Girls and Economy

Years from now, a movie called The Pregnancy Pact caused commotion in the U.S.  after showing a group of 15 year old girls had only one aspiration, get pregnant and marry their high school boyfriend, in order to be able to drop out of school and become only mothers and wives. This movie really caused an impact is it showed the existence of a still remaining par of ancient civilization’s rules. This is even worse considering the importance that the women empowerment has. Now at days around half the total working population is constituted by women. Around 66% of the average American female teenagers are enrolled into college whilst 64% of the average American teenage men are enrolled into college leaving a gap of 4% between the two genders.
Although few people actually have notion of it women economic empowerment has several benefits not only to the economy but to human rights., and to a better world itself in fact economists mostly state that:
Women’s economic empowerment – that is, their capacity to bring about economic change for themselves – is increasingly viewed as the most important contributing factor to achieving equality between the two genders.

But economically strengthening women is not only a means by which to spur economic growth, but also a matter of advancing women's human rights. When governments, businesses and communities invest in women, and when they work to eliminate inequalities, developing countries are less likely to be plagued by poverty. 

Women’s participation in the economy bring out several benefits to everyone that dares to invest on it, such as:

• Where women's participation in the labor force grew fastest, the economy experienced the largest reduction in poverty rates.
• When women farmers can access the resources they need, their production increases, making it less likely that their families are hungry and malnourished.
• When women own property and earn money from it, they may have more bargaining power at home. This in turn can help reduce their vulnerability to domestic violence and HIV infection.
   
• When women have access to time-saving technologies – such as a foot-pedaled water pump or a motorized scooter – economic benefits can follow. ICRW research has found that technology helps women increase their productivity as well as launch income-generating pursuits and entrepreneurial ventures. Those kind of outcomes empower women to become stronger leaders and to more effectively contribute financially to their families, communities and countries.
• Believe it or not  even in the world´s most modern countries there is an unequal distribution of jobs and salaries that benefit men.According to facts given out by the UN:
• For the last decade, median earnings for women working full time, year-round have been just 77% of men’s earnings. 
• The report controls for occupation, major, hours worked, parenthood, and many other factors to reveal that college-educated women working full time were paid an unexplained 7% less than their male counterparts were paid one year after graduation. Making it harder for women top ay their student loans.

When more women work, economies grow. If women’s paid employment rates were raised to the same level as men’s, the United States’ gross domestic product would be an estimated 9 per cent higher, the euro zone’s would climb by 13 per cent and Japan’s would be boosted by 16 per cent. In 15 major developing economies, per capita income would rise by 14 per cent by 2020 and 20 per cent by .
A study using data from 219 countries from 1970 to 2009 found that, for every one additional year of education for women of reproductive age, child mortality decreased by 9.5 per cent .
After watching this facts we could reach to the conclusion that:
Having women working and studying is a boost to our economy and to our world, women do have a very influential role in the world’s economy. 
Equal payments for both women, and men, are not only the fair deals but they are also good for our societies. 
Even though sometimes women diminish their capacities by only thinking of themselves as housewives, women can do greatly on the work fields.
Education for women influences even the most important aspects of our lives such as raising children and houses with women working are able to gain more and so they live better.

Patriarchal societies should allow education to all girls, and girls should always defend their right to have access to knowledge.

4 things a teen should know about...

DEBTS

Student Loans: While student loans are oftentimes a necessary debt, they're still money owed to someone else. And unlike many other forms of debt, this one cannot be discharged in a bankruptcy. If you had student loans, you can help your teens by telling them how long it took you to pay them down, as well as what you had to sacrifice along the way.

Car Ownership: If you don't have a car loan, you should let your teenager know your motives for paying in cash or your journey in paying down your car. If you do have a car loan, it might be helpful to explain that it's more than just a monthly payment. Sit down and run the numbers with them, demonstrating the money lost to interest. And it just might be the extra motivation you need to pay it off for good.

Credit Cards: If your 18-year-old has a pulse and a mailing address, credit card companies will find him. That's just a fact of life in the good ol' U.S. of A. Your teenagers should know the responsible ways to build credit and the dangers lurking behind every unnecessary swipe.
You can try to convince them that credit cards, like debit cards, should be paid off in full each month. If you've ever had credit card debt, your teen doesn't need to know the details, but he should know all the work that went into paying it off.

Mortgage: While a mortgage usually isn't seen as a mistake, the timing in getting one can be. Make sure your teen knows the various considerations that go into buying a home, such as the ebbs and flows of the housing market, private mortgage insurance, and interest rates. It's important to stress that there should be no rush to do the deed -- er, rather, have a deed.

What might be second nature to you is a whole new world for your soon-to-be independent teen. The more he knows about finances, the better. And sharing your personal financial experiences -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- will help. Yes, even that time you bought tickets to Twisted Sister on credit for you and your roommates. Let them learn from your mistakes -- and, in the process, keep them from making a few of their own.

Teens Guide to: Spending & Investing

Teens Guide To Investing

What is an Investment Strategy?  According to Barron’s Dictionary of Finance & Investment Terms it means:

"Investment Strategy: a plan to allocate assets among such choices as stock, bond, cash equivalents, commodities, and real estate.  An investment strategy should be formulated based on the investor’s outlook on interest rates, inflation, and economic growth among other factors.  Also taking into account the investor’s age, tolerance for risk, amount of capital available to invest, and future need for capital, such as for financing children’s college education or buying a house."

Teens Guide to Spending

As teens we have figured out how to spend money, that’s the easy part. But here are a few tips on how you can make your money go further and alert you to a few problems you might encounter.

First, you need to Know Your Needs Vs. Your Wants . When you have decided to make a purchase, where should you buy it and when? Check out the section on Shopping Choices - Stores & Catalogs and Researching & Buying On The Web. There might be some suggestion there you might not have thought about. What are the benefits of each of our buying choices and how can we obtain information about a product?

One of the first large purchases you may make as a teen or young adult is a car. Be sure to check out First Time Car Buying Tips For Teens.Finally, when you do make a purchase you may encounter a problem when you need to pay for an item. Got cash? Great! Have enough money in the bank to cover the entire amount—go for it! However, if you need to "borrow money" such as putting it on a Credit Card Changes & Managing Credit Wisely, think twice. Understand what a credit card is and what financial obligation’s you are taking on when you make a purchase using a credit card. Every time you use a credit card you are building up your very own personal credit history. Credit Bureaus obtain this information and give you a score, a FICO score, (like a grade in school) based on how much of your credit you pay off, how long it takes you to pay it and whether you payments are received on time. When a company decides to lend you money in the future, your score will determine how much they will lend you and at what rate. The section Credit History & Credit Score (FICO) is something everyone should read, even if you are not using credit now.

Teens Guide to: Save Money

This section introduces you to the Savings category.  Most of us would rather spend than save.  But sometimes we need to save in order to afford some of the bigger things we might want to buy or do in the future.  You also need to save first before thinking of investing.

One of your first steps to help you increase your savings is to open up an account in a bank.  Before you do this you need to find out about the different kinds of banks and how to select one, Selecting A Bank.  Once you have made your choice, you need to decide what kind of account or accounts to open.  This could be a checking account: Types Of Checking Accounts , or a savings account: Types Of Savings Accounts.  With a checking account you will need to learn how to use it so we provide a Checking Account Basics section.  There is also an account called Money Market Deposit Account (MMDA) Also Called Money Market Account .

Teens Guide to: Earn Money

We all would like to earn money, some of us earlier than others.  As a teen, our age and perhaps lack of experience may be a problem in getting a job.  The Government, both Federal and State, sets certain rules about the jobs teens can do.  Not only the type, but at what age, how many hours you can work, and the minimum you must be paid.

Job Search, Interviews & Questions To Ask Before You Look For A Job section explains how to go about finding a job and what questions you should ask yourself before you do.  Part of this process is creating a resume (see Building A Resume), which explains to employers who you are and what you know.

Some teens will be motivated by money and take the highest paid position we’re qualified for Paid Jobs.  However some might also consider convenience and/or environment they like—for example, indoor shopping mall versus outdoor activities.

Two other options for employment, are internships (which can be paid or unpaid) and volunteering.  Both can provide meaningful experiences and often a way to learn new skills that can help obtain a paid job in the future. Internships are ways to work in a corporate environment with a mentor in a field you’re interested in.  Internships are generally for older teens 17+, are offered during the summer, and are highly competitive.  You can volunteer (see Volunteering)in almost any type of organization.  This is a great way to gain experience and be of help to your community.

One of the downsides of employment is the need for the Government to get paid.  Even as a teen, if you are put on an official payroll of a company versus working as a babysitter, you’ll have to file a tax return. Taxes might be withheld, although if you don’t earn a lot you may get those taxes back.  But in some cases you might even want to pay taxes to start (believe it or not!) to save for retirement (Individual Retirement Account (IRA).

The Teenage Allowances

Why more money for girls than boys?

Allowances tend to be greater for girls, mostly because they experience more intense peer pressure about clothes and shop more. Guys tend to be the ones more interested in making money— and they have no problem borrowing from girls. “If I need money—like for lunch, a video game, whatever—sometimes I’ll just ask a chick,” says a private-school senior. “They’re usually cool about giving it out.”

Janet Bodnar, who writes a weekly column about kids and money for Kiplinger.com, argues that parents ought to enforce a strict allowance in order to teach money management. But she and others who study familial financial patterns say that fewer and fewer are heeding that advice. “A lot of parents, especially today, are inclined to just hand out $20 whenever kids need it,” Bodnar says. “And the kids don’t learn anything that way.” According to the JumpStart Coalition, a nonprofit that raises financial awareness, only 52 percent of high-school students have a working understanding of money. “For all our sophistication toward money, we enforce less and less real-life education on the topic,” says Laura Levine, the group’s executive director. “We give credit cards at younger ages, but with no explanation of what any of it means.”

How Much Money Does a Kid Really Need?

The predicament of Caitlin’s friend is, for the most part, a perversion unique to extreme wealth—most kids, even in New York, would be thrilled to get $60 a week from their parents. And yet for all its cartoonish pseudo-tragedy, the outburst provides a glimpse into something more universal: the ever-more-powerful role that money—and allowances, in particular—plays in the life of a teenager. Think of the allowance as a metaphor for one of the cruelest ironies adolescents confront: Your ability to act like an adult is still controlled by adults. Talk to kids, and they’ll tell you—how allowances have an incessant way of creeping up on friendships, provoking ire and envy, how they simmer with the potential to stratify friends, even inside stratospheres where that isn’t supposed to happen.

Parents are oppressed by the subject of allowance, too. “I would say that money is the most uncomfortable thing to talk about,” says a parent who’s putting a kid through private school on a salary not designed for such a burden. “Parents are more willing to call each other up and say ‘I understand there was drinking at your house’ or ‘I hear that eighth-grade girls are having sex in the locker room’ than ‘Why are you giving your kid so much money?’ ” 

The issue goes beyond just how much money to give a kid; you’ve got to consider how to give it, which raises thorny questions. Credit or debit? Should it be connected to chores? What about cash bonuses for good grades? At what point does responsibility start to repress? When does comfort veer into corruption? Sure, giving kids credit cards means you risk watching them morph into chronic shoppers, but cash might turn them into coke fiends—so what’s the lesser of two evils? “That’s the real reason a lot of us have credit cards now,” says a junior at an Upper East Side private school. “I didn’t ask for one—my parents just don’t want me to be able to buy drugs.” 

Data on allowances is hard to come by. But conversations with dozens of teenagers from public and private schools yield some rough approximations: They describe a typical New York allowance to be in the neighborhood of $20 a week, depending on whether the money is given as a simple token, a reward for specific work, a means of quieting a whiny kid, or a way of fostering self-sufficiency, requiring the child to buy his own clothes, groceries, and school supplies. Kyle Brandt-Lubart, a 16-year-old sophomore at Bronx Science, receives $45 a week, a figure she and her mother arrived at after making an extensive list of what she spends money on: clothing, transportation, food, going out on weekends. “I think it works well enough,” she says. “I learn to manage money, even if it’s on a small scale. At the same time, I’m supposed to save $5 a week, but that never actually happens.” 

And then there are the private-school kids, who—shocker!—get substantially more, between $100 and $300 a week on average, often in a combination of cash and credit and debit cards. (Such arrangements are thoughtfully facilitated by corporate America. Visa offers a card called Visa Buxx specifically designed for parents to give to kids; last year, MasterCard came under fire for issuing a Hello Kitty debit card that to some seemed targeted toward toddlers.) But these sums, while exorbitant, aren’t always being lavished on spoiled kids. Take Peter, a junior at an Upper West Side public school: He receives $100 a week from his mother, but he has to work for it—cleaning the hallways of the downtown apartment building his family owns, which alienates him from his friends, who are given money just for breathing. Not long ago I had lunch with a junior at an East Side private school who was paid an actual salary by her parents: $16,000 per year in quarterly payments, the figure increasing as she gets older; if she goes over, that’s her problem. “It’s supposed to help me understand responsibility,” she told me with a shrug, adding that while she “guesses it does,” the fact is that her parents still tend to pay for her clothes, food, transportation, everything. Which means the $16,000 ends up being something of a token. “I have stocks in some company, too,” she says, “and my dad keeps saying he’s going to explain it to me, but one of us is always too busy.” 

The Teenage Economy

In a city obsessed with money, kids are, too. And the choices parents make have powerful effects on the separate, sometimes cruel, world of adolescence. 
"I hate money!” the young girl blurted out, her cheeks flushed and quivering. And why not? Money is an issue that plagues New York kids much the way it does the adults raising them. Kids fret over not having enough money, they plot how to wheedle more, they organize social systems around who’s got how much. It’s brutal. Few, however, hate money for the same reason this girl does. Wiping her red-rimmed eyes, she added, “I wish I didn’t have so much!”

Listening to this, to her “distressed” friend, Caitlin Keating had to bite her glossed lower lip to avoid saying something rude. Can you hear yourself? Do you know how you sound? The other day you said that you and your sister were worth more than the Olsen twins! Caitlin and her friend are 15-year-olds, and they were chatting after Italian class at the Upper West Side private school where both are sophomores—a place where the kids loll about in nanny-ironed uniforms customized with Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton, a sanctum so dominated by money that to overtly acknowledge it is the ultimate taboo. And yet to Caitlin, it often seems like that’s all anyone does: kids hustling, kids obsessing, kids turning downright savage.

Take what had just happened: Throughout class, Caitlin had watched her friend—who came from a prominent billionaire family and was quite likely the most affluent kid in this affluent school—get chastised for being so wealthy by another student whose father worked as a fashion designer and wasn’t exactly living the hard-knock life himself. A charmingly laid-back girl, Caitlin says she has always felt older than her peers, secretly detached, and has a tendency to view her surroundings through a vaguely anthropological lens. She found the treatment of her friend to be unfair and—given that most everyone here had parents forking over 25 grand a year in tuition—ludicrous. 

But she was annoyed nonetheless. Because despite her friend’s gilded existence—despite her trust fund, despite her penthouse bedroom with remote-controlled blinds, despite the fact that even her freakin’ cats had their own bathroom—the girl never had any money. Her allowance was a flat $60 a week, a pittance in this world. The girl’s wardrobe was heavily Old Navy. She’d even had a stint in public school. She was, hands down, the poorest rich girl in the city. 

“It’s ridiculous,” says Caitlin, a few days after the incident, walking near Lincoln Center. “We go out at night, right? And I’m always paying for her cabs! We go out at lunch, and she’s like, ‘I’m sorry, I’m so broke! Can you buy me a Vitamin Water?’ Her mom’s obsessed with not spoiling her, but come on. Mooching off friends is the solution?” She pauses. All around her, parents and their kids drift in and out of stores, walking with identical struts, sporting identical clothes, spending with identical verve—squint and it becomes hard to tell the adults from the children. “And to say you wish you didn’t have so much money! What is that?”

Caitlin lets out a laugh. 

“The girl owes me at least a hundred dollars!"