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ESSENTIAL VOCABULARY

WOMEN IN BUSINESS

 

I. What is the ratio of males to females in your speciality at university?

 

II. How many female managers are there, especially at higher levels in organisations in your country?

 

III. Why do you think this is like that?

 

IV. Alison Maitland is the co-author, with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, of Why Women Mean Business: Understanding the Emergency of our Next Economic Revolution. Read what she says in the first part of her interview about women in business, and answer the questions.

 

1. What two reasons does Alison Maitland give for saying that the proportion of women in business is a strategic business issue and not a women’s issue?

2. What does she mean by ‘talent pool’?

 

Well, there are several key reasons why women mean business, and why this issue is now really a strategic business issue – it’s not a women’s issue – and why it’s time for CEOs to get serious about sex, as we say in the book.

One of these is the talent side of the equation, and that is that these days women actually account for majority of university graduates. Six out of ten university graduates in North America, and in Europe, are women, so that’s the talent pool, that’s more than half of the world’s, the developed world’s, intellectual potential.

Another aspect is the market and the importance of women as consumers, and in the United States, eight out of ten consumer spending decisions are made by women these days, and that’s not something peculiar to the US, it’s a trend that’s being followed by other countries, like Britain and France, Scandinavia, and we’re going to see more of that. So women as earners earning money independently, spending, making big spending decisions, even in Japan two-thirds of car purchases are either made by or influenced by women.

 

V. Vocabulary 1. Match the words and word combinations to their explanations.

 

1. mean business a. a person who acquires goods and services for his or her own personal needs
2. equation b. something that is bought with money
3. consumer c. be serious about sth
4. spending decisions d. special
5. peculiar e. a situation or problem in which a number of factors need to be considered
6. purchase n f. resolutions what goods or services to acquire with money

 

VI. Listening. Listen to the second part of the interview, where Alison Maitland gives a third very good reason why companies should have a number of women directors or senior managers. What is it?

 

VII. Vocabulary 2. Match the following words and expressions, used by Alison Maitland, with their definitions.

 

1. critical mass a. doing better than others, financially
2. outperforming b. the amount of money a company earns on the investment of its shareholders
3. return on equity c. the number of people needed to start and sustain a change
4. leadership ranks d. the ability to make a good return on capital invested in the business
5. profitability e. top levels of management

 



VIII. Discussion. The importance of women in business

 

1. What do the figures about consumer spending decisions made by women (80% in the US, 66% of car purchases in Japan) tell you? What is the situation in your country?

2. Why do you think that (according to research studies) companies with more than 30% of women on the board of directors or in senior management are so much more profitable than companies without?

 

IX. Read this extract from an article in the British newspaper The Guardian, and answer the questions that go after the extract.

 

Rolf Dammann, the co-owner of a Norwegian bank, recently had his skiing holiday interrupted by some unwelcome news. The government had published a list of 12 companies accused of breaking the law by failing to appoint women to 40% of their non-executive board directorships. His company was one of the dirty dozen – attracting international attention.

‘I work in a man’s world. I don’t come across many women and that’s the challenge. The law says a non-executive director has to be experienced, and experience is difficult to find in women in my sector. People have had to sack board members they’ve worked with and trusted for 20 or 30 years, and replace them with someone unknown. That’s hard,’ Dammann says.

This month, Norway set a new global record. It now has, at 40%, the highest proportion of female non-executive directors in the world, an achievement engineered by the introduction of a compulsory quota.

‘A woman comes in, a man goes out. That’s how the quota works; that’s the law,’ says Kjell Erik Øie, deputy minister of children and equality. ‘Very seldom do men let go of power easily. But when you start using the half of the talent you have previously ignored, then everybody gains.’

In 2002, business leaders argued that experienced senior women were impossible to find.

Dammann appointed his two women last June, after what he says was a six-month’ time-consuming’ search. He’s not a convert to the quota, though.

‘I think people will still go to those they have trusted for years, whom they have had to remove from the board,’ he says. ‘So there will now be a formal and informal system, and that cannot be good for accountability.’

 

X. Comprehension.

 

1. What is the Norwegian law?

2. What reasons does Rolf Dammann give for not having complied with the new law?

3. What does the CEO say about the two women he has had to appoint as directors?

4. What does Dammann say will happen as a consequence of the new law?

 

XI. Vocabulary 3. Find words in the article that mean the following:

 

1. Meet or find unexpectedly or by accident

2. Required, obligatory, necessary according to the law

3. An officially imposed number or quantity

4. Someone who changes their beliefs

 

XII. Discussion. Compulsory quotas

 

1. What do you think about the imposition of compulsory quotas concerning the number of women board members?

 

XIII. Translate from English into Russian.

 

The world is full of business gurus claiming to hold the key to female success. Tracy Mackness has gone one better: she has the key to keeping young women out of prison.

These days Mackness, 50, runs award-winning gourmet sausage business The Giggly Pig Company, and her bestselling autobiography, Jail Bird: The Life and Crimes of an Essex Bad Girl, is being discussed as a possible Channel 4 sitcom by the producers of Shameless.

But not so long ago she was a convicted locked up drug dealer.

Tracy says a special programme in prison turned her life around and is calling for the course to be offered in schools, in order to reach girls before they go disastrously off the rails.

In and out of jail from her 20s, Tracy was drawn deeper into the Essex underworld, eventually becoming a drug-debt collector known as “The Queen”. At 37, she was sentenced to 10 years for her part in a conspiracy to import £4m of cannabis.

This sentence turned out to be the start of a new chapter for Tracy, giving her space and time to think and refocus.

She ended up taking a process that aims to reprogramme the brain.

“The course is so intense and because you role play over and over, it sinks in. At first it was ‘let’s just get it over’. Then I started to think ‘this actually makes sense’. I started thinking more clearly. I could see my life had to change. I came out of prison with a different mindset.”

Mackness now gives talks to schools, colleges, women’s organisations, magistrates, police and community groups.

Mackness was 13 when her dad went to prison and her world started to fall apart. Her parents divorced and her dad didn’t stay in touch. “I was left behind and that was the start of me going off the rails,” she explains.

“If I’d done this course at 13 or even 18, my life would have been totally different. I would have thought ‘Stop! Think what you are doing.”

The course represented a complete turnaround for Mackness, who went on to qualify in pig husbandry while serving her sentence, after working with British saddlebacks on the prison farm. She set up Giggly Pig when she was released in 2007. Now her business includes an 800-pig farm and shop near Romford, Essex, and employs 22 people.

Mackness’s extraordinary life story was published by Simon and Schuster in 2013. Between the business, the writing and the TV talks she still doles out tough love to teenagers at risk of choosing the wrong path.

“At one college in London the teenage girls didn’t particularly want to be there,” she says. “When I put my banner up they were kissing their teeth. After half an hour I said, ‘I’ve got here under my own steam to tell you how I went wrong and turned my life around. I didn’t have to do it.’

“They quietened down and listened, then came over afterwards and apologised. To me, it showed they didn’t even know that the way they were behaving wasn’t right. No one called them on it.”

Mackness has seen where that kind of unchecked attitude can end. “When I was in jail one girl was in and out nine times,” she says. “I thought, why doesn’t someone take her under their wing?”

So she opens her wings for her younger staff, continues to speak about her experiences and tries to pass on some of the lifechanging skills she learned the hard way.

“I would like to think that one person in the room will end up having ambition and running their own business,” Tracy says. “And they’ll do it without going to jail first.”

 

 

ESSENTIAL VOCABULARY

account v for sth

accountability n

acquire v sth

appoint v smb as

come v across smb/sth

comply v with sth

compulsory adj

consequence n of sth

consumer n

consumer spending decisions

convert n to sth

critical mass

equality n

equation n

figure n

get serious about sth

ignore v sth

impose v sth

imposition n

interrupt v smb/sth

leadership ranks

male/female manager

mean v business

non-executive board directorships

outperform v sth

peculiar adj

profitability n

proportion n

purchase n and v

quota n

ratio n

remove v from sth

replace v sth/smb with sth/smb

return n on equity

sack v smb

strategic business issue

university graduate

women’s issue

 


Date: 2016-04-22; view: 3521


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