Apparently, There's A Place In Hell For Women Who DO Help Each Other

Madeleine Albright came under fire earlier this year for telling women to support Hillary Clinton because "there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other," said the former secretary of state.

Turns out there’s also a place in hell for women who do help each other.

Apparently, when women and minorities promote and hire other women and minorities, they are viewed less favorably by their supervisors and peers, according to some depressing new research published in the March edition of the Academy of Management Journal. 

People assume that women and minorities go out of their way to hire people like them -- but who might not be the best candidates for the job. The only kind of person who can hire a woman or person of color and not face negative consequences at work is a white man, according to the study.

“Basically everyone [surveyed for the study] got penalized for hiring somebody who looked like themselves -- except white guys,” said David Hekman, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado-Boulder's Leeds School of Business who coauthored the paper.

That’s because white males are unconsciously and consciously still considered model leaders and workers -- they get more leeway, he explained to The Huffington Post. And no one minds much if you hire white guys.

That's partly the reason that a stunning 85 percent of top executives and board members on the S&P 500 are white men, Hekman and co-athor Stefanie Johnson, also a Leeds professor, point out in a piece they wrote for the Harvard Business Review.

This is not a case of the most qualified candidates rising to the top, they said. It's a case of unconscious bias in favor of white men. "You don’t assume that a white guy hires a white guy because they're a white guy," Johnson said. That's because they're de facto, unconsciously considered the best candidates. And now we know, based on this research, that you'll be judged in the best light as a leader if you hire white men.

Hekman and Johnson surveyed 350 executives, asking whether they respected cultural, religious, gender and racial differences. Those executives were then evaluated by their peers and bosses, who judged women and minority executives as less competent when they hired candidates who looked like them.

The researchers also conducted a lab study to gauge what people thought about minorities hiring other minorities. The results were the same: Minorities and women were judged unfavorably for hiring diverse candidates.

You can also look to the real world for examples. Sam's Club CEO Rosalind Brewer was called a racist for explaining to CNN last year that she is committed to hiring diverse candidates for her team, the researchers point out.

DYK that the official stance by @SamsClub is to discriminate against White people as CEO Rosalind Brewer explains https://t.co/aWQrAWzx1m

— Nick Short (@PoliticalShort) December 14, 2015

The study comes at a time where more and more companies and executives are committed to hiring for diversity. Hekman and Johnson emphasized that the results shouldn’t discourage these efforts. Indeed, the research highlights the urgency with which organizations need to figure out how to hire and promote all kinds of people.

The key to doing this, Johnson said, is to figure out ways to remove unconscious biases from the hiring and promotion process. Organizations that do this will end up with more women and minorities. 

You want to make the pathways to hiring and promotion very clear and objective, removing the possibility that these decisions are made based on any reason besides competency. So you don’t promote people for being a “cultural fit,” an ambiguous term that often winds up meaning “guy who looks just like me and also likes beer and golfing.” Instead, you promote the person who increased profits or had the best code. “This way every player has an equal chance,” Johnson said.

California Reaches Deal For $15 Minimum Wage

SACRAMENTO (Reuters) - California Governor Jerry Brown said on Monday he had reached a deal with top legislators and labor leaders to gradually raise the minimum wage to $15, the latest in a wave of minimum wage increases at the state level following a push by Democrats.

The proposal, which still must win approval from moderate lawmakers in the California assembly, would gradually raise the state's minimum wage to $15, but give the governor the right to opt out if the economy faltered.

Such a move would give California the highest statewide minimum wage. The federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 an hour for more than six years.

Raising the minimum wage has cropped up on many Democratic Party candidates' agendas ahead of the November presidential, congressional and state elections. The issue could help mobilize Democratic voters and galvanize support from labor unions.

"An agreement has been reached with key labor leaders, legislative leaders and my administration to raise the minimum wage over time to $15 an hour, making California the first state to do that," Brown said at a press conference in Sacramento.

"It's a matter of economic justice and it makes sense," Brown said.

The deal would commit California to raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2022 for large businesses and 2023 for smaller firms.

The measure’s chances of passing the legislature will depend on support from moderate Democrats, who have held up other measures backed by the governor.

Democratic Party presidential hopeful U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has called for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by the year 2020.

The idea has been opposed by Republicans and some business groups, who have said a higher minimum would harm small businesses and strain the budgets of government agencies.

Christopher Thornberg, founding partner at Beacon Economics, said increasing the minimum wage was not an effective tool in reducing poverty because those most at risk of falling into poverty tend lose their jobs when employers cut positions.

"This is not costless," Thornberg said. “These are the people that businesses will say, "If I’m going to pay $15 bucks an hour, I’m not going to hire them.'"

Fourteen states and several cities began 2016 with minimum wage increases, typically phasing in raises that will ultimately take them to between $10 and $15 an hour.

 

(Reporting by Sharon Bernstein, Robin Respaut and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Grant McCool and Alan Crosby)

Why Levi's Is Giving Away Its Trade Secrets

Levi Strauss & Co. is giving away its special sauce.

The blue-jeans behemoth said Tuesday that it plans to reveal its strategies for reducing water use by 96 percent when making denim, so the tactics can be adopted by competitors across the industry. The announcement came on World Water Day, the holiday designated 23 years ago by the United Nations for celebrating the availability of fresh water. 

“Water is a critical resource for our business, the planet and people around the globe, but usable supply is becoming increasingly scarce,” Michael Kobori, vice president of sustainability at Levi's, said in a statement. “We’ve long been committed to being water stewards, but realize more needs to be done. We’re setting competition aside and encouraging others to utilize these open source tools.”

Levi's introduced its suite of 21 water-saving methods in 2011, including strategies like buying only sustainable cotton and using less water when finishing and washing denim. Since then, the company has conserved more than 1 billion liters of water. If its techniques were to become industry standard, Levi's estimates they could save 50 billion liters by 2020. 

"Making the jeans we wear is a very thirsty business," Brooke Barton, water program director at the nonprofit sustainability group Ceres, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "Levi's commitment to open source this technology means that others in the apparel sector have no excuse but to step up their game."

Levi's, whose CEO Chip Bergh famously eschews washing his jeans, said Tuesday that it plans to double-down on its sustainability efforts by 2020, the year many companies have set for overhauls in their supply chains and environmental policies.

By then, the company aims to source 100 percent of its cotton from farms certified by the nonprofit Better Cotton Initiative or from recycled material. Up to 80 percent of all Levi's products will be made with water-saving techniques, trademarked under its Water<Less brand. As part of its partnership with nonprofit The Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Foundation, it will eliminate all hazardous chemicals from its supply chain in the next four years. And, as part of an initiative backed by the White House, all corporate employees at the company will complete Project WET water education training.

The idea of allowing competitors behind the curtain in hopes of fostering higher industry standards isn't new.

As far back as the 1960s, Swedish automaker Volvo invented the three-point seat belt and promptly gave away the design to other manufacturers to make all cars safer -- not just its own. 

More recently, in 2010, Nike released a tool featuring many of its environmental design techniques, for free use by other clothing manufacturers. Three years later, the company folded the tool into a free app called Making that draws data from the Nike Materials Sustainability Index.

Nike CEO Mark Parker claims that its Flyknit technology has saved over 3 billion pounds of waste #Nike2016

— HuffPost Sports (@HuffPostSports) March 16, 2016

In June 2014, Tesla pledged not to sue anyone who used the electric carmaker's patented technology "in good faith," in hopes of cultivating a bigger industry for rechargeable vehicles. The argument was that copycat companies would expand the market, and the rising tide would raise all ships.

Levi's move is less about increasing competition and more about sharing strategies it's already developed. It's a refreshing perspective in a time of water crises. 

Why Levi's Is Giving Away Its Trade Secrets

Levi Strauss & Co. is giving away its special sauce.

The blue-jeans behemoth said Tuesday that it plans to reveal its strategies for reducing water use by 96 percent when making denim, so the tactics can be adopted by competitors across the industry. The announcement came on World Water Day, the holiday designated 23 years ago by the United Nations for celebrating the availability of fresh water. 

“Water is a critical resource for our business, the planet and people around the globe, but usable supply is becoming increasingly scarce,” Michael Kobori, vice president of sustainability at Levi's, said in a statement. “We’ve long been committed to being water stewards, but realize more needs to be done. We’re setting competition aside and encouraging others to utilize these open source tools.”

Levi's introduced its suite of 21 water-saving methods in 2011, including strategies like buying only sustainable cotton and using less water when finishing and washing denim. Since then, the company has conserved more than 1 billion liters of water. If its techniques were to become industry standard, Levi's estimates they could save 50 billion liters by 2020. 

"Making the jeans we wear is a very thirsty business," Brooke Barton, water program director at the nonprofit sustainability group Ceres, told The Huffington Post on Tuesday. "Levi's commitment to open source this technology means that others in the apparel sector have no excuse but to step up their game."

Levi's, whose CEO Chip Bergh famously eschews washing his jeans, said Tuesday that it plans to double-down on its sustainability efforts by 2020, the year many companies have set for overhauls in their supply chains and environmental policies.

By then, the company aims to source 100 percent of its cotton from farms certified by the nonprofit Better Cotton Initiative or from recycled material. Up to 80 percent of all Levi's products will be made with water-saving techniques, trademarked under its Water<Less brand. As part of its partnership with nonprofit The Zero Discharge of Hazardous Chemicals Foundation, it will eliminate all hazardous chemicals from its supply chain in the next four years. And, as part of an initiative backed by the White House, all corporate employees at the company will complete Project WET water education training.

The idea of allowing competitors behind the curtain in hopes of fostering higher industry standards isn't new.

As far back as the 1960s, Swedish automaker Volvo invented the three-point seat belt and promptly gave away the design to other manufacturers to make all cars safer -- not just its own. 

More recently, in 2010, Nike released a tool featuring many of its environmental design techniques, for free use by other clothing manufacturers. Three years later, the company folded the tool into a free app called Making that draws data from the Nike Materials Sustainability Index.

Nike CEO Mark Parker claims that its Flyknit technology has saved over 3 billion pounds of waste #Nike2016

— HuffPost Sports (@HuffPostSports) March 16, 2016

In June 2014, Tesla pledged not to sue anyone who used the electric carmaker's patented technology "in good faith," in hopes of cultivating a bigger industry for rechargeable vehicles. The argument was that copycat companies would expand the market, and the rising tide would raise all ships.

Levi's move is less about increasing competition and more about sharing strategies it's already developed. It's a refreshing perspective in a time of water crises. 

Having A Bad Day/Week/Month At Work? Here's How To Turn That Around

Michelle Gielan is a big fan of positive thinking. A former journalist for CBS News, Gielan believes that focusing on good news goes much further than harping on the bad.

Gielan, now a positive psychology researcher at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Broadcasting Happiness, previously examined the impact that solution-based news reporting had on readers. She found that people don't necessarily favor depressing or sensational stories. They also enjoy stories that present society's problems as opportunities for improvement -- and they were more likely to share those stories with friends and family.

Intrigued by the results, Gielan decided to take a look at whether a solution-based approach would help solve problems in the workplace too. Her latest research, conducted in partnership with The Huffington Post, focuses on how managers can better talk about issues in the office and get people to think creatively.

The key, once again, is to not just highlight what’s going wrong, like poor quarterly results or a change in management, but to offer solutions for those specific problems. That way, team members are thinking about how to improve going forward, rather than becoming dejected by less-than-ideal results at work.

“Managers struggle with telling their teams about bad news, but you don’t have to isolate your team from bad news,” Gielan told HuffPost. “You have to do it in a way that gets their brain moving from problems to potential solutions.”

For the study, 248 participants were asked to read an article that either revolved around a problem or explained both the problem and solutions. One article, for example, looked at food insecurity in the United States, while another discussed ways in which food bank shortages could be avoided.

Those who read a solution-based article reported feeling less hostile, less uptight and less agitated than those who had read a problem-based article. But the researchers didn't just observe a difference in participants' mood: When individuals read about solutions or actions that would be easy for them to recreate (like donating to a food bank), they improved by 20 percent on a task they were asked to complete later.

“When you remind people of their ability to control specific things, people do better” on tasks, she said.

In a way, she added, putting forward solutions among team members in an office isn’t too different from a news outlet highlighting positive stories for its readers.

“We’re constantly broadcasting info to people, as team members, as managers, as parents, and it can fuel people to success or hold them back,” Gieland said. “How can a business change what it’s broadcasting to its employees?”

Positive thinking can go beyond the office, too. A growing body of research has supported the benefits of this optimism to physical health, including reducing the risk of heart disease and improving immune system function.

But some caution against getting carried away with positive thinking. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science posits that leaning too heavily on optimistic fantasies could, in the long run, exacerbate symptoms of depression.

Instead, those researchers suggested that positive thinking be taken in the right doses -- and that people remain realistic about achieving their goals.

Even At A Company Obsessed With Fair Pay, Women Make Less Than Men

To get a sense of how complicated the gender pay gap is, take a look at Buffer, an 85-person company seemingly obsessed with paying workers fairly.

Nothing about salary is secret at the social media management company. A publicly available spreadsheet documents each Buffer employee’s salary. There’s little confusion over the rationale behind the numbers: To figure out what to pay people, Buffer uses what it believes to be a clear formula. Workers are paid according to the cost of living where they work, the market rate for their particular position and their experience level (the formula is also publicly available.)

There are no ambiguous annual bonuses doled out based on subjective measures of how you perform. Instead you get a 5 percent raise each year, categorized as a “loyalty increase.”

Yet despite a clearly scrupulous commitment to pay fairness, Buffer just realized that women at the company make less than men overall. The average annual salary for a man at Buffer is $98,705, while women make $89,205, according to internal analysis from Feb. 23, Buffer released last week -- its first look at gender and pay.

“We were surprised,” Courtney Seiter, who heads up Buffer’s inclusivity efforts, told The Huffington Post. “We’ve had transparent salaries for two and half years, we put out so much data that it never occurred to us to analyze it [for gender] until recently.”

Salary transparency is supposed to be a magical disinfectant for the stubborn scourge of gender pay inequality -- the fact that women make 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to federal data. An increasing number of companies are starting to examine how they pay men and women -- including Intel, Salesforce and Apple -- in an attempt to root out bias. (Others, like Amazon, stubbornly refuse.)

Many think that getting rid of secrecy around pay is the key to equality. California recently passed a fair pay law that protects workers who talk openly about pay. 

There’s even a bill lurking around Congress -- floated by GOP senators -- to make it easier for workers to talk about how much they make, for the express goal of getting rid of pay inequity.

“Ensuring transparency would not only make it easier for workers to recognize pay discrimination, it would also empower them to negotiate their salaries effectively,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) told an audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute on Friday, pushing for the bill, the Workplace Advancement Act, which offers stronger legal protections for workers who share salary information.

It’s not clear if Fischer thinks transparency will be enough to root out gender pay discrimination, but she used her time before the conservative group to criticize other efforts around fixing the gender pay gap, including a recent proposal floated by the Obama administration that would require companies with more than 100 employees to turn over data on worker pay, ethnicity, race and gender, with the Labor Department.

Through a spokesperson, Fischer declined to comment to HuffPost on the new Buffer data, which suggests that figuring out the pay gap does not end with transparency. You must also take a deeper look at the numbers, as Buffer is now starting to do. Fischer called such efforts -- if required by government mandate -- too cumbersome for the private sector.

Of course, knowing what your colleagues make is powerful information. The knowledge certainly helps you figure out if you’re making a fair wage. Armed with this information, women (and men) can negotiate for raises; I’ve written about this before. If Lilly Ledbetter had only learned sooner that she was paid far less than her male colleagues at Goodyear, perhaps she wouldn’t have wound up filing a lawsuit against the company that went all the way to the Supreme Court -- which she lost for waiting too long to sue.

However, the reason women in the United States make less money than men is too complicated for negotiation alone to fix.

A number of factors drive the gap. Women tend to work in lower paying fields: More men are engineers and CEOs. More women are social workers and human resource managers. At Buffer more men work as developers, who are paid more than those in customer service, for example.

This is not simply the result of choice, but a more complicated stew of gender bias that both funnels women into lower-paying fields and depresses wages in fields that are dominated by women, as a recent piece in the New York Times explained.

Within professions, women tend to make less money because they gravitate to work that is less demanding or requires fewer hours. Many need flexibility and time to take care of children and family. So more men become partner at high-paying law firms, while female lawyers might gravitate to lower-paying in-house legal jobs, for example. The work of economist Claudia Goldin at Harvard has been emphatic on this point. It also means that we take more time away from the workforce, further depressing wages.

Negotiation won’t fix this. Policy solutions might help, for example, by providing paid parental leave and, possibly, subsidized child-care that would allow more women to stay in the workforce and even out the gap.

On top of all this, there’s still the “unexplained gap,” the difference between men and women’s pay that cannot be accounted for by looking at years in the workforce or occupation. Even when you control for that stuff, women’s pay does not quite match up to men’s.

There’s plenty of blame-the-victim theorizing in this area -- where researchers look at how women negotiate pay or advocate for promotions. And how employers respond when women do step up and ask for more.

Open Salaries at Buffer: Our Updated Transparent Formula & All of Our Salaries: https://t.co/80aS4JhG9q #TalkPay pic.twitter.com/5ZoZIzS6z0

— Buffer (@buffer) February 28, 2016

At Buffer, women make less than men for a few reasons, Seiter theorizes.

First, like so many tech startups the company, founded in 2010, is majority male: 70 percent of workers are men.  Buffer’s earliest employees were men, and because of the salary formula -- remember, $5,000 a year for “loyalty” -- that means they make more money. Seiter calls this a “diversity debt.”

It’s not hard to imagine that such a debt, which puts men ahead of the game right at the founding of an organization, is common at other places.

“There are very subtle ways that this debt can accrue if we aren’t deliberate,” Seiter said, noting that the software company Salesforce (also a male-founded and dominated company) recently spent $3 million adjusting salaries to get rid of its pay gap. If Buffer hadn’t caught this, “we could’ve turned around and had a Salesforce situation,” she said.

Second, men are more likely to work as developers at Buffer. And developers are paid more. You’ll see (in the chart above) that in customer service at Buffer, women are actually paid equitably.

There's evidence that the gender pay gap is wider in fields that are dominated by men, Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at salary website Glassdoor, told Huffpost. Chamberlain is immersed in salary data, which Glassdoor collects from users of its job-seeking site. He was surprised that even at a company that practices salary transparency, there would still be a pay gap. "Fascinating," he said.

The third and trickier reason for the pay gap at Buffer could be its salary formula, Seiter said. “The only area where we haven’t licked unconscious bias is in assessing experience level,” she said. “We don’t have a hard and fast criteria.”

At Buffer an employee’s experience level -- intermediate, advanced or master -- is arrived at by considering a mix of criteria, including years in the workforce and skills. It’s perhaps telling that 61 percent of male employees at Buffer are considered advanced and just 38 percent of women get the same grade. At master level, things are more equal: 4.1 percent of women are master level, compared to 3.5 percent of men.

The company plans to take a fresh look at how it measures experience, going forward. And, at the same time, will aggressively try to hire more women in an effort to even out pay. Seiter also said Buffer wants to be more deliberate in laying out the steps employees need to take to advance up the ladder.

Still, for her part, Seiter does not believe she is paid unfairly and believes her colleagues are similarly situated. After all, this is a company where you can easily click to find out how much the guy next to you makes. “We talk about pay a lot in a philosophical way, but the talks don't have a feeling of insecurity or any kind of doubt.”

Cheap Oil Is Taking A Major Toll On Pirates

Oil companies aren't the only ones scaling down operations in the face of low oil prices. 

Pirate attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf of Guinea fell by 29 percent last year, in part because the cheaper cargo just isn't worth the danger posed by increased naval security off the west African coast.

"Since the price dropped, there has been a decline in piracy and the numbers are there," Bolaji Akinola, a maritime consultant based in Lagos, Nigeria, said in a segment that aired Sunday on NPR. "The low oil price is a deterrence. It's not much of a worthwhile venture any longer."

The number of attacks -- which include theft, kidnapping and hijacking -- fell to 49 in 2015 from 69 the previous year, according to data from Dryad Maritime, a U.K.-based consultancy.

“With oil at a low bottom price of below $30 per barrel, piracy is no longer such a profitable business as it was when prices hit $106 a barrel a few years ago,” Florentina Adenike Ukonga, executive secretary of the seven-nation group Gulf of Guinea Commission, told Bloomberg in February. “The price drop has contributed a great deal in reducing piracy and other maritime crimes in the Gulf of Guinea.”

Akinola said Nigeria, the wellspring of the region's oil supply, lost as much as 500,000 barrels a day when oil hit $100 per barrel about two years ago. 

"That is a quarter of what it is able to sell to the international community," Akinola said. 

Sunday Alamba/Associated Press

The MT Maximus -- owned by Dubai, flagged by Panama, leased by South Korea, seized off Côte d'Ivoire and saved by Nigeria -- represents the complex nature of the global oil market.

To be sure, low prices aren't the only factor keeping pirates at bay. 

The Gulf of Guinea Commission -- a treaty signed in 2001 by Angola, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria and São Tomé and Principe and updated in 2008 to include Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo -- set up a Maritime Trade Information Reporting Centre, a 24/7 communication service that monitors ships and alerts naval authorities to looters. The U.S. Navy began training with countries in the region in 2009. 

Improved coordination is yielding results. 

Last month, navies from the United States, Ghana, Togo and Nigeria pulled off “the first anti-piracy success in the region of this scale” when they freed the crew of the Dubai-owned MT Maximus nine days after it was seized by pirates off the coast of Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, according to a report in The Guardian. 

Nigerian forces stormed the ship, on lease to a South Korean company and carrying 4,700 tons of diesel fuel, after officials in São Tomé called on them for help. U.S. Navy Captain Heidi Agle called the coordinated effort "the biggest piece in progress in the region" since joint military operations began seven years ago. 

Still, the threat to oil tankers goes beyond just armed bandits boarding ships to steal cargo or ransom crewmen.

"Acts of piracy and armed robbery are only one facet of the spectrum of maritime insecurity; boundaries between various crimes are often blurred," Dirk Steffen, maritime security director of Denmark-based Risk Intelligence, wrote in an essay for the nonprofit United States Naval Institute. Piracy, he said, is just an offshoot of other gang activity in the region, including stealing crude, siphoning oil from storage sites and scamming the government for fuel subsidies.

In other words, the criminal organizations behind piracy have other illegal revenue streams to fall back on. If oil prices remain low in perpetuity, as some predict they will, scamming or stealing profits from Nigeria's oil industry may prove to just be bad business.

Investing Advice For Women Isn’t Sexist; It’s A Necessary Corrective

Sallie Krawcheck, at one time widely considered the most powerful woman on Wall Street, was fired twice from high-profile banking jobs, partly, she believes, because she was a woman.

"It wasn’t as though the boss said, 'We don’t like female parts,'" she told The Huffington Post recently. It was, according to Krawcheck, because she took an approach to business that she has since come to believe is inherently female -- focusing on long-term goals and relationships. (There was also a lot of office politics at play, to be sure.)

The "women are different" theory is now driving the 51-year-old's second act. Krawcheck has founded Ellevest, an online investing platform targeting women. Women do not invest their money at the same rate as men. The reason for this is up for debate; while some believe women are risk-averse, others note that they simply earn less money than men. 

Krawcheck has a different take: Women simply face different challenges -- like financing long career breaks for care-taking, paying for maternity leave, living longer than men, etc.

The new site is still in beta mode, with a launch planned for later this year. Krawcheck also chairs Ellevate, a women's networking company. HuffPost talked to her recently about women, Wall Street and why we’re more likely to want to have a beer with the guy running JPMorgan than with Hillary Clinton.

Why don’t women invest as much as men?

Wall Street is for men by men, I like to joke. I know lots of outstanding financial advisers who do a great job for women, but overall the industry does a great job for men. CNBC looks a lot like ESPN. The goal of investing is beating the market. It’s male. It feels competitive. When you speak to women about investing, they rarely talk about beating the market. Women talk about what they want to do in life and how investing can help them get there.

Doesn’t creating an investing company targeting women specifically just serve to keep the financial industry male dominated?

For years, I bristled at the idea that women would need their own thing. Well-intentioned journalists would say we need more hand-holding. We need simple. That’s not it. Women’s needs are different. What do I mean? We talk about the cost of a career break. That’s not something men grapple with. Women on average take breaks of up to 11 years and they are extraordinarily expensive. Another issue that impacts women more is not having mandated parental leave.

You talk about how the retirement crisis is a big women’s issue.

It is an insight I had a year ago when I was putting on my mascara one morning. We retire with two-thirds of the money that men have -- and we live longer.

If we cast retirement as a gender issue, the solution becomes about keeping women in the workforce, mandating parental leave, helping women invest more -- all of which can help grow the economy. The solutions go from depressing to pretty much all positive.

Aren’t I better off just putting my money into a low-fee index fund, rather than letting a so-called expert pick stocks for me and charge higher fees?

Over time, if investing is your only goal, yes you are better off putting your savings into a diversified low-fee index fund. That is the portfolio that we will use. I would say advisers can bring other capabilities to bear. For example, there is enormous value in a financial plan. It’s hard to go where you want to go, if you don’t know where you are going.

What was it like to be a young woman on Wall Street when you were starting out in the '80s? How do you think it’s changed?

It was outwardly hostile. I was left with a Xerox copy of male parts on my desk every morning. I don’t believe that happens now.

All those guys who were hazing you back then probably run things now.

Your theory may be correct, but when I go person by person I don’t know where they are. 

Does it ever frustrate you that for all your success, people still keep asking you “how do you do it” and “tell us about being a woman”?

Not at all. Because when I was in my 20s. Even in my 30s, there were so few female role models. When I would look around, I couldn’t see a path forward. I remember working at Salomon in London and being literally the senior woman there. I am really always very happy to talk about how I did it and how I didn’t do it and the approach, because there still aren’t enough role models.

The percentage of women in C-suites and in boardrooms is still absurdly low. Why?

If there were an answer, well-meaning people would have closed the gap. Some part is not mandating parental leave and that women don’t make it through the funnel [to the top]. Some is inherent gender bias. Likability and success in men is positively correlated. Think Jamie Dimon, you want to have a beer with him. [Editor’s note: Nope.] It’s inversely correlated for women; think Hillary Clinton. Men and women both have biases like this.

My mother told me, "I’m not going to vote for Hillary. She’s too ambitious." I said, "Mom, hello?" She said, "You do it in a nicer way, honey."

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated Krawcheck's role with Ellevate. She runs the organization but is not a founder.

Etsy's New Parental Leave Policy Is Basically Perfect

Etsy just increased the amount of parental leave it offers. Starting April 1, all workers at the Brooklyn-based company known for selling hipster-precious, hand-crafted goods will be able to take 26 weeks off after the arrival of a child via birth or adoption. 

That’s a big increase from the company's old policy, and follows examples set by a bunch of other tech companies that are racing to improve benefits as the war for talent continues.

But what truly makes Etsy’s announcement notable? It's gender neutral. Men and women at the 800-person company will be eligible for six months leave and -- this is key -- Etsy will no longer give more time off to "primary" caregivers, a falsely neutral designation that companies effectively only apply to heterosexual women.

Etsy

Etsy's headquarters in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn.

Previously, Etsy gave "primary" caregivers 12 paid weeks off, and "secondary" parents five paid weeks.

"It was playing out in a gendered way," Juliet Gorman, Etsy’s director of culture and engagement, told The Huffington Post.

"Male employees read the policy and thought, 'I must only be eligible for secondary,'" she said, adding that there's no established definition of what constitutes a primary or secondary parent. 

The company is following on the heels of Netflix, Spotify and Facebook, which now offer men and women equal paid time off. The United States has no paid leave policy, but does guarantee 12 weeks of unpaid leave regardless of gender to some new parents.

Gorman pointed out that most millennials are raising their kids in dual-income households where the expectation is that both parents share responsibilities. Designating one of those parents the primary caregiver seemed like a "dated concept," she said.

Although she didn’t know how many Etsy workers fall into the millennial age bracket, Gorman said the company adheres to a "millennial ethic," which apparently means it has a progressive bent and is concerned about the well-being of its workers. Etsy also offers such benefits as six-week sabbaticals and paid time off to volunteer.

"Etsy, regardless of age, is a very kind of plugged-in, ear-to-the ground, socially progressive company," she said.

Of course, we don't know how Etsy's new policy will play out in real life. At Facebook, for example, new fathers still reportedly take about half the time off that's offered to them.

"In many places the idea of a man taking time off at all is stigmatized. For a man to say he’s a primary caregiver, it’s downright impossible," said Josh Levs, author of All In, a book that looks at how fathers are treated in the workplace.

Primary and secondary parent designations are basically just "coded language" that reinforces traditional gender stereotypes, Levs said. 

Using a policy based on these designations is harmful is a couple of ways. First, it puts women at a disadvantage at work, as colleagues and supervisors tend to either consciously or unconsciously expect them to stop prioritizing their jobs after the arrival of a child. This typically means that new mothers aren't promoted as much, or aren't asked to take on extra responsibilities like traveling. Indeed, one study found that women’s salaries decrease with every new baby they have. 

Men, on the other hand, see their incomes rise when they become fathers. However, they’re put on unequal footing at home, deprived of key bonding time with their children and the ability to provide support to their coparent. Men who take leave are less likely to have partners who suffer from depression, one study found.

A couple of years ago, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson tweeted about taking a five-week paternity leave and encouraged other dads to follow suit.

@avleen @johngoulah @kellan CEOs & BODs should make leave not just acceptable but encouraged. Etsy BOD 100% supportive. Asked for baby pics.

— Chad Dickerson (@chaddickerson) November 7, 2014

Oh, and giving men and women different amounts of time off for caregiving -- beyond the time it takes a birthmother to heal from childbirth -- is considered discriminatory, said Peter Romer-Friedman, a Washington-based civil rights lawyer.

"Policies that give disproportionate amounts of parental leave are vulnerable to legal attack under sex discrimination laws," he said.

"Being a good dad" is now part of men's aspirations in addition to being tall & having a beard - E. Harðardóttir @IcelandUN #SharingtheCare

— MenCare Campaign (@MenCareGlobal) March 14, 2016

 

Levs knows this better than anyone. When he was working at CNN a few years ago, he tried to use the 10 weeks of parental leave his parent company Time Warner offered, but was told he wasn’t eligible. Men could get the 10 weeks if they adopted a child with their partner or used a surrogate, but fathers whose partners gave birth could only get two weeks paid time off. Ultimately, Levs filed a complaint against the company and Time Warner changed its rules.

Still, plenty of other firms hold fast to the "primary" caretaker concept, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Adobe.

When Levs asked Goldman if a heterosexual man with a wife who gives birth to a child would ever be eligible for paid leave, the company declined to comment. When HuffPost asked about this again recently, a Goldman spokeswoman said she didn’t have anything to add.

The North Face Just Destroyed Trump's Simplistic Opinion On Jobs

Donald Trump has a lame excuse for outsourcing the production of his clothing brand. The North Face, meanwhile, is proving that it's possible to keep business local. 

The Republican presidential front-runner has been criticized for using overseas manufacturing for items in his Donald J. Trump Signature Collection of suits and ties. When pressed on the issue during the GOP debate in Detroit on March 3, Trump said it's cheaper to produce clothes in, say, China and Mexico, than in the United States.

"They [these countries] make it impossible for clothing-makers in this country to do clothing in this country," Trump said. 

While he's right that it can be pricey to make clothes in the U.S., often because of high labor costs, there is a growing demand for locally sourced goods. Americans want to buy domestic -- and apparel companies like The North Face, which recently expanded its made-in-America offerings, are listening.

The North Face's newest clothing line, which launched March 1, is made entirely in the states. It's the second iteration of the company's Backyard Project, which "is about connecting with local artisans right here in the U.S.A. It’s about knowing which farms grew your cotton, who spun the yarn, or how your product was dyed,” Sumi Scott, The North Face's director of sportswear, said in a statement.

The new line features hoodies for $90 and T-shirts for $40. They're made with cotton sourced from farms in California and Arizona, spun in the Carolinas and sewn in factories in Los Angeles, according to James Rogers, sustainability manager at the apparel company. North Face did not provide sales figures for the line. 

Bright Black/The North Face

The Backyard Project is now available in several new styles and colors.

The company unleashed its original Backyard Project series in 2014. The year before, nearly 80 percent of Americans said they preferred American-made products over foreign-made ones, per a survey from Consumer Reports. Market research by The North Face confirms these findings, Rogers told HuffPost.

Production of domestically made clothes jumped 35 percent between 2009 and 2013, according to American Apparel and Footwear Association, an industry trade group.

“There’s starting to be this consumer base that appreciates [locally sourced products],” Tim Kraft, assistant professor of business administration at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, told The Huffington Post. “A lot of it is around food, and it’s an interesting concept to take to other retail products.”

The trend is still small, though. In 2013, only 2.6 percent of the clothes sold in America were made on U.S. soil. Some apparel companies, like workwear brand Carhartt, are now focusing on producing more affordable "Made in the U.S.A." clothing, in part to help their garments appeal more to shoppers. 

In addition to supporting American businesses, producing apparel in the U.S. probably has a lower energy footprint than manufacturing garments in, for instance, China or India, two of the major countries exporting garments to the U.S.

"Facilities [in America] are going to be more environmentally compliant," Beril Toktay, faculty director of the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business at Georgia Tech's Scheller College of Business, told HuffPost. 

But making clothes in America doesn't 100 percent guarantee that they'll have a smaller environmental footprint. For instance, sourcing cotton from California, as The North Face's Backyard Collection does, might sound like a questionable move, given the state's historic drought. 

"If The North Face is purchasing cotton from California, I would actually be a little worried about the local footprint of their sourcing strategy," Toktay said.

Rogers insists, however, that "California cotton farmers are some of the most efficient in world."

JC Video Productions/The North Face

Cotton.

Sourcing locally has another potential advantage: It can cut down on the lag time between when a producer places an order for materials and when that shipment arrives. This can make companies nimbler and more responsive to what shoppers want. 

"If you can manufacture locally, then you can respond much more rapidly to consumer demand," Toktay said.

Shorter supply chains are also easier to police. Long, complicated networks make it hard for retailers to know whether the farms and factories contracted to make its materials are meeting high labor standards.

"The retailers don’t often have a lot of direct, day-to-day contact with all these factories,” Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, told the U.S. News and World Report in 2014.  

Spanish textile company Inditex, which owns the popular Zara brand, has relied on local and regional sourcing for years. In 2012, Zara sourced almost half of its products from Spain, Portugal and Morocco, creating a short supply chain that could be manipulated quickly in response to changing tastes.

Inditex's strategy may be paying off. In 2015, the company’s profits rose 15 percent, and Zara's CEO, Amancia Ortega, became the world’s second-richest man. However, the company has dealt with repeated allegations that some of its suppliers in Brazil, Argentina, Turkey and Eastern Europe used sweatshop labor to produce Zara garments. 

While the North Face can keep a close eye on its Backyard Project line, this is just one part of the company's overall business. For the rest of its products, the North Face sources from 33 countries, including the U.S. 

Bright Black/The North Face

Employees at JC Industries trimming threads on the Backyard Project t-shirts as the final stage in the production process. JC Industries, based in Los Angeles, started in the 1970s making custom trims and has expanded its operations over the years to offer vertical manufacturing.

The North Face shares parts of its supply chain with its parent company VF Brands, which has attracted criticism in the past for sourcing from factories in Bangladesh, a country notorious for weak labor protections.  

However, after the 2014 collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Bangladesh killed over 1,100 workers, VF founded a coalition with 26 other companies to collectively dedicate five years and $50 billion to improve labor conditions in the factories they use. The North Face belongs to this coalition through VF. 

Despite the advantages of making goods in the U.S., domestic production has some drawbacks. Areas where consumers live don’t always have the highest quality source materials, for example. 

When you think about locally sourced goods, Kraft said, you have to ask: “Is there a potential quality risk?” 

The North Face hopes the Backyard Project will show that companies can make quality clothing while returning to traditional ways of producing goods, according to Rogers.

"Really, this is an old way of making apparel," Rogers said. 

Trump seemed to say during the March 3 debate that he would move his clothing operation back to the U.S., where his "Make America Great Again" hats are already produced. Doing so would bring his company's practices into line with his oft-repeated vow to "bring jobs back" from foreign countries. 

However, as tends to be the case with his grand promises, it's anyone's guess whether he'll follow through on this one.

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

Editor's note: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims -- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion -- from entering the U.S.

4 Things You Need To Know About The Latest Jobs Report

The monthly jobs report came out on Friday, and things are pretty good overall.

The big headline numbers were great: The economy added 242,000 jobs in February, much higher than the 195,000 that economists estimated, and the unemployment rate remained at 4.9 percent, which is nice and low. 

But if you drill down into the data, the picture is a little murkier.

Here are four things we know about the economy from the details in this report:

1) Wages aren't growing much, and it's hard to say why.

Average hourly earnings were down by 3 cents in February, to $25.35. Year-over-year, wages are up about 2.2 percent. That's not great -- although, thanks to very low oil prices and low inflation, it's not terrible either. But it's worth asking why wage growth since 2010 hasn't been as robust as growth in previous recoveries. 

Shane Ferro/Huffington Post

2) Nonetheless, people are coming back into the labor force.

As we said earlier, the economy added 242,000 jobs this month. But perhaps more importantly, details in the household survey show that more than 500,000 entered the labor force by starting to look for work again. In order to be officially unemployed, a person must not have a job and must be looking for work. Discouraged workers, who have given up looking for jobs, aren't counted as part of the labor force. It's a sign of a healthy economy when those people start looking for jobs again, even if they don't find work immediately.

3) But the unemployment rate for blacks is twice the unemployment rate for whites.

The unemployment rate for whites in the United States is 4.3 percent. For blacks, it's 8.8 percent. This is an economic dynamic that has been persistent since the Labor Department started tracking unemployment by race back in the 1970s. The chart below is not really America's best look: 

Shane Ferro/Huffington Post

There's a huge racial disparity in the unemployment rate in this country.

4) There is a lot of growth in low-wage industries.

The retail industry added 55,000 jobs last month, and food service added 40,000. These have been some of the strongest growth industries over the last few years, which means the economy is adding a lot of low wage, service sector jobs. That said, the economy also added a lot of health care (38,000) and construction (19,000) jobs in February, which tend to pay quite well. 

This Could Explain One Of The Biggest Mysteries Of Cheap Oil

The price of oil has crashed over the last year and a half. In the middle of 2014, a barrel of crude cost over $100. Now it's worth just over $30.

Normally, such a collapse would lead OPEC to pump less oil. The idea is that less oil on the market helps keep prices up. But despite a historic fall in oil prices, the Saudi Arabian-led international oil cartel hasn't budged: The biggest step it has taken so far is offer to freeze production at its current record levels. Production cuts are not on the table.

The big question is, why? One theory is that OPEC simply has less control over the oil market than it used to, thanks to the shale gas revolution. Another possibility is that OPEC wants oil prices to be low precisely in order to drive shale oil producers, which have higher costs, out of business. 

Here's a simpler hypothesis: Maybe the Saudis aren't cutting production in the face of low prices because huge portions of their oil reserves might eventually become worthless. That's what James Rowe, an environmental studies professor at the University of Victoria, thinks. 

If that happens, today's oil prices won't look low -- not when there's an overabundance of an asset that can't be sold. But oil prices are the lowest they've been in 12 years, you say. How could they ever be considered high? 

This explanation relies on two related ideas: a carbon bubble and stranded assets. The carbon bubble refers to the fact that energy companies around the world are sitting on five times more fossil fuels than can be burned, the research nonprofit Carbon Tracker estimates. Those assets, worth about $2 trillion, are referred to as "stranded assets."

So what does that mean for an oil company that controls a state? It might as well sell as much oil as possible while still can.

Saudis can't sell oil for $100 a barrel, obviously, but Rowe said they "appear to be positioning themselves for the next best option: gobbling up as much of the earth’s remaining carbon budget for themselves before the bubble bursts. Isn’t it better to sell at a lower price than to receive nothing at all from vast unburnable reserves?"

By the time the world has moved on from oil, Rowe said, Saudi Arabia "will have sold what it could while its reserves were still burnable."

And the country will have moved on as well. Its oil minister, Ali Al-Naimi, has said Saudi Arabia will be a solar exporter by the middle of this century. 

Warren Buffett Is Wrong About Climate Change

Warren Buffett doesn't want you to know how his empire is preparing to deal with the disastrous effects of climate change. In fact, he said in a letter released Saturday, he isn't exactly sure this whole "climate change" thing is real, anyway.

In his annual letter to investors in his conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway, the billionaire investor fought back against a proposed shareholder resolution demanding his insurance subsidiaries measure and disclose the risks that climate change poses to their business and how the company is responding to the threat. Buffett compared fears over climate change to the brouhaha around apocalyptic Y2K predictions.

“It seems highly likely to me that climate change poses a major problem for the planet,” the 85-year-old wrote in the letter, released Saturday morning. “I say ‘highly likely’ rather than ‘certain’ because I have no scientific aptitude and remember well the dire predictions of most ‘experts’ about Y2K.”

Insurance companies take on losses after major weather disasters (think droughts, Hurricane Katrina and other big storms), so it makes sense they'd be concerned about climate change. If that's true, why would Buffett say he's not so sure this is real? Because skepticism is better business.

Buffett isn’t denying climate change, but rather using language climate deniers feel comfortable with and will likely cite in future attempts to derail environmental policy. Climate change affects Buffett's business: He owns a Nevada utility that has fought and won against solar development in that state, and his railroad, Burlington Northern, in large part depends on the demand for coal and oil.

Buffett argues in favor of seeing climate change as a likely risk to the world, but against the need for more oversight, transparency or regulation of his companies. It’s a position he’s taken before -- Buffett argued against designating reinsurers, of which he owns the world’s fifth-largest, as too-big-to-fail institutions. Though he said he never spoke directly to regulators about the issue, he made his views public. Regulators, thus far, have agreed.

Why Buffett's Words Matter

Markets, governments and companies aren’t properly pricing the risk of climate change. For instance, are beachfront homes in low-lying areas as valuable as their owners believe? Experts reckon that only once markets and others attach a price to the threat of climate change will the rest of the world finally move to limit the potential consequences. If insurers -- which must grow their assets in order to make good on their guarantees -- measure the potential losses they could incur as a result of climate change, they can then price that risk. Then everyone else could follow.

Buffett's views against disclosure put him in sharp disagreement with Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who has said that financial markets can help limit the effects of climate change, but only if companies -- such as insurers -- supply the kind of information that Buffett doesn't want to disclose. 

In September remarks to the insurance industry, the chief overseer of the world’s third-largest insurance sector warned about the numerous economic and financial risks posed by climate change. Carney urged companies, particularly insurers, to start taking seriously their responsibility to measure their potential losses. Their own solvency could be at stake, Carney warned.

Insurance companies invest their money in places like the stock market. But “stranded" oil, gas and coal reserves, left in the ground due to the world’s commitment to halt rising temperatures, could render related financial assets worthless. Or the disruption of trade resulting from an extreme weather event could affect related investments.

Cynthia McHale, director of the insurance program for Ceres, a nonprofit group that pushes investors to pay attention to the financial risks of climate change, said in an interview earlier this month that neither insurers nor their government overseers have a good handle on the risks that climate change poses to insurers’ various financial assets.

McHale compared the situation to the one faced by big banks in 2008, when few sufficiently realized the magnitude of potential losses from the U.S. property bust. 

Weathering Heights

Buffett's case against the resolution boils down to this: “Thinking only as a shareholder of a major insurer, climate change should not be on your list of worries.”

First, he said, his company can handle any possible losses thanks to rising premiums. Because insurance policies are typically written for one year and repriced annually, Buffett's company can hike premiums to better account for the heightened risk of climate change-driven losses.

Second, Buffett asserts that climate change has produced neither “more frequent nor more costly hurricanes nor other weather-related events covered by insurance.”

But eight of the 10 costliest hurricanes in U.S. history, in terms of insured losses, have occurred since 2000, according to the Insurance Information Institute. Nine of the 10 costliest floods in U.S. history, when measured by payouts from the federal government’s National Flood Insurance Program, also have occurred since 2000, according to the insurance group.

NOAA

The U.S. experienced five different types of extreme weather last year. 

Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, estimated that extreme weather events led to $510 billion in insured losses from 1980 to 2011.

Carney said that according to Lloyd’s of London, the world’s oldest insurance market, the roughly 8-inch rise in sea level at the tip of Manhattan since the 1950s increased the insured losses from Hurricane Sandy by 30 percent in New York alone.

PAUL J. RICHARDS via Getty Images

A house in Staten Island, New York, hit in Hurricane Sandy. Scientists say we should prepare for more weather events like the massive storm.

Insurance companies should care about climate change from a selfish perspective if they want to stay in business. Carney has warned that insurers that jack up premiums or exit markets after realizing the potential losses associated with climate change could unwittingly cause the value of their own assets to shrink.

He also warned about potential losses from claims on policies written by insurers. For example, insurance companies could be forced to make massive payouts if victims of climate change successfully hold accountable companies that contributed to it. He likened the situation to the one faced by U.S. insurers stung by tens of billions of dollars in losses from asbestos claims.

In fact, Carney said that as a result of recent weather trends, some now estimate that insurers are undervaluing their potential losses by as much as 50 percent.

Insurance companies caught unprepared for the effects of climate change could cause problems for government officials and put taxpayers at risk.

For example, governments may have to cover markets that insurers dump as a direct result of climate change, the Bank of England chief said, putting taxpayers on the hook.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Mark Carney, the U.K.'s top central banker, says insurers may be undervaluing their potential risks by 50 percent. 

What Could Change If Insurers Opened Up About This Risk

Disclosing climate change information would improve policymaking, Carney said. It could make climate policy more like monetary policy, where officials who set interest rates often tinker with their stance based on markets’ reactions.

The Financial Stability Board, a global group of the world’s financial regulators, wants financial companies to disclose their risks, too.

Some state insurance regulators in the U.S. are demanding insurers take the threat posed by climate change into account when investing their customers’ money and underwriting insurance policies. Washington state’s insurance regulator, Mike Kreidler, has criticized some insurers for failing to take climate change risks seriously, arguing their own solvency was at risk.

Buffett sounded more alarmed by the prospect of climate change in 2007, when scientific evidence of the impacts of climate change was less well-understood. In his annual letter that year, Buffett wondered aloud whether the deadly and expensive hurricanes of 2004 and 2005 marked the first warning of a new type of climate.

“It would be a huge mistake to bet that evolving atmospheric changes are benign in their implications for insurers,” Buffett wrote in his letter.

He warned that it was “naïve” to think of Hurricane Katrina -- the costliest hurricane in U.S. history -- “as anything close to a worst-case event.”

“These could rock the insurance industry,” Buffett added.

 

Half Of New Cars Could Be Electric By 2040

Electric vehicles could make up half of all new car sales by 2040, as long as oil prices eventually increase, according to a study released Thursday by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The cost of the lithium-ion batteries that power electric vehicles is quickly decreasing, but sales suffered last year as oil slid below $30 per barrel, making gas-guzzling vehicles more affordable in the United States. If oil remains at rock-bottom prices, it could delay electric vehicles from becoming mainstream for at least the next four years.

“In a scenario where they become widespread in fleets and ride sharing scheme, new EV sales could reach 50% of new car sales by 2040,” Salim Morsy, senior analyst at BNEF, wrote in the study. “However, persistently low crude oil prices could also keep adoption as low as 25% by 2040.”

Electric vehicles currently make up about 1 percent of global annual car sales. Four major factors will determine whether they'll make up half of the market by 2040.

First, battery prices must continue to fall. This is likely to happen for a few reasons. Demand continues to be high, as more automakers release electric vehicles and the energy storage industry begins to pick up pace. To fill those orders, manufacturers are upping their production. Tesla, for example, is building a $5 billion factory in Nevada that will, at its peak, produce more lithium-ion packs per year than were created in the entire world in 2013.

“It’s very important, insofar as being a first move for establishing large-scale manufacturing assets globally,” Morsy told The Huffington Post on Wednesday. “But, relative to the install demand needed in the future to supply what we project to be demand, it is certainly not as important.”

Second, self-driving technology must become commercially viable. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last month, nearly every major automaker unveiled some kind of autonomous driving technology. And with good reason: Google is testing driverless, electric cars. Tesla just released a limited autonomous feature that allows its cars to steer themselves. Uber last year raided Carnegie Mellon University's robotics department, hiring away its top scientists to develop self-driving technology that will eventually replace its drivers. 

Analysts expect Tesla, Uber and other car companies to eventually own and operate fleets of autonomous vehicles. If they're advanced enough to drive themselves, they'll ideally be advanced enough not to use oil.

Third, oil prices need to bounce back. Unless the price of crude returns to $50 and $70, as some predict it will by 2020, electric vehicles are unlikely to exceed 5 percent of new sales in most markets for the next four years, Morsy said. Low price projections actually halve electric vehicles’ market share forecast. If current oil prices continue into the next decade, electric vehicles may only make up 25 percent of new car sales by 2040.

Fourth, the electric auto industry must overcome the fact that it’s navigating a combustion engine’s world. By 2030, BNEF expects charging ports to become standardized, much in the same way any vehicle on the road now can connect to a petrol pump at any gas station. Improved infrastructure -- and the normalization of plugging your car in nightly at home or at the office during the day -- will help the industry clear the range issue that has long dogged it. Just as no one likes having a dead smartphone, no one wants to be left with a car that runs out of battery.  

“By and large, by 2030, we think the infrastructure issues around charging EVs will be addressed,” Morsy said. “That means standardization around charging for vehicles -- at the moment, it’s not a standardized market -- as well as availability of charging points.”

Yet one of the biggest challenges to electric vehicle adoption may not be an economic headwind, but political sabotage. Last week, HuffPost reported that billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are planning to launch a $10 million campaign aimed at once again killing the electric car. Still, at this point, the industry may be too far along.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, one of the most famous business leaders fighting to wean humanity off fossil fuels, summed it up nicely:

Sigh …https://t.co/VelOzAKIW6

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 19, 2016

White House Predicts Robots May Take Over Many Jobs That Pay $20 Per Hour

The White House is worried that robots are coming to take your job.

In a report to Congress this week, White House economists forecast an 83 percent chance that workers earning less than $20 per hour will lose their jobs to robots.

Wage earners who receive up to $40 in hourly pay face a 31 percent chance they'll be replaced by robots, while workers who are paid more than $40 an hour face much lower odds -- about 4 percent -- of losing their jobs to automation.

The estimates underscore the myriad threats facing low-wage workers in America, who in recent years have been buffeted by stagnant wages, decreasing employment prospects and higher education costs if they wish to obtain additional credentials in pursuit of better-paying jobs.

In an economy increasingly defined by the yawning gap between rich and poor, White House economists worry that increased automation could exacerbate inequality as the well-paid enjoy the fruits of robot-fueled gains in productivity while everyone else is left to fight for scraps.

One study cited by the White House found that automation has particularly hurt middle-skilled Americans, such as bookkeepers, clerks and some assembly-line workers. A lack of additional training and education opportunities led these workers to settle for lower-skilled positions, and likely lower wages.

Already, the White House noted in its report, most economists reckon that changes in technology are "partially responsible for rising inequality in recent decades."

Robots and other advances in technology are forecast to displace a significant number of blue- and white-collar workers, according to 48 percent of experts surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2014. They also said that robots and so-called digital agents will displace more jobs than they create by 2025.

Many experts surveyed by Pew said they are concerned that the rise of robots and other technological advances "will lead to vast increases in income inequality, masses of people who are effectively unemployable, and breakdowns in the social order."

It's not a new worry. The famed economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930 about "technological unemployment," or the theory that workers could be displaced due to society's ability to improve labor efficiency at a faster rate than finding new uses for labor.

But White House economists said they don't have enough information to judge whether increased automation will help or hurt the U.S. economy. For example, new jobs could emerge to develop and maintain robots or other new forms of technology.

"While industrial robots have the potential to drive productivity growth in the United States, it is less clear how this growth will affect workers," the White House said in its report.

There are two important questions, according to White House economists. First, if robots replace existing workers, will workers have enough bargaining power to share in their employers' newfound gains? Second, will the economy create new jobs fast enough to replace the lost ones?

Falling union membership -- some 11 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union last year, down from about 20 percent in 1983 -- suggests that workers may not have much power to demand higher wages from employers who are automating them out of a job.

The economy could create enough new, good-paying jobs to help those displaced by robots, but the plight of manufacturing workers who have lost their jobs in recent decades as manufacturers moved abroad suggests that this, too, could be a challenge.

Instead, according to the White House, the key is to maintain a "robust training and education agenda to ensure that displaced workers are able to quickly and smoothly move into new jobs." With most Americans now financing higher education through debt -- about 1 in 8 Americans collectively owe $1.3 trillion on their student loans -- amid an era of sluggish wages, it's unclear whether higher debt burdens will lead to a better economic future.

MasterCard Wants You To Pay For Stuff With Selfies

MasterCard is rolling out a new strategy in the fight against credit card fraud: It wants you to pay for things with your face.

At the Mobile World Congress tech show in Barcelona this week, the credit card company unveiled its new “selfie pay” feature, which will allow cardholders to use an image of their face or a fingerprint to verify their identity when making payments online.

.@MasterCard is launching selfie payments https://t.co/jd71s9e4vp pic.twitter.com/LhCv6h3B0q

— CNNMoney (@CNNMoney) February 23, 2016

To use selfie pay, cardholders will have to download MasterCard’s app to their mobile device or tablet. Customers will still need to provide their credit card details to make purchases, but if further authentication is required, they can hold their device up to their face and take a photograph or use the device’s fingerprint sensor.

To prevent fraudsters from abusing the service, MasterCard said users will have to blink to prove they’re not holding a photograph up to the camera. The company said it also has algorithms in place that can detect if someone is using a previously-filmed video.

MasterCard plans on rolling out the feature in the coming months in several countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and parts of Europe.

The move came after a series of successful pilot tests last year. MasterCard told the BBC that 92 percent of its test subjects “preferred the new system to passwords.”

“I think the whole biometric space is a great way of protecting yourself when you are doing payments,” Ann Cairns, head of international markets for MasterCard, told CNBC. “There are a whole range of biometrics that say ‘I’m me, I'm making a payment’ and it just makes the whole thing more secure.”

According to The Verge, MasterCard is currently looking into other biometric security options beyond facial recognition and fingerprint scans. Specifically, the company is considering using sensors to read a person’s electrocardiogram -- the unique electrical signal produced by his or her heart.

“While even fingerprint or facial recognition requires input from the user, heartbeat recognition can take place seamlessly in the background,” The Verge explained. “You just wear a bracelet and it sends a signal to devices you're near to prove you're you.”

To prevent identity theft and fraud, many banks and companies are turning to biometrics to amp up security mechanisms. The Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba recently introduced its own “selfie pay” feature while British bank HSBC announced new security measures this week that allow customers to authenticate their identity with a fingerprint or voice command.

“The problem with online payments has always been that the card doesn't need to be present, hence the credit card companies have charged more for the transactions to cover the costs of fraud,” Windsor Holden, head of forecasting at the U.K. tech consultancy Juniper Research, told the BBC. “If they can introduce a mechanism that makes the system more secure than merely asking for a password, then the hope would be that fraud levels decrease and the savings can be passed back onto merchants, and perhaps consumers too.”

Still, experts have warned that even biometric authentication measures like facial and fingerprint scans aren't foolproof. Privacy is also a concern.