Innovation Hub

The number of women running Fortune 500 companies is higher than it’s ever been. And yet, there are only 32 female CEOs on that list. So… why aren’t there more high-powered women in positions of power? There are a multitude of reasons, but according to Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, author of the article “If you Can’t Find a Spouse Who Supports Your Career, Stay Single,” part of the issue lies with the support these women are receiving.

We all want fun and rewarding careers and personal lives. But, we never really learn how to achieve our life goals in college. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, Stanford professors and co-authors of “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life,” invented a college course to change just that.

You don’t have to fish for tuna to have a dangerous job. Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer tells us why toxic workplaces lead to an enormous number of health problems.

How weaving rugs can empower Afghan women.

When you think of dangerous work, you probably conjure up images of crab fishermen braving the frigid Atlantic, lumberjacks operating chainsaws, or truckers navigating icy roads. You probably don’t think of late nights at the office, or working overtime at the cash register.

But maybe you should. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, argues that seemingly-innocuous workplaces have become increasingly bad for our health over the past few decades. He’s the author of “Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance - and What We Can Do About It.”

When Connie Duckworth visited Afghanistan in 2003, she was struck by two things: the deep poverty that engulfed the country and, by contrast, her own wealth and comfort. The former Goldman Sachs executive decided she needed to help and saw an opportunity in a skill many of the women already possessed: rug making. Duckworth created ARZU, a non-profit that employs Afghan women and gives them access to resources like education and healthcare. We talked with Duckworth about how this model might fit into the broader scope of international development.

If you’re reading this, you almost certainly have access to the internet, which means you can check email anytime, do online banking, or investigate whether your kid’s rash is worthy of a trip to the doctor. But, across the country, about one in five people don’t have access to those tools. According to Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, there are three main reasons why people don’t have internet connections: it’s unaffordable, it’s physically unavailable, or the household lacks digital literacy. Siefer talks about efforts to bridge this gap, and get everyone across the country connected.

Robert Sapolsky explains why it’s hard to act as if free will is an illusion… even if you believe that free will is an illusion.

How the Keeling Curve, one of the most recognizable pieces of evidence of global warming, came to be.

Corporations aren’t a minority group, but Adam Winkler says businesses have spent 200 years arguing for their civil rights.

Humanity is simultaneously incredibly kind and incredibly violent. We commit indescribable atrocities, but also acts of incomprehensible compassion. There is both horror and beauty in our history. Which leads to the question… how do we reconcile this inherent contradiction? It all goes back to our biology, according to Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist at Stanford and author of the book “Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst. In fact, all questions about human behavior are, at their core, about biology.

For thousands of years, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere fluctuated relatively consistently (air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice provide a record of the past). But, since around the 19th century, CO2 levels have been rising and haven’t really stopped. We know this partly because of the work of Charles Keeling. Keeling developed the first technique for accurately measuring CO2 in the air. He set-up a continuous measurement of CO2 on a volcano in Hawaii in 1958.

When you plot out the data collected over years of CO2 observations, you can see a steady upward curve. It became known as the “Keeling Curve” and was an easy-to-understand piece of evidence for global warming. Ralph Keeling, Charles’ son, has now taken over his father’s work and serves as the Principal Investigator for the Atmospheric Oxygen Research Group at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He spoke to us on the 60th anniversary of his father’s CO2 measurements.

Former presidential candidate Mitt Romney famously declared that “corporations are people” while on the campaign trail in 2011. The Iowa State Fair crowd jeered him and Romney launched into a stammering defense. But, if you look at Supreme Court cases from the past 200 years, Romney’s assessment wasn’t too far off. Corporations may not be people, but they enjoy many of the same basic rights we do. We talk with UCLA law professor Adam Winkler about his new book, “We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won their Civil Rights.”