Only four out of 100 Canadian companies have more than one woman in a senior position, and 74 firms are exclusively male.

The top corporate offices at Canada’s largest companies held even fewer women in 2007, according to a report, but a leading women’s executive network says the decline is no big deal.
The third annual Rosenzweig Report on women in senior management in Canada found that out of 535 top corporate jobs, only 31, or 5.8 percent, were held by women, down from 37, or 6.9 percent, the year before.
“This drop is disheartening and makes you wonder if anything is really going to change over the next 10 years, or even longer,“ Jay Rosenzweig, managing partner of Rosenzweig and Co., said in a release.
But Pamela Jeffery, founder of the Women’s Executive Network, a leading organization dedicated to the advancement of executive-minded women, says that the smaller number of female officers is “not a statistically significant group.“
“I think that the fact is we are staying around 6 percent and that’s consistent with the US,“ she told Reuters.
“In the US, 6 percent of the Fortune 500 top executives are female, so we’re in the same league.“
The Rosenzweig report shows that Canadian banks seem to be doing well in promoting women to top positions.
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of Montreal and Toronto-Dominion Bank all have at least one woman in a senior position, while Royal Bank of Canada has two.
But only four out of the 100 companies analyzed had more than one woman in a senior position, and 74 firms were exclusively male when it comes to their top jobs, the report shows.
“Unfortunately, there are still a lot of barriers in the workplace that are preventing women from getting into those officer positions and I think that’s what we need to see employers focus on,“ Jeffery said.

India’s President Pratibha Patil urged women to learn martial arts like judo and karate for self-defense and self-confidence to face the challenges of discrimination.
“Self-defense is the best defense,“ Pratibha said, according to Newkerala.com.
Pratibha, the first woman president of the country, asked the government to ensure women’s security at work places and insisted that strict action should be taken against those who indulge in “reprehensible acts like eve-teasing and molesting.“
Urging the women to fight discrimination, Pratibha said: “They should work determinedly for their own empowerment. One important step in this direction is imparting physical education--like judo and karate--for self-defense to girl students from a very early age so as to make them physically strong and to build-up self-confidence to face the challenges of life.“
The president’s advice came in the wake of increased cases of molestation and rapes reported from different parts of the country.

Nearly half the candidates being fielded by Spain’s ruling Socialist party in general elections on March 9 will be women, the party said.
In a statement released after the party had approved its election lists, the party said 49 percent of its candidates will be women, up from 42 percent when the party swept to power in March 2004, reported AFP.
“We are the guarantee of equality between men and women and we are absolutely determined to eliminate all barriers that still exist in our society that limit the possibilities for women’s personal development,“ Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told a party meeting in Madrid.
Zapatero has made gender equality a hallmark of his liberal-minded government.
Within days of taking office he appointed a cabinet made up of eight men and eight women, including a female deputy premier--a level of gender parity that put traditionally macho Spain on a par with Scandinavian countries.
In April parliament passed a law that requires all companies with more than 250 employees to create gender equality plans, and the largest firms to have 40 percent female boards of directors within eight years.
The new law also requires women to take up at least 40 percent of the lists of candidates that parties field in elections.
The government has also set up a system unique to Europe of special courts for victims of gender violence and streamlined divorce proceedings.

Women who work nights may come home to a day of domestic duties.

Women who work shifts are more likely to retire early due to ill health than male counterparts, a study suggests.
The health risks of shifts are already well-documented, but this Danish study points to a clear gender division.
Some 8,000 men and women working both regular and irregular hours were followed by Danish researchers, BBC reported.
Shift-working women were over a third more likely to claim an early pension for poor health, the Occupational and Environmental Medicine study found.
Women--whether shift or day workers--on the whole were more likely to claim the Danish disability pension than men, the team at the National Research Center for the Working Environment in Copenhagen found.
But while male shift workers were no more likely to retire early than other workers, female shift workers claimed disability pension much more frequently than both their male counterparts and women who worked days.
The differences remained even after researchers had taken into account other risk factors, such as smoking, weight and socio-economic group.
“Shift work“ in this study was defined as anyone whose hours regularly changed or who worked fixed evening and night work. These were compared with permanent day workers.
Studies have already linked shift work to a range of health conditions, including heart disease, breast cancer and peptic ulcers, as well as potentially causing problems during pregnancy.
Stress, lack of sleep and hormonal disturbances have all been cited as factors.
“It is therefore not surprising if the incidence of disability requirement is higher among shift workers, but we have no knowledge about why women should be more vulnerable to shift work than men as our study suggests,“ said report author, Dr Finn Tuchsen.
However occupational health experts speculated it could well be linked to the “double burden“ that female workers carry.
“Women are much more likely to come home to domestic work, and the strain of this combined with what we already know about the impact of shift work could explain the findings,“ said Dr. Phil Tucker of Swansea University.

The number of Yemeni families dependent on the income of female members has reached 11.7 percent.

Hadheah, a woman in her seventies, is used to begging on the streets for money to support her children. Divorced while pregnant with her fifth child, she was left to raise her children without help from their father or her extended family.
“When we got divorced, the father refused to take responsibility for the children, so I was forced to take care of them which caused a lot of problems for me,“ she said. Hadheah’s family also refused to be of any assistance. To make things more difficult, she has no formal education, making it difficult for her to find work, reported Yobserver.com.
“I knocked at different doors, but no one cared. So I found myself in the streets begging and saving money for my children. It was especially difficult for me to beg in the extreme heat of the sun. Also, many men tried to abuse me,“ she said.
Hadheah is not the only woman in Yemen who has been forced to make a living by working on the streets.
There is an increasing number of women who have turned to begging or selling various products on the streets as a means of income.
Poverty, and the absence of a central male figure responsible for taking care of the family, have both been identified as the main causes for the plight of these women.
Although poverty in Yemen is decreasing, the rate is slow--two percent in 2007-- leaving a large percentage of the population below the poverty line, according to the latest report addressing poverty in the country, organized by the Ministry of Planning and Cooperation.
The number of Yemeni families dependent on the income of their female members has reached 11.7 percent, according to the annual report for the National Survey of Poverty in 1999. Since then the number of females who work, especially in the streets, is increasing.
Most of the women find themselves in this position in order to obtain food for their young children.

An orange tree covered with snow in Iran's Yazd province.

Women who experience headaches, irritability and mood swings as menopause nears will likely see these symptoms diminish as menopause progresses, new research suggests.
“So many symptoms are attributed to menopause, with the belief that they get worse with menopause,“ Dr. Ellen W. Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, told Reuters Health. But “a number of women will find relief once menopause is reached.“
Freeman and colleagues followed 404, 35- to 47-year-old women for nine years to investigate how typical menopausal symptoms, along with concentration problems and anxiety, might change over the course of menopause.
They found that women who experienced headaches saw them diminish as menopause approached. Irritability and mood swings also decreased in the menopausal transition as assessed by hormone levels.
Levels of follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) increase with menopause, and Freeman and her team found that both mood swings and irritability fell as FSH levels rose.

The number of abortions in the United States fell to 1.2 million in 2005, down 25 percent from the all-time high of 1.6 million in 1990 and dropping the abortion rate to its lowest level since 1974, according to report, AP said.
The Guttmacher Institute, which surveyed abortion providers nationwide, said there likely were several reasons for the decline, including more effective use of contraceptives, lower levels of unintended pregnancy and greater difficulty obtaining abortions in some parts of the country.
The institute’s president, Sharon Camp, noted that despite the drop, more than one in five pregnancies ended in abortion in 2005.
According to the Guttmacher data, the number of abortions declined by 8 percent between 2000 and 2005, from 1.31 million to 1.21 million--the lowest total since the 1.18 million abortions tallied in 1976.
The 2005 abortion rate of 19.4 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44 was the lowest since 1974, when it was 19.3.

As women’s participation in the kingdom’s national development increases, special women’s sections with all female staff have opened in several government offices.
Several municipality offices in the kingdom have also opened sections exclusively for women so that they will get more involved in both administrative and field activities of local governments.
And of course permitting women to work in areas which were formerly the exclusive domains of men is a bold move in Saudi society. Ahmad Al-Ghamdi, director of media relations in the mayor’s office told Arab News that the Jeddah Mayor’s office had recruited 16 women computer operators and information technologists.
They began working on the first working day of the new Hijri year which was Jan. 12. “Our office plans to increase women’s participation to other branches including the field inspection of commercial establishments,“ Al-Ghamdi said.
Women have also been employed in the administrative department of the office.