Thoughts of a career woman

Book Review: Suze Orman, The Money Class

2011-09-02T18:12:00.000-04:00

During the last 3 years the USA and other countries have been through a deep recession, many people have lost their jobs. So we all have to improvise, and in my opinion the best way to do is educating our self financially in a way that we can learn how to save, how to invest and how to not fall into any scam. So I decided to buy the new Suze Orman's book The Money Class, this book is very good for the average person, for someone that is not in the financial business, she talks about how to save, the principles of investing, the do and don'ts about buying a house, and for people like me that lives in big cities, she talks a lot about the traps some people fall when they buy condos and coops.

This is a book that is very helpful for people that like I used to, don't have any idea of how the financial word works, I totally recommend this book, it is written in a non complex way so that the average person can understand it. So lets all educate ourselves financially talking, and learn how to manage our money.

Droppled charges in the Dominique Strauss-Kahn's Case

2011-08-24T20:10:00.000-04:00

Many people have followed the Dominique Strauss-Kahn since the beginning, until finally yesterday it was announced that the charges were dropped due to the lack of evidence. As a new yorker I couldn't help to ask myself, did he do it? was this a matter of "take care of the reach white guy and disregard the poor black woman? did race play a part on this? The reason I asked myself those questions was because apparently many other people in this city thought about it also, especially for some black civic leaders and women’s rights groups. But to be honest I think all these people are not being objective. It is true that Strauss-Kahn have fame of being womanizer, but does that make him a raper? Not in my opinion.

The facts are the facts, the credibility of the accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, was seriously compromised, she lied in her political asylum petition, and in this country, lie to any federal agency is a major offense. There were also no evidence of defensive wounds, which most of the times happens because the victim try to defend herself from the abuser. So how do we know if there was a consensual sexual encounter or not? Well that is the problem, we can't beyond reasonable doubt. And that is the point. A rape accusation is something very serious. And if the only one evidence is the witness/victim's testimony and on top of that there are credibility problems, it is a recipe for disaster, and it would also sent a precedent that would compromise our legal system. In my opinion this type of case discredit every single woman that have really be rapped or abused, and those are the real victims that have to be protected. So in my opinion this is not a matter of gender or race, it is a matter of having the evidence to proof that a crime was actually committed. We should stop trying to place the race and gender card and being more objective and listen to the facts. We have to remember that this man was the president of the International Monetary Found, and candidate for the presidency of France, and he lost both due to the accusations of this lady. Real women that have been victims needs the help and resources of the government and compassion of us as a society.

Anthony D. Weiner Sex Scandall

2011-06-16T13:34:00.000-04:00

Well as everybody knows I am a New York City resident, and by coincidence, also resident of the district of the Anthony Weiner representative. And to be honest I have to talk about it. Well all the scandal came out when Weiner send a picture (via Twitter) of his boxer brief–clad erect penis to a 21 years old woman. After that he admitted in press conference on June 6th that he exchange other pictures with at least other 6 women, and according to the New York Times his resignation is imminent, even the president Barack Obama and Nancy Pelossi asked for it.

Thinking about it, does he really deserve the resignation? In my opinion, I don't think so, what he did was:

1. Stupid: There is NO PRIVACY in the internet, and when you send a picture or private information to somebody else, YOU ARE NOT THE OWNER OF THAT INFORMATION anymore, especially if you are public figure with an image to maintain.

2. Immoral and Pathetic: Lets remember he is married and have a family, this is a total disrespect to his wife, if he had problems in his marriage, there are many ways to solve it, that what marriage counselors are for. But for the love of God, don't put your wife and family in ridiculous.

If you ask me I would tell you that he deserve the resignation only for being Stupid. But at the same time, I think, isn't everybody being a little bit puritanical about all this? How many guys don't cheat on their wives? They are politicians, not saints, as people say in my country: we are all throwing stones when our roof is made with glasses. What happens between 2 adults, with consent, shouldn't matter to anybody. As long as he does what he have to as a congressman, we shouldn't care.

I think the media and all politicians are wasting time and resources in issues that lets face it, may other guys do. There are so many problems in this country for us to be worrying about issues like that. Real issues needs attention in this country: gay marriage, unemployment, the recession, the big corporations outsourcing our jobs to other countries, the raising cost of health care. Those are real issues, not the pathetic behavior of a congressman.

I am finally back

2011-06-16T12:03:00.000-04:00

Hi Guys so much time with out blogging!, well after some health issues I am back to blogging people

I am back, lauching my Jewelry Shop

2010-08-18T11:56:00.000-04:00

Hi followers and readers, first of all I want to apologize because I have been a little bit out of the blogging world for a month and a half, but I am back, I was working to lauch my online jewelry store. I started to make jewelry, a couple of years ago, I found out that it was very good for relieve my stress, but guess what?, now I have so many items at my place that I decided to start selling it. So if you like jewelry, and want affordable prices, come to my shop, underneath there is preview of my job.

Saturday of Success: Dale Carnegie

2010-06-26T13:40:00.001-04:00

Today is Saturday of Success and the quote I found today is from Dale Carnegie. He was an US writer and lecturer, that develop famous courses of self-improvements, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills. He is the author of the bestseller "How to Win Friends and Influential People", "How to stop worrying and start living", a biography of Abraham Lincoln. So this is what Dale Carnegie said about success:

"People rarely succeed unless they have fun at what they are doing"

I think this is a wonderful quote, sometimes we think that success if have a lot of money and a good career, but that is not true when the person doesn't enjoy what he/she is doing. Success is different for many people, and I think we succeed as long as we reached all our dreams.

Post #100

2010-06-25T16:14:00.000-04:00

This is my post # 100 and I want to thanks you everybody that have stop on my bog even just to look. Thanks to all my subscribers, thank you to all my followers and to all the people that have post comments on this blog. Also I want to thank to all the people that have gives me awards. Thank you to all of you, you have make my life much better and for show me so much love. It have been a great ride and thanks to all of you.

I would like to say that I am accepting guest blogger, so if you are interested you can file the contact form and I will be happy to feature you.

Wonderful Jewerly and Accesories

2010-06-25T15:51:00.000-04:00

Probably some of you knows that I got engaged a couple of months ago. So obviously, any girl dreams about the engagement moment, it was really nice and my ring was gorgeous, I got to say my boyfriend have a good taste. But I found out how much he paid for my engagement ring and I almost die. I can't believe how expensive jewerly have gotten in the last few years, it is incredible. So i decided to do some reasearch about how much is the average cost of jewerly.

In my research found out Become, wihch is a wesite that sells mostly everything, at a very good prices, but the prices are much better in jewelry, for example, the engagement rings are gorgeous you can see it on Engagements Rings. Also there is other types of jewerly like necklaces, and bracelets. Also if you are like that are a show and bags lover they have really nice accesories.

Ipad and Education

2010-06-24T19:53:00.002-04:00

During the last couple of months Apple have sold millions of Ipad tablet, and the projections are 5.5 millions of sales this year and 13.5 millions for the next year. But rather than a cool gadget the Ipad tablet have a lot of very nice applications that help in the education of children and adults. I made some reasearch and I found out these were the best applications for educational purposes:

IBooks: One of the nicest things about the Ipad is the e reader, but it is not like any other e-reader like the Kindle, this one is totally interactive and with color which makes it very nice for educational purposes. With this application students can read an incredible amount of books.
Kindle for Ipad: This one is perfect if you want to have access to the Kindle books, including best sellers and new releases.
Wall Street Journal: Gives you online access to every edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Alphabet Fun: With multi-touch technology, it allows kids to learns the alphabet, colors and numbers. I has very bright colors and fun games that are very attractive to small children.
Dictionary.com: This is a great application because it has the Thesaurus included and it is also available offline, it has an inventary of almost one millions of words, and it is free for ipad users.
Pages: It is a word processor, designed by Apple, for mobile devices, it also have templates and and very nice layout tools. It also allows you to export documents to Mycrosoft and PDF without having compatibility problems.
The Elements: A Visual Exploration: This application is wonderful for someone that is studing sciences, especifically chemistry. It provides very strong information with high-definition graphics of every element of the periodic table.
Articles for Ipad: It looks for articles on wikipedia, which is very nice for children and adults, it gives access to tons of information.

It is nice to see that the Ipad is a device that provides a lot for entertaining, but also gives more ways of educate ourselves and educate our children outside of the classroom. I always tell my friends that knowledge is one of the better gifts that we can receive, we can go trought to horrible times, we can be without money and even homeless, but with a good education the world can be ours again. Devices like this makes the world smaller and this is important because we can learn from others, which will help us to become better people in the future.

Female Engineers and Beauty

2010-06-18T17:09:00.001-04:00

If I ask you how a female engineer would look like, what would you said to me? Some people would give me the classic stereotype of the female engineer or scientific, like that girl with glasses, with no sense of fashion, socially inept, that prefer to play video games rather than go out for dinner or coffee with some friends. Unfortunately that is the perpetuated stereotype not only about female engineers but also about everybody that works on a scientific or technical field. The media have generalized the stereotyped of the female geek that is ugly, that don't use make up, her fashion sense is stuck in the 1980's. But in reality things are not like that.

When I first meet people, males or females, many times things goes in this way:

myself: Hi I am Laura, nice to meet you.

other person: Hi my name is X, nice to meet you too. So what do you do for living?

myself: Well I am electrical engineer.

other person: really? you don't look like an engineer.

myself: why do you say that? how does the engineers should look like?

So I guess most of the time people don't believe that if a girl looks a little bit put together and have some social skills they may be engineer, because they have the stereotype of the hideous nerd that can't put two sentence together. I am not gorgeous by any means, but I do like to dress up and I think I have some sense of style, and I try to look my best most of the time, however there is a difference between that and being obsessed with how do we look all the time. We should try to look our best, but inside of normal parameters, without risking our health and our economical stability.

Female engineers are normal women, they can be pretty or ugly, they can also be feminine and stylish. They, like many other women are interested also in beauty. I remember when I was in college one of my best friends, whom I am not going to say her name, was honor student during all the bachelor, she was studding electrical engineer, and she was also a runway model, she was beautiful and very stylish without being airhead, being also one of the best students in the faculty, now she works for Boeing.

Having these types of stereotypes in mind may not hurt us right now, but it may hurt our children in the future, because parents think that if the girl decide to go for a scientific or engineering degree she won't be feminine. Perpetuating these stereotype, we discourage young girls to pursue this fields, that in my opinion are really nice professions. I keep facing those stereotypes every day of my life, but I enjoy my profession and work with joy all the time.

Our society is so fixated with beauty and image that if on top of that we keep perpetuating the "ugly nerd" and not-feminine image of female engineers, young girls wouldn't even think about pursing these careers, and we may loose incredibly talented individuals that could make a different in history of science and engineering. But I have to say that in the last couple of years some activist have been making a difference encouraging young girls to go for engineering and science degree, for example this year Mattel, decided that this year Barbie was going to be a Computer Engineer, which is extremely positive because Barbie have been an icon of beauty between young girls, this will send a message to young girls that you can be pretty, stylish and been also an engineer.

Product Review: Homeandliving.com

2010-06-18T16:00:00.002-04:00

Home Furniture is an online furniture site that sells all types of furniture, with very different style and sizes. They carry all the famous brands at wonderful prices. My favorite item is the gorgeous fountains, which they have in different sizes; my favorites are the small ones. Shipping and handling is free and there is no sales tax for the customers.

Product Review: Home and Living Furniture

2010-06-18T16:00:00.001-04:00

Homeandliving.com is an online furniture site that sells bed frames. They have every size, style and configuration that you want at incredibly low prices. Shipping and handling is free and there is no sales tax to the customers. Visit their website at bed frames, and find wonderful bed frames that will adjust to your necessities.

Product Review: Power Furniture

2010-06-18T16:00:00.000-04:00

Homeandliving.com provides one of the best selections in Powell Furniture at incredibly low prices. They offer free shipping and handling also no sales tax. You can chat with a representative 24 hours that will gives you excellent customer service. Go to their website and you will see stylish furniture at a great prices

Career Women makes Bad Mothers and wifes, Really?

2010-06-17T21:19:00.001-04:00

Some time ago I wrote an article called Housewife vs Career Women Can We Have it All?. This article have brought a lot of traffic to my blog, which I was surprised about, because I didn't thought there were so many women asking themselves what is better if being housewife or a Career Woman. As I explain in my previous article some of us dreamed of having a career and being successful professionally talking. Some people portrait career woman as this bitchy ladies that they would castrate guys if they would have the opportunity; or they are also portrait as dominant women that treats the husbands like doormats and neglect children. While there are women like that that has more to do with the core of the person that if the woman is professionally active or not. I have seen very good mothers that have careers and horrifying mothers that are housewife.

I also think that we must understand that some people have the necessity to do things outside of the household, some people have necessity of intellectual challenges. In the last decades the societies of different countries have focus in educate girls with equality ideas, telling them they can achieve everything guys does, and it is true, but what about the boys?. Boys also should be educated, they must understand they are not above the domestic work or the children care. If both persons share 50% of the house work, there is no necessity of overwork women.

I agree with some women that said that in the last couple of decades women have the double of the work load, but what about guys?, they keep having the same amount of work than before, sometimes they even have less, because in the first half of the XX century they have all responsibility of bring money to their home, if they didn't do it, the wife and kids will starve. Now they don't have that much pressure because if they loose the job, they still can back with the wife's salary if she works. In essence we have take workload out of the guys shoulders and put it over ours. That is why is imperative to share tasks with our partners and also look for the support of the family.

It always amazes me seeing how many guys still can't even do their own laundry, and this is totally wrong. Mothers teach girls how to clean and how to cook, but they don't do the same with the boys, so as a consequence boys think they are above all of those chores.

Career Women don't automatically makes bad mother or wife, I am always amazed when I go to my fiance's parents apartment, very often I found his father cleaning the floor, and whenever his mother have to do the laundry he always helps her. So they both have the same workload at the house. I think the key is that we have to stop believing that the children responsibility are only a woman's work and father is only the ATM of the house. Also we are underestimating the benefits of the daycare centers, in daycare centers (the good ones), children learn how to socialize with other children. When I was a child my mother had the possibility to stay at home with me because my health was very fragile when I was a child, but the pediatrician that was treating me told her that I should go to daycare because that would make me a more independent kid. Under any circumstance I am saying that it is good leaving our children on daycare until 6pm or 7pm because we are working. I don't condone the women that don't take care of the children for being working long hours, or women that treats the husbands horribly and neglet children. I believe a good balance can be achieved only if we choose as a partner a man that is willing to share the house and children responsibilities 50%, a man that doesn't care if he has to make some homework with the children, a man that cooks if he has too, a man that is willing to take the children to the park or to museums, in generally a man that is willing to devote himself to his wife and his children just like a wife should do, and when I mean devote himself I am not talking about bringing good money to the house, it is have dedication to his family. Career Women don't make bad mother's, but they do need a support network including the husband and family. Some Career Women think that they must be perfect and they should be superwomen, well there is no such a thing as a superwomen, it is OK to be vulnerable and it is OK to ask for help, but your partner also should be there for you all the time.

Product Review:

2010-06-17T20:26:00.001-04:00

The USAEyes advocacy organization that publishes the 50 Tough Questions For Your Lasik Doctor and conducts a national Lasik results survey has been prominently cited in an in-depth US News & World Report article about laser eye surgery. Check their site here

USAEyes

USAEyes.org

Career Women in Foreign Countries

2010-06-14T21:47:00.001-04:00

You emigrated to a foreign country trying to look for a better life for you and your family, but find yourself with the uncertainty of if you will be able to work on your profession or not. Many women used to be career women in their countries of origin and when they emigrated to other countries they are forced to work minimum waige jobs in order to make ends meet. When my family emigrates out of Cuba, I went to Puerto Rico with my family, but my mother went to Canada, because we couldn't leave the country together. My mother is a mathematician, PhD, and all that, and her first job in Canada, was working in a factory packing candies. So obviously she felt a little bit frustrated but at the same time she was grateful for a new start. Now she has a better as a software engineer, and she enjoys it; so after that she has always tells me that I shouldn't settle, it doesn't matter if today I am feeding pigeons in the street, if we have the motivation, we will be able to take our careers back.

Immigrants often face challenges in foreign countries, the most obvious one is the language and the differences in the law. Some professionals can work in any country, others have to take boards exams and it is not always easy, it can be exhausting and discouraging but if we don't try it. For example lawyers and doctors are the ones who really have the biggest troubles when they go to foreign countries. But I think the best way to approach this problems is being proactive and always be motivate, have your eyes on the target, for example, first thing to do is learning the language of the country you just move to, the TV, newspapers. Then, contrary to what many people would believe is move away from the neighborhoods from the same ethnicity as you, for example if you are Romanian, don't live in Romanian neighborhoods. This may seems odd, but the truth about this, is that you look yourself in the mirror of the people of the same ethnicity as you that have been more years in that country and some of them have made it, some of them have not. Also in the minorities neighborhoods some people have the tendency to use the "poor me" card, the best thing to do, is live in a neighborhood as neutral as possible, so you can have a better understanding of the culture and how things work in that country. Also it is important to inform yourself about what are the qualifications, exams, and documentation you need in order to start working in your profession. But the most important thing is be motivated and don't feel sorry for ourselves, it may not be easy, but it is not impossible.

Product Review: No Waiting Period Dental Insurance

2010-06-14T21:46:00.000-04:00

If you are interested in Dental Insurance check out this links

United Dental Insurance
No Waiting Period Dental Insurance
Find Health Insurance

Saturday of Success: Robert Collier

2010-06-12T10:00:00.001-04:00

As today is Saturday of Success, the quote of today is by Robert Collier(1885 – 1950), who had a prolific career as a self-help writer, his inspiration books changed the life of many people. Some of his most important publications are The God in You, The Secret Power, The Magic Word, and The Law of the Higher Potential. So here is what Robert Collier said:

Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.

I think this is a wonderful quote, because it show, how important perceverace is in order to achieve success in life. It doesn't matter which is our definition of success, but as I always said with hard work everything can be achieved. Success is not something that happens over night, it is like win small battles every day, and at the end we will win the war.

Female Genital Mutilation, a Form of Child Abuse.

2010-06-11T17:40:00.000-04:00

Female Genital Mutilation is still practice in many countries of the world, especially in Africa and Asia. This practice is still done due to cultural believes, which makes more difficult its eradication. Female Genital Mutilation is the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia with non-therapeutics purposes. There are three types of Female Genital Mutilation:

Type I: It is the complete or partial removal of the clitoris and/or the prepuce, which is the clitoral hood.
Type II: Complete or partial removal of the clitoris and labia minora
Type III: It is the narrowing of the vaginal orifice with creation of a covering seal by cutting and repositioning the labia minora and/or the labia majora, with or without excision of the clitoris.

The following figure shows the difference between the 3 types of Female Genital Mutilation:

The most common one is the the type II that goes 85% of the case and the rest 15% is for the type III that is called Infibulation. The procedure is done to young girls, when they are still legally minors. This is a violation of the children rights and it is illegal in many countries, but it has been very difficult to eradicate because this practice has been a tradition in those countries for the last 2000 years, some of the reasons why is done are:

It will reduce a woman's desire for sex
To enhance the femininity of the girl, because the clitoris is perceived as a male organ in a female body.
To clean her body, because the view of the female genitalia is consider dirty.
To enhance the fertility.
Prevention of the masturbation and lesbianism

I think all those reasons are product of the ignorance, lack of education and desire to control women. For the people that practice the Female Genital Mutilation are the kind of people that value more the traditions than the health of the little girls. This is one of the worst violations to human rights and to the rights of the children. This practice can bring a number of health problems such as sepsis due to the lack of clean instruments when the procedure is done, death by shock or excessive bleeding. Less serious side effects could be Urinary and Reproductive track infection, infertility, cyst that can grow and become infected, and must be drained.

This is one of the practice that should not even exist in the world. This is a way a child abuse, and should be punished, as I said before in the United States is illegal, but in some countries of Africa and Asia is still to this days legal. Mutilate parts of the body, especially when it can be so dangerous that the child can die, is totally horrible, because the child can't give a consent and can't understand the implications of that procedure. Also why the families of those girls have to control their sexual desires? Why our clitoris have to be perceived as something dirty? And why masturbation is bad? It is a practice that we all do and should not be any shame with that. I think international agencies and governments should give a better sexual education to the people, and make them understand that their children are not their property, children are not pets, they are human beings and needs to be respected. They may not be mature enough but deserve respect.

Female Genital Mutilation, in my opinion, is a product of patriarchal societies, where the authority is managed by men and women are considered private property, where their sexuality and bodies can be controlled since a very early age, just because our sexual organs are not appealing for some. Young girls have to go thought this horrible procedures because their mothers lack the education to understand that the presence of our sexual organs does not mean we are dirty, and there is nothing wrong with women having sexual desire or not. Sex, when is done responsibly, is something very beautiful and no one should be ashamed off. Ignorance is taking the best of this women, and make them more vulnerable to manipulation, and as a consequence, their daughters have to suffer the consequences. I think women and men in those countries should question themselves why they are doing those things, they should ask themselves if it is worth put their child such a cruel situation

Online Reputation and a Prospective Job

2010-06-08T18:47:00.001-04:00

During the last 20 years we have experimented a revolution in the communications due to the introduction of the internet at the beginning of the 90's, and as a consequence of that some of our attitudes have changed and the way we do things have also changed, some people do online dating instead of the traditional way, for put just one example. Later on the social networks emerged, and people went quickly to put profiles, share pictures, look for high school classmates they haven't seen in years. Social networks have brought nice things for a lot of us, but some people don't understand that we are sharing there information very personal, that may not be appropriate to reveal to some other people.

The fact this information is on the social networks still means it is on the internet, accessible to a lot of people including Human Resources Recruiters. I remember one time I receive a friend request on my facebook from a person that was a team leader in one project I worked a couple of months before, I was surprised for the request, but at the end I decided to ignore it, because I didn't wanted to share personal information from my private life with people from work, not because there was something bad there, it is just a way to separate my personal and professional life. But I have seen people that have public profiles in facebook or myspace showing pictures of them on parties, dance clubs, guys making up with girls, and many other things from that nature that shouldn't be seen by a potential boss or an HR Recruiter.

When you are applying for a job, especially if you are professional, companies makes a background check, and in the last years they also check your "online reputation", not everybody do it, but some of them does. It is questionable, in my opinion, checking your behavior via social networks, but still some people do it. So we should use common sense when we us social networks, for example, there is nothing wrong uploading pictures from a trip, from you doing site sees, nothing wrong with graduation, birthdays or anniversaries pictures, we just have to be careful with the "sensitive pictures" that can damage our image in front of other professionals. It is also important to watch what we said, we don't want to make bad comments about how mean was the HR recruiter that just interview us in the facebook wall, because someone else can see it. In general I am not a big fan of the public profiles, that is why I have always all my profiles as private, and i don't befriend people that I don't know. We must remember that when we put some information on the internet, we loose control of it.

Product Review: Texas Air Duct

2010-06-08T18:46:00.000-04:00

The company Texas Air Duct offer services of air duct cleaning for customers in the San Antonio, Texas Area. They offer air duct cleaning for as little as $75, great services, visit their web page at San Antonio Duct Cleaners

Some Humor, Academic Special Moves

2010-06-04T12:38:00.001-04:00

We all know about all the things that graduate students have to do in order to survive academically and survive in general, the first one is free food, whenever you are in graduate school, and some company comes to give a conference and bring pizza, even if the students don't care, they will go in order to have free food. The other one is when the computers crash because you are running programs that consume more resources than what the university can afford. The other one is when you meet with your advisor, and everything you have done for the last month is wrong, or when you have to do 10000 of different moves in order to the lab equipment work, because as always, there is no budget.

Pay Gap Between Males and Females, does it really exist?

2010-06-03T21:56:00.004-04:00

If you have been following my blog for some time, you can tell that I have feminist tendencies, because I believe in intellectual and rights equality from me and women. I am aware there exist discrimination at the work place, however I haven't been victim of it because I respect myself and carry myself with professionalism. Why I say this? Well I have been hearing since a long time ago about the pay gap between men and females, which in essence means that women makes less money than men. There are many arguments about why this happen, one of them is that traditional female dominated professions like teachers or office clerks are less remunerated than traditionally male dominated ones, other argument is that women negotiate less their salaries because of fear of being perceived as "less nice" if they asked for more. The article Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling from The Washington Post from July of 2007 explain this very well.

But even when I have feminist ideas I have to say, that this time guys are not guilty of this, we as women have to stop playing the victim role and work for what you want. If women make less money is because their own choices of life. I understand sometimes society expect you to fit into certain mold, like if you are married move to the suburbs, buy an SUV, start popping babies and stay at home taking care of them while your husband works outside. We can debate what is better or worst if being a stay at home mother or have a career and at the same time take care of the children, I am not going to debate that in this article, because I think it is a very personal decision to take. I actually talk about it in the article Housewife vs Career Woman, Can we have it all?. But anything we decide to do we have to suck it up whatever consequences have our decisions.

We must stop being victims and if we want to break the mold and go to professions that are traditionally men dominated do it, if we don't want to negotiate a bigger salary for fear of how we will be perceived don't do it, but after that we can't complain.

I think also it is important to encourage not only women, also guys, that they don't have to fit in any society mold, if a guy wants to be teacher, hair dresser, fashion designer or secretary, that doesn't mean he is gay or there is some problem with his masculinity or if a girl decide to be engineer, truck driver, police officer, construction worker, doctor, lawyer or stock market broker, she shouldn't be perceived as a bitch or non-feminine; and I think education is key in order to break those molds, and all of us, as a society are guilty for that, so when those patterns break maybe the pay gap between males and females would be smaller. So there is really a gap, but in my opinion we are as guilty as men for keep perpetrating it.

Beauty Pageants. My take

2010-06-02T17:07:00.002-04:00

We have all being exposed to the beauty pageants at some points of their life, watching them on TV, or knowing someone that have been part of it. There is a lot of different beauty pageants according to age, sex and sexual orientation. But all of them have a common denominator and it is celebrate an ideal of beauty that is a very high standard to achieve. As we know the 99% of people in this world do not look like the contestants of the pageants.

I grew up in Latin America and over there the beauty pageants are big, really big, putting a lot of pressure over women, men and children in order to look good. I think the pageants send the wrong message to the population because it is only focus in physical appearance, it is true that you must have a talent and answer questions in order to win or even be consider. But the real focus is in the image.

When I was living in Puerto Rico there was a journalist that was one of the contestants of Miss World. She said that she spend thousands of dollars in dresses, breast plastic surgery and singing classes. But at the end it didn't help her to boost her career as journalist. At the end she learned the lesson and drop out of the pageants and she focus more in the intellectual aspect of her career.

In my opinion the worst of those ones are the children beauty pageants because we are biasing our children with the message that beauty is more important than anything else, but I will talk about children beauty pageants in another post.

These events send the message that with a pretty face the world will be on your feet, on top of that impose certain patterns of beauty. I am not saying that beauty is important, but it should also be reinforced the importance of education and hard work. It is horrible how much importance we are giving to beauty, considering all the ratings that beauty pageants reach, and many women do it in order to get scholarships to go to college. I don't judge that much these girls, I judge the people that sits in front of the TV watching a show about who is more pretty, or the mother's that push their daughters to do it.

I think in order to be a better society we should understand that beauty is relative, what it may be appealing for me, may not be for others, some people, like me, believe the beauty comes from inside, and with hard work we can reach the sky as opposed of just having a pretty face.

Differences between a Career and a Job.

2010-06-01T21:21:00.007-04:00

When we think about a career and a job, we may see it as the same, but if we look closer we realize that the different is mostly in attitude. If we think about it, most of us work to life, our jobs provides us with the money to pay our bills. But when we decided in what way we want to earn our money, and we prepare and plan our life based on it, we have a career, as opposed of if we just go to our work in order to catch the check every two week without caring for anything else.

A career involves some time of planing and preparation, it could be with years of studies like lawyers, doctors, engineers, accountants, and even actors it could be also with years of practice, like musicians, dancers, acrobats or athletes. It is also a lot of passion involve in what you do in order to be consider a career, because you are willing to do sacrifices in order to achieve higher goals that you set yourself. In my opinion a person have a career if they evolve in their field, thought getting an advanced degree, publishing papers, going to conferences, going to training sessions or even doing voluntary work. It is more about attitude and passion.

In the company I work, I have meet many people that extremelly comitted to their careers, they love what i do and try to mantain all the time on top of their game, those guys have a career, however, I know some other people, that they just go to work from 9 am to 5pm, it was years since the last time they went to a conference, they perform their job in a mechanic way, without even asking or questioning if there is ways to do things more effitient, this people don't want to learn something new, and you can tell they are misserable while they are at their office. This people, even when they went to college, got an engineering degree, they have jobs not careers, because they are lacking of passion and goals.

In this life we can all have careers, it is a very nice feeling to be able to make money from what you love, we just need to find our calling, and for that, parents need to reinforce every vocational desire that children may have. It will motivate children to set goals and make plans to achieve them