In a continued effort to both inform and be a resource for the community, The WNY Women's Foundation will be producing this newsletter for you monthly. Every other month, we will include news that affects the programs and initiatives that we are directly involved with (WNYWF Update), and the next month's newsletter will include pertinent articles on advocacy, family sustaining jobs, childcare, out of school time, new research and reports, and other information we think you might enjoy to keep you informed (Women in the News). Please feel free to send us your comments, or suggestions for items to include in the next newsletter, and please "share" this with your friends, by clicking on one of the images at the top of the newsletter.

A woman signs up to receive a microloan in India.  Adeel Halim/Bloomberg-Getty Images

Businesses are starting to understand what development experts have long known: investing in women pays dividends. Women are more likely than men to put their income back into their communities, driving illiteracy and mortality rates down and GDP up.

Now a corporate revolution is at hand, one that is moving beyond philanthropy, making women partners in business at all levels. This was an important theme at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, which hosted a plenary session entitled "Women as the Way Forward" on the potential impact of women on the global economy. On Feb. 1, some of the most powerful companies in the United States (Accenture, Coca-Cola, Ernst and Young, Goldman Sachs, and others) are signing on to a worldwide campaign to bring women into the economic mainstream. The Third Billion Campaign is being launched by La Pietra Coalition-an alliance including corporations, governments, and nonprofits-to enable 1 billion women to become members of the global economy by 2025. The campaign's title comes from the notion that over the next decade, the impact of women will be at least as significant as that of China's and India's respective 1-billion-plus populations.

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Susan Rose

Inter Press Service: U.S. Women's Commissions Under the Budget Axe

Rousbeh Legatis interviews SUSAN ROSE, Vice-Chair of Human Rights Watch's Santa Barbara Committee 

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Business First by G. Scott Thomas, Projects Editor

Date: Monday, February 6, 2012, 12:46pm EST

Women occupy just 15 percent of the Buffalo area's power positions, according to Business First's new list of the 125 most influential people across Western New York.

The alphabetical list, which was released last week, provides the latest confirmation that men remain dominant in the region's private and public sectors.

It follows two recent studies by On Numbers that showed local males with a clear advantage over local females in terms of earnings and education. (On Numbers is an online service of American City Business Journals Inc. American City Business Journals Inc.Latest from The Business JournalsCharlotte has added 12,300 jobs in the past decadeAlbany area dead last in retail jobsBuffalo ranks in national top 20 for retail growthFollow this company , the parent company of Business First.)

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By SABRINA TAVERNISE

Published: February 9, 2012

WASHINGTON - Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education's leveling effects.

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

"We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race," said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

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Women's eNews.org: Minimum Wage Doesn't Pay for Hard Work; Let's Hike

By Melissa Josephs

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When Sheryl Sandberg quit a senior job at Google, in March 2008, to become Facebook's No. 2 executive, one commentator suggested that she faced a "monumental" challenge: justifying the social-networking company's $15 billion private-market valuation at the time.

Chalk one up for the risk-taking Sandberg. Facebook's long-cloaked ownership structure has just become a matter of public record, thanks to the company's filing of its IPO prospectus. Among the eye-catching disclosures is this: the 42-year-old Sandberg holds stock in Facebook that could be worth at least $1.3 billion.

Sandberg's direct stock holdings are a relatively modest 1.9 million shares, equal to barely 0.1% of the company's shares outstanding. But she also holds 39 million shares of restricted stock that hasn't vested yet - chiefly reflecting her sign-on package when she joined the company in 2008. And she has received significant options grants since then.

The exact value of of Sandberg's holdings won't be known until Facebook stock begins public trading, probably in May. But it's known that Facebook stock changed hands in private transactions a month ago at $32 a share.  If the company's initial public offering yields the same price, Sandberg's total holdings would be valued at $1.3 billion. If optimists' talk of a $45 price for Facebook shares comes true, her holdings will top $1.8 billion.

That fortune will make Sandberg one of the richest female executives in the world. It won't quite rival Oprah Winfrey's fortune, estimated at $2.7 billion last year. But Winfrey not only runs a media empire; she holds the hefty ownership stake that comes with being a founder. Among female executives who joined existing companies as hired employees or executives, Sandberg stands practically unparalleled.

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