Women in Business at SFSU

04/23/2018

Hi WiB friends! Interested in starting a career in digital marketing? coop.cx is recruiting for their next cohort for Fall 2018, and they are hosting an information session tomorrow!

COOP is a Google funded program and connects students as well as graduates to meaningful careers in tech, media and design. If you are interested in learning digital marketing and analytics skills for FREE and want to apply for a spot in their next cohort, join them at the information session to meet with the program manager and learn more. Open to current students (all levels), and alumni!

COOP Information Session – Start Your Career in Digital Marketing
Tuesday, April 24 @ 2:00PM - 3:30 PM
SFSU Holloway Campus, room BUS 202

- RSVP Info session at http://pi.sfsu.edu/e/55462/sfstatecoop/ctwdvy/532204980

- Visit COOP’s website at www.coop.cx

- Made up your mind? Apply now at http://coop.cx/fall-2018/

04/05/2018

Hello WiB community,

AXA Advisors and the Ladies Professional Golf Association will be holding a Women at the Top of Their Game panel and networking event. The event will be held Tuesday, April 24th from 4-6.30pm at the Presidio Golf Club.

The event is free for students! Don't forget to RSVP Sarah May at [email protected] by April 13th, 2018.

03/01/2018

Thank you everyone who attended the interviewing workshop today! There were so many useful takeaways from our discussion. Here's the list of common interview questions we worked on:

02/21/2018

Hi everybody! For Women in Business Wednesday this week, we’ll be keeping it casual with a social hour before evening classes. Come hang out with your fellow MBA/MSA students and chat about school, career, or whatever else is on your mind.

Wednesday, 2/21
5:15-6:15pm
SFSU Downtown Campus
Room 597 (*new location this week*)

Please feel free to bring snacks for yourself or for sharing. As always, we are inclusive, and all are welcome.

02/13/2018

The Ethics & Compliance Roundtable brings together students, faculty and the business community to discuss current topics surrounding business ethics and compliance. PG&E, Kaiser Permanente, Salesforce.com, Starbucks Coffee Co., Genentech, Salesforce.com Foundation, FedEx, Bank of San Francisco, and...

02/12/2018

If you’re looking to achieve your career ambitions, it’s not enough to come up with New Year’s resolutions. Resolutions are intentions waiting for a plan of action, they’re basically a wish list. To accomplish them, you should start by setting SMART goals.

SMART stands for "Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound”. It answers these questions to ensure you’re setting goals that are actually attainable:

-Specific - Have you clearly defined what you want to accomplish?
-Measurable - Have you identified targets and milestones to track your progress?
-Achievable - Is your goal realistic and manageable?
-Relevant - Have you identified a goal that fits with your career ambitions?
-Time-bound - By when will this goal be accomplished? / How often will this task be done?

The link below demonstrates how to set a SMART goal:

Using the SMART acronym can help ensure that managers and employees share the same understanding of goals set during performance review conversations. As you create goals, answer the following questions to be sure that you are following the SMART approach:

02/05/2018

Have you kept your New Year’s resolutions so far? How about your career goals? In February, we will discuss goals and ambition in the workplace.

This article from Boston Consulting Group offers data that refutes the myth of women being inherently less ambitious in the workplace than men, especially as they age or when they become mothers. The data shows that ambition is not a fixed attribute but is nurtured—or damaged—by the daily interactions, conversations, and opportunities that women face over time.

The article also offers four steps for management to make leadership more inclusive and more aspirational.
1. Build a gender-diverse leadership team with the right role models.
2. Change the informal context.
3. Make and relentlessly promote structural changes such as flexible work.
4. Track progress and involve everybody.

According to new BCG research, women don’t step off the leadership track as much as they’re pushed off, by negative corporate cultures. Yet CEOs can take steps to improve.

11/27/2017

Throughout November, we have been discussing business ethics, and how companies are expected to be ethical in today’s business world. But what about engineering ethics? Being located in the Bay Area exposes us to the newest advancements in the tech world, as well as ugly incidents such as the internal memo by a male Google engineer who claimed female engineers were fundamentally less capable than their male counterparts.

A common viewpoint held by engineers — called ‘engineering purity’ by this HBR article — means engineers believe they need to protect the purity of their profession from extraneous considerations that threaten engineering’s rationality and rigor. This has two implications. Firstly, engineering purity causes students’ commitment to public welfare to decline significantly over the course of their engineering education and their careers. This outdated notion lets engineers think they should ‘invent stuff and let others cope with the consequences.’

And secondly, it lets engineers who are low in social or emotional intelligence off the hook. ‘Pure’ engineers get a pass in thinking about how their words and actions affect others and even create a hostile work environment. This is especially relevant in a world where robust levels of both gender and racial bias exist in the engineering industry.

Have you ever noticed ‘engineering purity’ in action? Share it with us in the comments!👇

Former Google engineer James Damore’s memo is the tip of an iceberg.

11/20/2017

Imagine you’re the CEO of a company. You’ve been reading the articles shared on the Women in Business page under November’s theme of “Ethics in Leadership”, so by now you’re convinced that leaders should set the tone for ethics at the top, and being ethical brings positive effects to an organization. You’re just not sure how much those positive effects are in numbers. Is it worth it?

An experiment done by WSJ puts the financial returns of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in perspective. In the experiment, consumers were shown the same coffee product, but one group was told the items had been made using high ethical standards and another group was told low standards had been used. A control group got no information. The consumers were then asked what they were willing to pay for a pound of coffee. Here are the results:
-Ethical standards: $9.71
-Unethical standards: $5.89
-No information: $8.31

Not only the consumers rewarded ethical companies by paying a premium, but they punished unethical ones by demanding steep discounts. It was clear that being ethical brings financial returns.

Which products do you prefer to buy for being produced ethically? Share it with us in the comments!👇

For corporations, social responsibility has become a big business. But does it pay off?

11/13/2017

Our first article for November’s “Ethics in Leadership” theme listed the companies who have won Ethisphere's World’s Most Ethical Companies award. This week, we’re sharing a conversation about ethics with the leaders at Ethisphere, Aflac (11-time recipient of the award), and Voya Financial (4-time recipient).

Some of the highlights of the interview are:
- Timothy Erblich, CEO, Ethisphere: “ ‘Good Ethics is Good Business.’ In fact, there is a growing body of data, including our own, that shows that the financial return of ethics (ROE) is significant.”
- Dan Amos, Chairman and CEO, Aflac: “Your culture begins at the top. Building a culture of ethics will not work if leaders are not providing the moral compass.”
- Rodney Martin, CEO, Voya Financial: “Building an ethical culture must be centered on doing the right thing — in a safe and open environment — where anyone can speak up and identify behaviors that are not aligned with a culture of trust and integrity.”

What’s your most recent experience of ethical behavior from a business or an employee? Share it with us in the comments!👇

As CEOs seek ways to not only differentiate themselves, but to do the right thing, the common denominator is a foundation of ethics. This article share direct quotes from 3 top authorities.

11/01/2017

Next week is Business Ethics Week at SFSU, and the theme for November on our page is “Ethics in Leadership”! The leadership team sets the tone for how an organization will be run, and running a business in an ethical manner builds a foundation of ethical behavior for the whole organization, creating long lasting positive effects. Throughout the month, we will discuss various topics such as what those positive effects are, and how companies can be run more ethically.

This week’s article highlights the most ethical companies in 2017. In its 11th year, a survey conducted by Ethisphere resulted in a list with the world’s most ethical companies. The most notable aspect of the 2017 results? Of the 124 firms on this year’s list, 13 have made the cut every single year, including: Aflac, Deere & Company, Ecolab, Fluor, GE, International Paper, Kao Corporation, Milliken and Company, PepsiCo, Starbucks, Texas Instruments, UPS and Xerox.

What’s your most recent experience of ethical behavior from a business or an employee? Share it with us in the comments!👇

From sexual harassment allegations at Fox News to widespread fraud at Wells Fargo, we saw no shortage of corporate scandals in 2016. But year after year, many firms also show a strong moral compass. This week Ethisphere launched its annual list of the world’s most ethical companies.

10/27/2017

Hi WiB members!✨

We’ve been busy preparing for our events for Business Ethics Week, and we can’t wait for you to join us on November 8th and 9th at the downtown campus! There will be more details coming your way, but for now here’s some information if you would like to mark your calendars🗓️:

**Wednesday, November 8, 5 PM-6:15 PM, DTC Room 597: Kohl Gill of LaborVoices**
LaborVoices is the world's first public, transparent ranking of factories on open social metrics, and has reached over 40,000 workers in 11 countries on 4 continents. Kohl Gill is the founder of LaborVoices, and the recipient of many honors and awards including: Ashoka Fellow; the Purpose Economy Asia 100; Echoing Green Fellow; and the Clinton Global Initiative. He has recently been profiled by Forbes, Reuters and BBC Radio.

**Thursday, November 9, 5 PM-6:15 PM, DTC Room 607: Industry Panel, "Everyday Ethics in Business"**
Panelists will participate in a dynamic discussion and cover a range of business ethics perspectives related to corporate responsibility, sustainability, diversity, and more. Our panelists are:
-Kelley Hinds, Associate Director of Sustainability and Compliance at Roche
-Carolyn Kenady, Retired Human Resources Executive, Yelp and Cisco Systems
-Ellen Martin, VP of Impact and Strategic Initiatives at Closed Loop Partners

We look forward to seeing you on 11/8 and 11/9!