and dedication to hiring and retaining female talent known this year. Here are the top ten companies for women, according to NAFE:
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Voice of Experience: Pam Flaherty, President, Citi Foundation
Featured, Voices of Experienceby Pamela Weinsaft (New York City)
At the age of 21, Pam Flaherty, President of Citi Foundation, was well on her way to achieving her childhood dream of becoming an ambassador. While waiting to get called up into a Foreign Service Officer class, she was accepted into the M.A. program in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. It was there that she learned more about the realities of life in the Foreign Service and decided, for a variety of reasons, that “it was not the way [she] wanted to go.”
Fluent in Arabic and French and still enamored with all things international, she obtained a position as an assistant to a very senior international monetary advisor at Citi in New York. She explained, “Citi [was a good fit because it] is a global company and was very receptive to people with odd kinds of backgrounds. I started out by doing economic research, which I knew a fair amount about [because economics was a heavy part of the requirements at John Hopkins]. But, from the moment I got here, I realized I was more intrigued by the business environment and solving business problems than by the research I was doing.”
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Ask-A-Career-Coach: How Do You Track Down Lost References?
Ask A Career CoachContributed by Caroline Ceniza-Levine of SixFigureStart
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Helping Female Leaders Succeed: Seven Best Practices
NewsWomen may be less likely to encounter blatant sexism on the job than in prior years, but a recent study suggests “modern sexism” is still keeping women from achieving the highest level of success in corporate America. Modern sexism is often defined as a more subtle form of discrimination that is deeply ingrained in a corporate culture and can be as, if not more, damaging than overt acts of gender bias. Authored by chief scientist Ann Howard and senior vice president Richard Wellins of Development Dimensions International, a consulting firm, the study is titled “Holding Women Back: Troubling Discoveries and Best Practices for Helping Female Leaders Succeed.”
Howard and Wellins’ work points out that despite the fact women represent more than half of all employees in the U.S. and the fact that women are graduating from high schools and colleges at a higher rate than men, they are not being promoted to high-level positions at the same rate as men. In fact, as women advance in their careers from early management to senior management, the number of women leaders drop off significantly.
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Voice of Experience: Janice Chaffin, President of the Consumer Business Unit, Symantec
Voices of ExperienceJanice Chaffin, Consumer Business Unit President at security giant Symantec, knows a little something about hard work. She got her first job at the very young age of fourteen, working her way up over time from cleaning person to receptionist in a doctor’s office.
Once in college at the University of California, San Diego, Chaffin took any job that came her way, including dishwashing, bookkeeping, acting as a Spanish-speaking tour guide at Disney World, and working as a medical school admissions office staffer, just to name a few. “Whatever I wound up becoming, I always knew I would work hard to achieve what I wanted, no matter what,” Chaffin said.
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