Women leaders are criticized for their age — no matter how old they are, researchers find

• Emily Peck, author of Axios Markets

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

It doesn't matter if a woman is young or old or somewhere in between — any age can be viewed as the wrong one for women leaders, write three researchers in a new article in Harvard Business Review.

Why it matters: This kind of "double-whammy" age-gender bias holds women back from promotions and, consequently, leadership roles.

Zoom out: The piece, titled "Women in leadership face ageism at every age," is part of a larger study — a qualitative survey of U.S. women leaders across four industries — that found that across a range of traits women are often viewed as "never quite right."

• "They were too short or too tall, too pretty or too unattractive or too heavy. They had too much education or not enough...," the researchers wrote in a separate article for Fast Company.
• Women lost out on leadership roles because they were "single, married, or divorced."
• "There was no personality trait sweet spot, as introverted women were not seen as leaders and extraverted [sic] women were viewed as aggressive."

Zoom in: Age was one of the biggest issues for women — across generations.

• Under age 40, women were patronized — patted on the head, called "kiddo," the researchers found. They also face a "credibility deficit," where they're not believed or taken seriously.
• Between ages 40 - 60 some women are judged to have too many family responsibilities, or were passed over for promotions because of "menopause concerns," or because they "don't look vital."

• Past 60, women are seen as outdated, their voices discounted and ignored.

What they're saying: "First, we are too young to be responsible or to supervise," one lawyer told the researchers. "This lasts into our mid- to late-thirties but does not for men. Then in an instant, we are too old to be hired for anything or anywhere new."

Flashback: Earlier this year, CNN host Don Lemon faced criticism for saying that at age 51, Republican Presidential candidate Nikki Haley "isn't in her prime." It's not a criticism you see leveled against men of a similar age.

‘Hostage situation’: Egypt’s decade-long rights crackdown


By AFP
Published June 29, 2023

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi (R) led the ouster of his Islamist predecessor and now rules a nation where expressions of dissent has been quashed - 

 GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP/File MARIO TAMA, VASILY MAXIMOV

Ten years ago, Egypt’s then-defence minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi rallied citizens by promising to move the country out of the “terrorist” shadow of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi.

Today, the former general rules a nation where expressions of dissent have been quashed, the media is muzzled and the justice system is a labyrinth even legal experts say they cannot navigate.

Over the decades, Egypt — the most populous Arab nation and a key US ally — “was never a very liberal democracy”, said Hossam Bahgat, founder of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

But today’s level of state repression is unprecedented, say rights activists.

For decades, Egyptian “activists and lawyers have been imprisoned for their opinions”, said human rights lawyer Mahienour El-Massry.

Now, she said, “ordinary citizens are accused of terrorism because of a TikTok sketch or a Facebook post complaining about the cost of living”.

The United States has accused Egypt, one of its top military aid recipients, of torture, “life-threatening prison conditions”, free speech restrictions and the persecution of the LGBTQ community.

This week marks a decade since Sisi deposed Morsi in popular protests — the last time Egyptians demonstrated en masse, after the overthrow of veteran ruler Hosni Mubarak in the 2011 Arab Spring.

Sisi assumed power a year later and has since tightened his grip on the nation of now 105 million people.

A decade on, said Bahgat, “the entire country lives in fear of arrest, open-ended detention with no due process.

“We went from self-censorship to the entire population living in a hostage situation.”

– ‘Zero demonstrations’ –

On Egyptian streets that once echoed with protest chants, “there are literally zero demonstrations a year”, Bahgat said.

“For the first time in Egypt there is not one single opposition newspaper, there is no way for the population to express dissent in an organised manner.”

According to rights groups, 562 websites are now blocked, including of independent news outlets, non-profits and rights organisations.

Authorities regularly ban rap and electronic music performers and have prosecuted young female social media influencers for “violating family values”.

Bahgat said Egypt has “turned into a carceral state. It is the worst decade in the modern history of the country when it comes to human rights”.

Authorities point to reforms, including lifting a long-standing state of emergency, and a revived presidential pardoning committee that has released hundreds of political prisoners.

Long accused of brutal prison conditions, Egypt has opened new “rehabilitation centres” with libraries and workshops for inmates.

Under a new “national dialogue”, former prisoners “speak to those within the institution, with much enthusiasm”, according to its coordinator Diaa Rashwan.

But rights defenders — many of whom have had their assets frozen and remain under travel bans — label such gestures mere manoeuvres.

Measures once allowed under states of emergency have been streamlined into laws which “have been turned into oppression tools”, said Bahgat.

“Even at the height of authoritarianism… the judiciary had to create a legal basis for abuse,” he said. “That has ceased to exist.”

– Caught in the system –

Today, the judiciary has been made compliant through the censures, transfers and promotions of judges that cement the loyalty of those left, activists say.

Egypt now ranks 135th out of 140 countries on the Rule of Law Index by the World Justice Project.

One of the many citizens caught up in the justice system is finance manager Samer al-Desouki, 32, who was arrested on the street over a year ago and remains in pre-trial detention, Bahgat told AFP.

While his family swore he had nothing to do with Islamists or the liberal opposition, his lawyers have been unable to access the file of the state security detainee.

An anti-terrorism court in the city of Damietta acquitted Desouki of “belonging to a terrorist organisation” three times last year.

And yet each time, Bahgat said, he was handed a new case number under the same charges that restarted the clock on his pre-trial detention.

Lawyers now attend their clients’ detention hearings via video call in what was once a Covid safety measure.

Massry describes seeing “20 detainees on screen at once… flanked by guards, they can’t talk about their conditions in detention.”

There is no way to verify how many Egyptians are behind bars, and authorities refuse to release figures.

Rights monitors say that so far this year at least 16 inmates have died in state custody, at least five of them in new rehabilitation centres.

Massry can only report what she has seen during several past stints in detention. In 2016, the women’s prison she was jailed in held around 30 political prisoners, she said.

When she was arrested again in 2019, she recounted, “there was an entire wing reserved for political cases, with some 200 people inside”.

Too Many Workers, or Too Few: India’s Massive Employment Challenge

by Brian Neeley
June 28, 2023


The dirt streets of Musallahpur in the northern Indian city of Patna are filled with pedestrians, banners and vending carts familiar to commercial centers across India. However, the hue and cry here is directed towards a single goal: to help youth get government jobs.

Musallahpur is full of brick-barn classrooms where 20 people crowd with their heavy bags to train for standardized employment exams. With about 1,800 applicants for each of the state’s top-tier jobs, they know it’s a long way to the last. But in a country where semi-employed drudgery defines life for millions, it is their only hope.

A thousand miles south, in the city of Coimbatore, M. Ramesh, a busy automotive parts entrepreneur, is tackling the other side of India’s deepening employment challenge. If the government has far more potential employees than it needs, Mr. Ramesh has far fewer.

To make complex aluminum castings that operate at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour with precision, they need workers who are willing to stay on the job, learn and earn. But he says he could not find enough people from the poorer north or elsewhere in the country who were competent and reliable. So he was one week away from partially automating his plant — turning to machines in the hope of employing fewer humans.

As India overtakes China to become the world’s most populous country, bridging its economic disparity is perhaps its most important task. Success could mean a more moderate-income future that delivers on the country’s world-shaking promise. Failure to do so could lead to a large part of India being mired in widespread poverty for decades to come.

The fate of the greatest generation of workers on the planet hangs in the balance.

India’s young and growing population, with more students dropping out of school every year to start careers, is the envy of countries that are facing a growing citizenry and a shrinking workforce. Its economic growth of about 6 percent per year is also a global bright spot.

But that growth isn’t creating enough jobs. And the jobs that businesses have to offer are often not in line with the skills and aspirations of India’s potential workforce.

It affects the whole world. If India’s economy, now the fifth largest and becoming more deeply embedded in the global exchange of goods and services every year, is to fuel growth elsewhere, as China does, it needs to do more with its workforce. Should take more advantage.

Within India, the long-term consequences of failing to provide enough jobs to its youth can be dire. The unfulfilled desires of these workers, more educated and more indebted than ever before, have become a destabilizing force. In the state of Bihar, whose capital is Patna, youths set trains on fire last summer, angered by a plan that could eliminate jobs in the armed forces.

Quiet exposure is a colossal waste of human potential. India’s anticipated “demographic dividend”, as its population continues its steady but manageable growth, may instead result in a vast majority being forced into incomplete and unproductive work when they are not completely out of employment.

Plus, managers grapple with enormous personnel problems. Finding people willing to uproot themselves for the most important factory jobs for long-term economic growth can be difficult. They can be expensive to train, and nearly impossible to maintain.

Economists say that if India is to follow the traditional path of development, it needs a more robust manufacturing sector. But as owners try to sidestep their labor issues by opting for automation, India is headed for “premature deindustrialization,” before manufacturing jobs can do their usual poverty-alleviation magic. Just disappearing.

Jayakumar Ramadoss, joint managing director of Mahindra Pumps, another fast-growing industrial company in Coimbatore, said, “We will either have to go for full automation, where we will have to reduce our manpower significantly, or do business with fewer people. Will happen.”
striving people

In India’s youngest, poorest and fastest-growing state, Bihar, with more than 120 million people, a feudal social structure and low rate of urbanization give rise to the old chicken-or-egg riddle that asks Why keep a poor place poor.

Here entrepreneurship seems to be another name for self-employment, and self-employment a euphemism for unemployment. More than half of India’s workforce is technically self-employed. That work is often piecemeal: imagine a railway station where 10 rickshaw pullers wait for passengers but the fare is enough for only two or three.

Hence, in India, many youngsters aim not for the stars, but for stability. In Bihar it means a government job, however low it may be. For example, the post of under-registrar in the Prohibition Office is also a coveted prize.

But competition is stiff. Around five lakh youth appeared for the Bihar Public Service Commission’s annual preliminary examination for a total of 281 jobs in February. For every batch of 2,000 hopefuls, 1,999 will walk away without taking anything.

At the national level, the situation is almost as bad. From 2014 to 2022, Indians filed over 220 million job applications with the central government. Of those, only 720,000 – less than a third of 1 percent – were successful, a government minister told parliament.

Yet, every year, Bihar’s capital, Patna, attracts thousands of students from densely populated rural areas, spending each year writing notes on calculus, geology and everything else they might encounter in state exams .

Praveen Kumar, 27, is both a student and employee at a coaching center in Patna. Although his parents never left their family farm, he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and moved to wealthier parts of the country in search of work.

What he saw saddened him. Friends with engineering degrees got jobs on the assembly line making mobile-phone chargers for $146 a month. It is much more than what he would have earned in his home village, but not enough to leave his family behind for too long.

When Mr. Kumar returned to Bihar feeling defeated, he said, “I was getting depressed sitting at home.” He sometimes even contemplated suicide. In such a bad moment, the dream of entering the civil service arose in his mind.

Since then, he moved to Patna and attempted to clear the exam four times. While studying, he earns $110 a month by doing video production work on lessons for students like himself. With this he feeds himself, his wife and his 4-month-old child.

In India, where absolute unemployment hardly exists, many people are similarly distressed. “People cannot afford to be unemployed,” said Amit Basole, professor of economics at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. “So, of course, they are working all the time, but they are working in occupations with very low pay and low productivity.”

The one exception to this is the educated youth – they are at that stage of life when they can, in essence, try to do something better. Unemployment levels reach 15 to 20 percent for people under the age of 30 with at least 12 years of schooling, Dr. Basole said. In young women, it can go up to 50 percent.

When there is nothing to be gained, even the most educated youth must choose whatever work they can find, whether it is working as a laborer in the city or helping in the fields back home.

In Mr Kumar’s home village, Nai Naiyawan, the symptoms of unemployment are visible in subtler ways. In the quiet rural lanes, a large number of beautifully carved wooden doors are locked. Whole families have left their homes in search of temporary work.

It is not as tough a place as it was when Mr. Kumar’s father was young; There is now adequate electricity, cheap phone and internet service, and subsidized food grains. “There are no jobs here,” says the younger Mr. Kumar. “Otherwise, all things are good.”

Those who are still in the village are taking care of the livestock and are openly wasting their working days. Except for men starting in their early 20s. They are completing university degree and dreaming of government standardized exams.
help Wanted

The valley around Coimbatore in the southern state of Tamil Nadu is a model of what India wants for itself in the coming decades. The state’s fertility rate is much lower than Bihar. Coimbatore’s business community is diverse, with approximately 100,000 small to medium-sized companies specializing in casting, machining, and irrigation equipment.

These businesses do not have a steady supply of reliable labor. Mr. Ramesh, managing director of auto parts maker Alphacraft, is optimistic about almost every aspect of his business. With orders rising and shipping costs being streamlined, they see growth potential across three continents. His only problem: a workforce he can’t trust “because they’re all coming from far-flung parts of the country.”

Most of the 200 workers from outside Tamil Nadu are from Bihar and speak only Hindi (Tamil is spoken by most people in Tamil Nadu).

Mr. Ramesh needs them because the youth of Tamil Nadu are looking elsewhere. So many people have earned advanced degrees, often bachelors in technology, that they don’t want to stay in the factory. They would love to earn less driving scooters for delivery apps (“jobs in technology”) and daydream about finding a professional job someday.

But it takes a lot of hard work to train the working class people of Bihar. Factory owners say they come with low levels of literacy and unfamiliarity with the schedules and standards that apply on modern, semi-automated factory floors.

Mr. Ramesh is the sole manufacturer of Aston Martin parts in Asia. The training investments he makes in migrant workers become a costly proposition when 80 percent of them “float”, he says – they leave at unexpected intervals, often for major festivals, and never return. Returning This keeps their HR department struggling.

Mr. Ramesh takes pride in providing a good life to those who remain loyal to his company, which is much more than what a government job salary in Bihar would pay. Still, he and other Coimbatore owners and managers are investing heavily in automation. For now, they need their migrant workers, but once they are able to afford more investment, they expect to need less of them.

Without much industry in places like Bihar, and without a greater supply of able, willing factory workers in places like Coimbatore, the great opportunity represented by India’s demographic moment remains in the shadows.

Canada Express Entry: 4300 invites issued in the latest draw

 + 500 invites under healthcare category

ByVrinda Rastogi

Jun 29, 2023 

Canada Express Entry draw invites 4300 candidates along with 500 more

 under the first round of the Healthcare category. STEM invites are to be

 issued on July 5.

On June 27, Immigration Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) invited 4,300 candidates in the fifteenth Express Entry draw of 2023. To qualify, the candidates were required to score a minimum of 486 points in the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS). Previously, a similar draw was held on June 8, inviting 4,800 candidates with the same CRS cut-off score.

A Canada flag flies in Hamilton, Ontario. (REUTERS/FILE)

Express Entry’s Comprehensive Ranking System is used to manage skilled worker applications. The candidates are ranked according to their scores in CRS. It evaluates the candidate (and if applicable, their spouse or partner) based on their human capital. The highest-scoring candidates are invited by the Canadian Government to immigrate there.

In a positive turn of events, IRCC announced in May 2023 introducing the addition of a category-based selection of Express Entry candidates. These are meant to help meet specific economic goals. They will likely vary from year to year depending upon the evolving priorities of the Canadian immigration system. Specific, category-based draws will be held starting in late summer.

The categories chosen for 2023 are as follows:

1. French-language proficiency
2. Healthcare occupations
3. Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) occupations
4. Trade occupations
5. Transport occupations
6. Agriculture and agri-food occupations

In the new draws, candidates possessing the required work or language experience for the occupations within these categories will receive Invitations to Apply (ITAs). A significant portion of the eligible categories is made up of Healthcare and STEM occupations. Nearly half of the occupations are represented by Healthcare alone.

On July 28, the first category-based selection round issued 500 invites under Healthcare. The second round for Healthcare will issue 1,500 more invites on July 5. Skilled workers with experience in STEM occupations will also be invited on July 5.

Applicants with work experience in any of the listed occupations must also be part of the Express Entry pool to be eligible for an ITA. The introduction of category-based selection does bring additional opportunities yet a high CRS score still remains crucial. Candidates with the highest scores are more likely to receive an ITA.

Express Entry is an online application management system used by the Canadian government for skilled workers who wish to migrate to Canada. It allows the invited candidates to gain permanent residence in the country. It is the fastest pathway into Canada as 250,000 economic immigrants are invited through this system every year.

Also Read | Canada express entry system: Draws, timing and tie-breaking rule explained

Why Americans felt bad about a good economy — anemic wage growth

• Emily Peck, author of Axios Markets

Data: BLS via FRED; Chart: Axios Visuals

Turns out how you feel about the economy likely comes down to your paycheck: If your wages are outpacing inflation, things look rosy — if not, well, that's quite dispiriting, a new paper finds.

Why it matters: The paper from economist Darren Grant answers a puzzle plaguing economists and journalists since 2022. That is, why was consumer sentiment so dismal even as the economy roared and unemployment hit record lows?

• The findings have big implications politically as President Biden tries to sell Americans on the success of "Bidenomics."
• The contradiction between how Americans feel about the economy — and the actual state of the economy — will play a key role in the 2024 election, Axios' Hans Nichols writes.

Driving the news: In a speech in Chicago on Wednesday, Biden talked up his economic record, pointing to historic job growth, the low unemployment rate (especially for women and Black people), and his infrastructure legislation, among other things.

• Biden touted record wage growth for low-wage workers, too.

Between the lines: The thing is, the overall picture for wage growth is a less positive story. Until very recently, real wage growth — that is, factoring in the impact of inflation — was negative for Americans on average.

• Now, finally, as inflation eases, real wage growth is turning positive (see the recent reversal in the chart above). And consumer sentiment is picking up, too, as Axios' Neil Irwin reports.
• The key question now: Will it last?

"The deal isn't really sealed with the American public until real wages start to grow," said Grant, a professor at Sam Houston State University in Texas.

Zoom in: Back in 2014, Grant published a paper looking at decades of consumer sentiment polling and economic data, and found Americans' views of the economy were deeply connected to the unemployment rate: When the jobless rate was low, people's moods brightened.

• When he updated the research last year he found that was no longer true. But he couldn't quite understand why.
• He wasn't alone: Economists and journalists both puzzled over this. Some attributed the shift to partisanship, media coverage, COVID, or inflation.
• Still wondering, Grant spent the past year looking at wage growth data from the Atlanta Fed to see how it correlated with his data on sentiment. Turns out, there was a strong connection — particularly among workers in their 30s and 40s, who are most strongly attached to the workforce.

The bottom line: When people's incomes are going up, they feel better. "It's a pretty straightforward explanation that works," Grant said.