Long ago I gave up trying to break through the so-called “glass ceiling” that has kept women like me out of higher management. Instead I decided to create new enterprises in which management could be reinvented by women. On 8 March 2005, I launched a business incubator devoted exclusively to projects by female entrepreneurs.

Just how significant is international migration in the light of other globalisation developments? One obvious starting point for answering the question is to ask how many of the current world population of 6.7 billion people are international migrants, defined as persons living outside their country of birth.

Women political leaders remain a rarity in OECD countries. True, there is Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand, and high-profile women candidates are battling it out in major election campaigns in France and the US. But did you know that women are still vastly outnumbered by men in all the world’s parliaments?

It is a century since Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes, one for physics and the other for chemistry. How can more women be encouraged to work in science? A timely question in view of International Women's Day on 8 March.

“Tradition is a guide and not a jailer”, wrote W. Somerset Maugham. Could it be that some traditions, however rooted in great histories and cultures, are now trapping countries in poverty? This certainly appears to be the case when it comes to the influence of social and cultural norms on the status of women.

Which came first, working mothers or day care centres? More mothers in the workforce generally spur the development of childcare facilities. In this study of four of the wealthier OECD countries–Canada, Finland, Sweden and the UK–where three out of four women between the ages of 25 and 54 hold down jobs, the Swedish experience suggests that without publicly-assisted childcare, the upper limit for female employment would be around 60%.

Gender equality has come a long way since International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Europe in 8 March 1911. But while there is reason to celebrate, there is also far more to be done. The Gender, Institutions and Development Database (GID), a new OECD database (see link below), can help point the way forward. It shows deeply rooted social norms and traditions continue to harm women’s economic opportunities in many countries around the world.

Barriers to gender equality may be deep seated and hard to change for cultural reasons, but leaders, business and civil society groups have a role to play in helping to change mindsets. The payback if they try would be substantial.

Gender equality strengthens longterm economic development. This assertion is not some wild, passionate claim, but is based on a new analysis of the relationship between birth rates and attitudes toward gender equality in a range of countries.

World AIDS Day 2004 kicked off on 1 December with the slogan, “Have you heard me today?”. The slogan was coined by women, who account for about half of the people infected with HIV/AIDS, but who often don’t have a say in protecting themselves against the disease.

Choosing the career track versus the family track is a personal choice that has become a global concern. Family-friendly policies are essential, says Babies and Bosses - Reconciling Work and Family Life, not only to promote child development and family wellbeing, but to reduce poverty, underpin productivity and bolster employment in our ageing societies.

You argue about integrating more women into the workforce to raise productivity, describing them in the same breath as other disadvantaged groups, including the old and the disabled. I wonder how productive all “able” groups are, women or men? Blaming low productivity on those who are not in the workforce seems misplaced in some cases and definitely ignores the economic role of women not in the workforce.

In almost all industrialised countries, the last few decades have seen a sharp rise in female participation in the labour market accompanied by a decline in birth rates. Not so in Italy, though, where increases in female labour force participation, in particular for mothers with young children, have been modest, and where fertility has declined dramatically.

The number of women going out to work has risen sharply in many OECD countries over the past 40 years, but they still account for less than half the workforce. And while the female share of the working population rose from 33% in the US and the UK in 1961 to more than 45% today, elsewhere trends are less marked. In Japan, women’s share of the total workforce fell to 38% in 1981 from 40% in 1961 before climbing back up to 41% in 2001, close to the OECD average of 42.6%.

The number of women going out to work has risen in most OECD countries in recent years and their wages have risen too. But no matter how the gender wage gap is measured, women’s hourly earnings are still below those received by men in all countries, averaging 84% of male wages, or a wage gap of 16 percentage points, the latest OECD Employment Outlook found.

Girls have overtaken boys in the literacy stakes when it comes to reading, both in their ability to understand what they read and in their tendency to read for pleasure.