Generating Debt Is a Natural Part of Government Business, But Controlling Rising Debt Is Crucial

Generating debt is a natural part of doing government business. Alexander Hamilton said it best in his first report on public credit: “The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty. The faith of America has been repeatedly pledged for it…Among ourselves, the most enlightened friends of good government are those whose expectations of prompt payment are the highest. To justify and preserve their confidence; to promote the increasing respectability of the American name; to answer the calls of justice; to restore landed property to its due value; to furnish new resources, both to agriculture and commerce; to cement more closely the Union of the States; to add to their security against foreign attack; to establish public order on the basis of an upright and liberal policy; these are the great and invaluable ends to be secured by a proper and adequate provision, at the present period, for the support of public credit.”

Hamilton’s message is simple. In other words, what he was saying is that when you’re trying to grow, you need a cash flow. When your income is not large enough, then borrowing is a necessity.

But the rising debt in the U.S. has caused concern among leaders and economists over the years. Proponents of the debt ceiling are concerned that interest paid on the national debt could instead be used more effectively elsewhere; they are also worried that the national culture of debt promotes irresponsible fiscal behavior.

[Related article: Entitlement Spending Is the True Cause of the Rising National Debt]

US Treasury Taking ‘Extraordinary Measures’ to Deal with the Debt Ceiling Problem

Congress has raised the debt ceiling dozens of times since 1917. On Jan. 19, that debt ceiling was reached yet again.

In a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed him that the newest debt ceiling has been reached. As a result, she will now need to take what federal law calls “extraordinary measures.”

These extraordinary measures are really bookkeeping strategies at this point. Yellen said that the U.S. Treasury will not add new investments to the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund and the Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund.

Because the debt is an intragovernmental debt – a debt owed by one federal agency to another – that is why Yellen has chosen to use extraordinary measures. As a result, the default on the national debt will be delayed until the early summer of 2023, depending on the extent of the revenue collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

If the debt ceiling is not further increased, there will likely be a government shutdown of some kind. But even a government shutdown will not prevent a default of debt by the U.S. government.

Such a default could have dramatic effects on the dollar, the stock market and the job market. For instance, if the U.S. defaults on debt payments, that will make it harder to borrow money.

It will lower the faith of investors in the U.S. dollar. As a result, the dollar will be less powerful and that will limit the buying power of U.S. companies in foreign countries. Such an unprecedented event will also lead to havoc in the stock market, since it will raise questions as to the stability of the entire market and that in turn will influence the job market.

Negotiations in Congress to Resolve the National Debt Will Not Be Easy

With the makeup of the current House of Representatives, negotiations in Congress will not be easy. Sara Dorn of Forbes notes: “Fears of a debt limit showdown grew earlier this month, when far-right Republicans in the House proved they are willing to take extreme measures to convince leadership to give in to their demands. McCarthy was elected after 15 rounds of voting – the first time in 163 years the election has surpassed 11 rounds – and only after giving into major concessions demanded by a group of 20 right-wing lawmakers, some of which affect the debt ceiling negotiations.

“Among them is a provision that requires Congress to hold an individual vote on raising the borrowing cap, rather than passing it as part of a budget resolution. The deal also included a promise from McCarthy that Congress would not agree to raise the debt ceiling without significant spending cuts. It’s unclear what, exactly, those cuts would entail, but some Republicans have floated raising the age for Medicare and Social Security eligibility in an effort to reduce the federal deficit.”

A government shutdown would affect everyone. For instance, the longest shutdown in history (Dec. 22, 2018 to Jan. 25, 2019) was the result of President Trump and Congress not reaching an agreement concerning the appropriations bill, according to the New York Times.

This shutdown resulted in the suspension of all non-essential activities by the federal government and the ripple effects were felt around the world. It has a direct effect on the economy and services to ordinary citizens.

The next few months will prove interesting. McCarthy will have to deal with a large group within his political party that sees Washington’s fiscal culture of as the source of most of the ills of America. They will have many demands if there is any hope of reaching an agreement.

The Republicans will want to see significant budget cuts and a change of the internal culture in federal government circles. However, it is anybody’s guess how this debt ceiling issue will be solved.

Sadly, her killer has never been brought to justice. To help her family, members of the University’s volunteer cold case team have conducted a renewed investigation into this unsolved murder.

Details on their investigation and progress can be found in three ways:

• Reading the series of articles published on her case
• Joining the Facebook group dedicated to Judy’s case
• Listening to the Safe Haven podcast, hosted by Justin Rimmel and Melissa Sandberg

The Cold Case Team Will Be in Parkersburg During the First Week of February 2023

To commemorate the 15-year anniversary of Judy Petty’s death, the University’s cold case team will travel to Parkersburg on the first weekend of February 2023. They plan to meet with investigator Doug Sturm who is assigned to Judy’s case, speak with persons of interest and conduct additional on-the-ground investigation.

Additionally, the team will host a meet-and-greet and a raffle to increase the reward fund established for Judy’s case. The meet-and-greet will be held at the North End Tavern & Brewery at 3500 Emerson Drive in Parkersburg) from 1-4 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 4.

Several of Judy’s family members will be in attendance. Anyone in the local area is welcome to attend; they can meet the cold case team members and other case followers, learn more about the team’s methodology, and participate in the raffle. All proceeds from the raffle will be added to the reward fund, currently at $5,200.

George Jared and I will be in attendance signing copies of our true crime book, Silent Silhouette. which details our previous investigation into the unsolved murder of Deborah Sue Williamson. Proceeds from book sales will assist the cold case team’s travel expenses.

Prior to the meet-and-greet, George and I will be giving a presentation on our team’s work on various cold cases and hosting a book signing immediately afterwards. The presentation will begin at 11 a.m. at the Emerson Branch of the Parkersburg and Wood County Library, located at 3100 Emerson Avenue in Parkersburg. The event is open to the public and is free of charge.

Any questions regarding the presentation, meet-and-greet or offers to donate items for the raffle may be directed to [email protected].

Readers Can Submit Tips about the Case of Judy Petty

Anyone with information about Judy Petty’s death can email our confidential tip address at [email protected] or call the team’s tip line at 224-225-5208. Readers may also contact Doug Sturm, investigator for the Wood County Prosecuting Attorney’s office at 304-424-1776. All tipsters are guaranteed confidentiality and anonymity if they request it.

and Kristjana Cook, M.S. 
2022 Master’s Degree Graduate, Sports and Health Sciences

Osteoporosis is a disease which causes bones to lose density and become porous, according to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. As a result, the bones become more fragile, which drastically increases the risk of a fracture.

Like the foundation of a house, a robust, resilient skeletal system is the foundation for lifelong vitality and health. Osteoporosis is a “silent” disease that degenerates the entire skeleton. It generally has no warning signs until a broken bone occurs – typically in the hip, spine, or wrist –after a fall or sudden impact.

People of All Ages Can Suffer from Osteoporosis

The stereotypical image of osteoporosis brings to mind a stooped granny hobbling with a cane. But while advanced age and gender are certainly factors in an increased risk for osteoporosis, it is a disease that can affect both men and women of all ages.

In recent years, there has been more recognition that populations other than the elderly are vulnerable to osteoporosis. The American Medical Society for Sports Medicine has indicated a distinct connection between bone density and low energy availability in athletes, both elite and recreational. Similarly, Army Times says that male and female military recruits can also suffer from osteoporosis, which is often recognized only after a recruit suffers a stress fracture.

While a gradual loss of bone tissue normally begins occurring midway through someone’s life, there are other reasons for an accelerated loss of bone mass, including:

• Lifestyle choices
• Certain medications
• Poor nutrition
• Insufficient weight-bearing activity

As a result, bone quality can sink to dangerous levels. In fact, for U.S. women age 55 and older, bone fractures due to osteoporosis lead to more hospitalizations and greater healthcare costs than heart attacks, strokes, or breast cancer.

Fortunately, bone loss is both preventable and treatable if risk factors are identified early. In addition, patients should be educated on necessary diet, exercise, and lifestyle modifications for rebuilding bone density and halting further bone loss.

RELATED: The Hazards of Hypertension: How to Lower High Blood Pressure

Who Is at Risk for This Disease?

There are various groups that are at the highest risk for osteoporosis. These groups include:

• Women and men over the age of 50
• Women without regular menstrual cycles
• Elite and recreational athletes
• Military recruits

Osteoporosis in People Over 50

The integrity of the 206 bones in the human skeleton is constantly changing, and bones are strongly affected by the aging process. People may think of bone as hard and lifeless, but in fact, bone is living tissue providing critical structural support for muscles and protecting vital organs.

But bones will only adapt to stimuli they are given. As people age, they have a tendency to become less physically active. However, weight-bearing exercise such as running, walking, jumping, and resistance training are vital in maintaining adequate stress on bones to promote new bone growth and slow age-related bone mineral loss, according to Harvard Medical School.

Because bone tissue degenerates in the absence of physical stress, weight-bearing exercises can help people to develop and maintain skeletal strength. Weight-bearing exercises like walking, jogging, low-impact aerobics, weightlifting, and ballroom dancing are generally more effective than non-weight-bearing exercise such as swimming or biking, though these forms of aerobic exercise are excellent for maintaining one’s overall health.

Repeated muscular contractions during weight training may actually be the most effective method of the stimulating of bone function. The key is the degree of mechanical loading that flexes the bone regardless of whether the weight comes from barbells, babies, full grocery bags or garbage cans.

A protocol from The Bone Clinic in Australia, based on successful clinical trials that involved targeted weightlifting interventions in men and women over 50 with a diagnosis of osteoporosis, has shown great effect. Osteoporosis patients who did just two sessions per week of resistance training along with jumping built their bone density back into the healthy range for older adults, according to the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.

Rapid and severe bone loss often occurs during prolonged periods of disuse, such as hospitalization or bed rest due to injury. However, bones are remarkably adaptable to stimulation, so bone density can begin to rebuild once someone resumes physical activity.

Older adults, especially the elderly, who begin an exercise program should take care to progress slowly and give their bodies time to adapt. In addition, they should seek to incorporate a variety of weightbearing activities during exercise sessions. Changing from a sedentary lifestyle to regular, moderate activity will greatly reduce the chance of several degenerative problems, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, osteoarthritis, and Alzheimer’s disease.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention note that regular, weight-bearing exercise prescribed for patients with osteoporosis may worsen the condition of osteoarthritis (inflammation of the joints and surrounding tissues). It is common for people to have one or more of these diseases at the same time, especially in older populations.

Osteoporosis in Women Without Regular Menstrual Cycles  

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Women’s Health, one in four women over the age of 65 are affected by osteoporosis. Similarly, the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation states that one in two of these women will sustain a fracture directly related to low bone density.

The influx of estrogen at the start of puberty is the primary metabolic pathway with which mineral deposits in the bone begin to accumulate. Estrogen also protects bone from being reabsorbed.

At the onset of menopause, estrogen levels drop, according to the Endocrine Society. As a result, bone regeneration is stalled and the protection against bone depletion is reduced.

Natural menopause is not the only cause for the loss of a menstrual cycle. Surgical procedures,  such as a hysterectomy, can also cause a rapid decrease in estrogen production, explains Medical News Today. It can also happen due to conditions such as disordered eating, anorexia, or bulimia or through any kind of restricted-calorie diet combined with excessive exercise.

Osteoporosis in Elite/Recreational Athletes and Military Recruits

In 2017, British Olympic hopeful Bobby Clay was diagnosed with osteoporosis at age 18 after snapping the bones in her foot while pushing off from the wall in a swimming pool. Clary recounted on the Olympics Channel podcast that she found out she had the bone density of someone 70 years her senior. Her condition was the result of overtraining, chronic under-fueling and athletic amenorrhea, as well as eliminating any exercise beyond running.

In recent years, the incidence of low bone mineral density in young athletes due to overloading the body through repetitive, single-sport training along with the underconsumption of vital nutrients has become more widely recognized. Radiology Medicine notes that both recreational and professional athletes have come forward with stories of chronic bone stress injuries, exposing the alarming frequency of early osteopenia, a herald to potential osteoporosis.

According to American Family Physician, the combination of restricted eating and excessive activity can create a condition called relative energy deficiency in sport (RED-S), which can affect both male and female athletes of all ages and skill levels. It is frequently linked to low bone density, which is especially concerning during adolescence and the peak years of bone development in young adulthood.

Research published in Frontiers in Nutrition observes that military recruits are another population that is plagued with stress fractures, and new studies are beginning to recognize the prevalence of RED-S and the Female Athlete Triad in young military personnel. Recruits are often under high levels of stress as they adapt to new environments and the new physical demands placed on their bodies in basic training.

Many recruits are told to lose weight to meet military standards, and they may not be counseled on safe weight loss habits. This need to lose weight can result in haphazard calorie restriction and dieting; at the same time, these recruits are suddenly engaging in levels of strenuous physical activities to which their bodies are not accustomed.

Unfortunately, cases of RED-S and the Triad are rarely diagnosed until a trainee sustains a fracture during basic training. Low bone density may only be detected if a physician orders a bone mineral density scan.

RELATED: Female Athlete Triad and the Risk for Female Competitors

Osteoporosis in Patients with an Eating Disorder or Disordered Eating

There are significant links between disordered eating and osteoporosis, according to the National Institutes of Health. Any time food is restricted or whole food groups are eliminated, vitamin and nutrient consumption is compromised.

If people do not supply their bodies with the necessary vitamins and nutrients, the body’s systems are forced to extract calcium and other minerals from existing tissues, including the bones. In addition, when there is not enough available energy to the body, the body begins to conserve energy any way it can, which include stopping reproductive processes like menstruation.

The dual challenge of insufficient nutrition and low levels of estrogen wreak havoc on the bones. According to Eating Disorder Hope^®, about 30% of people with anorexia nervosa have osteoporosis, no matter what age they are, and up to 90% of those with eating disorders have osteopenia. Osteopenia is a bone density level lower than normal for a person’s age.

What Can Be Done to Prevent and Treat This Disease?

The best prevention for osteoporosis and osteopenia is to maximize the potential for peak bone density during adolescence and young adulthood, says the International Osteoporosis Foundation. Bone becomes stronger when it is stimulated to grow, and children and adolescents who participate in vigorous physical activity that stimulates the skeletal system in a variety of ways are likely to build stronger bones.

Maintaining a sufficient level of physical activity throughout one’s lifespan is also vital for keeping bones strong and healthy. Focusing on weight-bearing exercise and resistance-based training are the most effective methods of building stronger bones.

Diet is another critical method for optimizing bone development. Along with eating enough to sustain activity levels, striving to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables with essential vitamins and minerals is the best medicine.

According to the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Foundation (BHOF), calcium and Vitamin D are especially important to consume as a part of one’s diet. Including calcium-rich foods such as dairy products and dark leafy greens, along with foods high in Vitamin D like fatty fish and eggs, helps the body to absorb these nutrients.

The New York State Department of Health says that FDA-approved medications are occasionally used to treat severe osteoporosis, but an informed dialogue with a physician of the benefits and risks of these medications is advisable. Web MD notes that hormone replacement therapy for post-menopausal women is another treatment worth considering, but studies on the effects of synthetic estrogen on maintaining and building bone density are still ongoing.

Prescriptions for oral contraceptives to “re-start” a period in pre-menopausal women are not universally advised by physicians. The artificial menstrual cycle brought on by the pills can mask amenorrhea without treating or addressing the underlying cause.

Osteoporosis Will Continue to Be a Major Health Problem in the US

The BHOF states that osteoporosis will continue to be a major health problem in our aging society and its treatment expected to cost billions of dollars for surgery and rehabilitation, according to a recent systematic review. Unfortunately, bone deterioration usually occurs silently over many years and is often not discovered until an individual falls and breaks a bone.

Fortunately, osteoporosis is both preventable and treatable. A balanced diet adequate in calcium and vitamin D, a regular program of weight-bearing exercise, and pharmaceutical interventions prescribed by a physician can be helpful in preventing people from suffering the pain of broken bones due to osteoporosis.

About the Authors

Daniel G. Graetzer, Ph.D., received his B.S. from Colorado State University/Fort Collins, MA from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill, and Ph.D. from the University of Utah/Salt Lake City and has been a faculty member in the School of Health Sciences, Department of Sports and Health Sciences, since 2015. As a regular columnist in encyclopedias and popular magazines, Dr. Graetzer greatly enjoys helping bridge communication gaps between recent breakthroughs in practical application of developing scientific theories and societal well-being.

Kristjana Cook, M.S., earned a bachelor’s in anthropology from The George Washington University in 1996. In 2022, she earned her master’s in health sciences with a concentration in exercise science and human performance from American Public University, maintaining a 4.0 GPA. Her capstone project, written under the direction of Dr. Graetzer, was “Reframing the Female Athlete Triad and Reconsidering Mindsets and Training Methods for Female Distance Runners Across the Lifespan.” Kristjana is an American Council on Exercise (ACE) Certified Personal Trainer and a certified Road Runners Club of America (RRCA) Level 1 Running Coach. She has also been a participant in the Boston Marathon multiple times.

and Kristjana Cook, M.S. 
2022 Master’s Degree Graduate, Sports and Health Sciences

Female Athlete Triad is increasingly being diagnosed in girls and women heavily involved in both recreational and competitive sports, according to the American College of Pediatrics. This is not surprising, because we live in a culture that glorifies thinness and beauty, as well as the sacrifices needed to achieve a slim body.

As a result, an obsession with diet and exercise often grips young female athletes and compels them to do whatever it takes to mold their bodies into often unrealistic ideals, based on the images that saturate the media. The drive to be and look the best has the potential to wreak havoc on these young women, and the health consequences of Female Athlete Triad affect nearly every system of the body and extend far into adulthood.

What Is the Female Athlete Triad?

Female Athlete Triad is a cause for concern due to its effects on the body. It is typically characterized by three interlinking variables:

• An energy imbalance with or without an eating disorder
• Amenorrhea (the absence of a monthly period)
• Decreased bone mineral density (with or without osteoporosis, which is often not identified until a bone stress injury occurs)

Weight loss due to decreased caloric intake and excessive exercise (with both possibly becoming obsessions) are often the first signs of possible progression into a full-blown eating disorder. These eating disorders can include anorexia or bulimia. 

RELATED: How Warmups and Stretches Can Affect Athletic Performance

How Are Young Girls and Women Affected by the Triad?

Young female athletes are often overly concerned about their personal body weight and shape. As a result, they may feel the need to drastically restrict their eating and lose weight to achieve a physical ideal.

This desire to be thin is often influenced by images they see in social media. Essentially all social media platforms show photographs of professional athletes and fitness models with extremely low body fat, toned muscles, and visible bones. However, the common practice of using digital photoshopping to create these “ideal” bodies is something most people often conveniently ignore, according to More Than a Body.

Low-calorie diets, especially those which lack sufficient protein, calcium and Vitamin D may lead to amenorrhea (the absence of a monthly period) as the body begins to shut down nonessential functions to conserve available energy. This conservation process frequently triggers a reduction of estrogen production, which contributes to low bone density, a higher risk of bone stress injury and fractures, and possibly early-onset osteoporosis (which increases bone fragility).  

An almost morbid fear of gaining weight is more common than many parents and coaches would like to believe. Many young girls competing in timed, weight-bearing sports such as running and aesthetic sports such as dancing, gymnastics, and figure skating may be willing to do anything it takes to be as thin as possible.

What’s more, some of these athletes believe that losing their period is a sign that they are training at their peak. They imagine that amenorrhea speaks to their dedication and commitment to their sport, and they like the convenience of not having to navigate a monthly menstrual cycle during competition.

A restricted pattern of eating, however, leads to dangerously low intakes of vitamins and vital nutrients such as iron, calcium, and zinc. Elimination diets, a popular way to disguise disordered eating, makes excluding whole macronutrients such as carbs or fats seem wholesome, according to Global Autoimmune Institute.

Similarly, extremely low-protein vegan diets may also seem virtuous, says WebMD. But eliminating dairy products drastically reduces calcium and vitamin D intake, which are essential for a robust musculoskeletal system. 

The Female Athlete Triad is also closely associated with a reduction in the body’s supply of estradiol (the primary form of the hormone estrogen), which increases a female’s risk for amenorrhea and other menstrual irregularities in addition to bone mineral, according to News Medical. Although low body weight alone is generally not enough to explain the loss of menstrual periods, insufficient nutrition relative to the amount of exercise contributes strongly to low bone density.

Teenage girls who fall into the Female Athlete Triad spectrum have an increased risk for broken bones (ballet dancers and runners are particularly prone to stress fractures), which is another sign that more serious problems might follow. According to Dr. Sara Forsyth, the critical years for building bone mass are from onset of adolescence to about age 25. Insufficient fueling to support exercise and the increased caloric demands of growth during puberty essentially robs the skeleton of the very minerals it requires. 

RELATED: Strength Training for Young Athletes: What Is Appropriate?

How Can Female Athlete Triad Be Avoided?

Young women can optimize bone mass through proper diet and exercise during childhood to adulthood, giving them the greatest potential protection against osteoporosis later in life. Once a female nears the end of her reproductive years and enters the menopause transition, estrogen levels naturally begin to decline, according to the Cleveland Clinic. Bone tissue begins to break down faster than new bone can be formed as the body begins to deplete the “bone bank” established during the peak growing years.

Ideally, healthcare providers, coaches and parents should be aware of the symptoms, causes, and health risks associated with the Female Athlete Triad. Educating young female athletes on the importance of maintaining a healthy diet, especially during the teen years, is the best strategy for reducing risk of future osteoporosis. 

Fortunately, Female Athlete Triad is both preventable and treatable if it is addressed early and appropriate interventions are put into place, according to Family Doctor. Reducing the stigma associated with talking openly about menstrual cycles will help young women to realize the importance of a balanced diet that contains adequate calories to support training and essential nutrients such as calcium and vitamin D.

Also, teaching parents and coaches to recognize the warning signs of eating disorders and body dysmorphia can change the way young women define a healthy body. Hopefully, the dissemination of Female Athlete Triad information will aid a new generation of female athletes who will be able to participate and thrive in sports throughout their lifespans. 

About the Authors 

Daniel G. Graetzer, Ph.D., received his B.S. from Colorado State University/Fort Collins, MA from the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill, and Ph.D. from the University of Utah/Salt Lake City and has been a faculty member in the School of Health Sciences, Department of Sports and Health Sciences, since 2015. As a regular columnist in encyclopedias and popular magazines, Dr. Graetzer greatly enjoys helping bridge communication gaps between recent breakthroughs in practical application of developing scientific theories and societal well-being. 

Kristjana Cook, M.S., earned a bachelor’s in anthropology from The George Washington University in 1996. In 2022, she earned her master’s in health sciences with a concentration in exercise science and human performance from American Public University, maintaining a 4.0 GPA. Her capstone project, written under the direction of Dr. Graetzer, was “Reframing the Female Athlete Triad and Reconsidering Mindsets and Training Methods for Female Distance Runners Across the Lifespan.” Kristjana is an American Council on Exercise (ACE) Certified Personal Trainer and a certified Road Runners Club of America (RRCA) Level 1 Running Coach. She has also been a participant in the Boston Marathon multiple times.

Improving Time Management Skills

Improving your time management skills is essential; it enables you to meet deadlines and reduces the stress of falling behind. There are several good techniques to develop better time management skills.

One way is to use technology as much as possible. Using the calendar features on Outlook and smartphones is a good way to organize your daily tasks in a timely, logical manner.

Blocking out distractions is equally important. Often, we don’t realize how much time we spend surfing websites or social media platforms.

One strategy that I have found to be helpful was to create an hourly time log of my workday. I listed the activities and tasks that I completed on a normal workday and wrote out how much time I spent on each activity.

From there, I saw what activities were unnecessarily taking up my time and eliminated them from my daily activities. That strategy provided me with more time to focus on more important tasks.

I have also found it helpful to create a checklist of daily tasks to complete. Once I have my list, I prioritize the list using a letter and numbering system. For example, the most important task is labeled A1. The next most important tasks are labeled A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1 and so on.

I begin my workday with the A1 task and gradually work my way through the list, so that the most important tasks are completed first. Reviewing the checklist enables me to see my progress through the day and if changes are needed to my routine to ensure that I get all of my tasks completed. For example, if it is lunchtime and I am only on the A2 task, I consider working through lunch.

As a supervisor, I have also found that delegating tasks to subordinates and empowering them to make decisions is helpful in time management. Working well as a team and building collaboration in the workplace is also useful. If everyone has buy-in for getting daily tasks done, there is more likely to be cohesiveness in the workplace and a higher level of productivity.

RELATED: How to Encourage and Improve Teamwork in Your Organization

Building More Effective Organizational Skills

Organizational skills are equally important for workers to develop because many jobs have multiple responsibilities, and technology can be a useful aid. Technology enables users to not only compartmentalize tasks in easy-to-access electronic folders, but it can also be used to organize online meetings with coworkers and supervisors. For instance, software such as Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams can all be used to organize meetings.

I have to admit that I was a skeptic of Microsoft Teams at first. However, I have found that this software is a very helpful tool in both time management and organization.

For example, different teams and folders can be set up within Microsoft Teams according to Solutions2Share, and an organization’s documents and files can be organized by project or team. This format can be helpful when employees manage multiple projects or responsibilities; they can keep files separated and labeled according to their priorities and objectives.

RELATED: How to Develop the Characteristics of a Good Entrepreneur

Time Management and Organizational Skills Must Be Developed over Time

Time management and organizational skills are typically strengthened over time. They are essential to fostering productivity and reducing stress, so developing these useful skills is a must for everyone in the workplace.

Investing portfolios led by women tend to perform better with lower defaults and better risk management. In this episode, Cynthia Gentile leads a discussion of The XX Edge, a new book focused on gender diverse decision-making.

Listen to the Episode:

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Read the Transcript:

Cynthia Gentile: Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Cynthia Gentile. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome back Ivy Kempf, a professor of legal studies at Pierce College in Philadelphia, and authors Ruth Shaber and Patience Marime-Ball. Ruth and Patience, thank you for joining us today. We’re excited to discuss your book, The XX Edge, on locking higher returns and lower risk, which was published in June of 2022. Thank you and welcome all.

Ruth Shaber: Thanks for having us.

Patience Marime-Ball: Thank you for having us.

Cynthia Gentile I’ve been looking forward to our conversation for weeks. Let’s just dig right in. Ruth and Patience, could you start by sharing a bit of your impressive and wide-ranging professional backgrounds and maybe help us understand why you set out to write this book right now?

Ruth Shaber: Sure. This is Ruth and I’ll get started. I have a very unusual background that led me to this field of gender finance. I’m an obstetrician gynecologist and I had a very robust career at Kaiser Permanente for 26 years, where in addition to being a clinician, I also had many executive roles.

In my different executive roles, I oversaw Kaiser’s evidence-based medicine programs and population care programs and had the opportunity to understand systems engineering in an extremely complex system. Essentially, my job was to translate medical evidence into the actual practice that the members of Kaiser Permanente received.

When I left Kaiser in 2012, it was with the intention of bringing all that I had learned about systems engineering to the field of philanthropy and impact investing. I’ve started Tara Health Foundation in 2014 and we also took a very novel approach. Our mission was to improve the lives of women and girls, but we wanted to use a hundred percent of our assets towards this mission.

Most foundations really only think about their grant making, which is just 5% of their capital. In our case, we looked at a hundred percent of our capital. That meant thinking about a strategy for private markets, public markets, debt, and how we could build the field of gender lens investing. That journey is what led me to meeting patients.

Patience Marime-Ball: All right, so thank you, Ruth. And I’m going to just give a couple of words about my background. I’ve worked all of my life in finance. My educational background is a law degree and an MBA, and I was going to be a human rights lawyer until I realized that folks have rights as long as they can access them, and economic capacity really underpins access to most of the rights that we talk about, including right to shelter, right to food, et cetera, et cetera.

I did a JD MBA and started investing at the International Finance Corporation, and that is the private sector arm of the World Bank. The early part of my career, I invested in par generation assets around the world and then moved to doing distress assets work, so restructuring non-performing portfolios of investments, and then finally moved to investing in financial institutions. These are commercial banks around the world. In that role, I was sitting in that role when the 2008 financial crisis happened, and Christine Lagarde said something that really results in a pivotal moment in my career. She said, “If Lehman Brothers had been Lehman Sisters, things would’ve been different.”

I started really interrogating my work and the capital that I was influencing and allocating for how much of it was actually being directed with gender focused strategies or gender informed strategies, and ended up building for the IFC, the Banking on Women platform, which is now a multi-billion dollar platform to provide access to capital for women entrepreneurs around the world, not at the micro level, but at the next level, the women who are building SMEs that are the engine for growth and jobs in most economies.

We issued the first ever gender bond on the EU DESI market. We did the first ever global debt fund with Goldman Sachs for $600 million, and that’s deployed billions of dollars as well. I took early retirement to hang out with my boys, but to also continue to invest in gender diverse teams, in this case, for my own account, was invited to join a venture fund.

In the time that we are trying to raise, I realized that there was a problem, and that problem was upstream. Asset owners upstream did not necessarily understand the value of women around the table, the value of women’s innovation, the value of women decision making, et cetera, et cetera. They kept asking us if we meant microfinance or cook stoves, if we wanted to invest in those, as if that’s the only technology and the only capital that women can handle. That frustrated me enough to end up founding in 2018 Women of the World Endowment.

Women of the World Endowment is focused on building a large capital base that can have a seat in the room with other asset owners to do three things. One like Tara Health Foundation, invest all the capital intentionally. So, with a gender focused commitment. So, we invest across asset classes and sectors, but with singular commitment that every one of our investments has an agenda focused strategy and delivers impact as well as significant financial performance.

We also work on curating strategic capital that we use to influence other asset owners. Finally, with the income that we generate, we invest in nonprofits that are doing the hard work of removing the friction out of capital flows so that those capital flows get directed to solving problems and giving people inclusive opportunity. So that’s Women of the World Endowment.

Ruth and I met three years ago in 2019 when we were at an event in Italy together and we arranged a breakfast. Ruth brought to that breakfast a systems map of capital markets that she and the team at Tara Health Foundation and an external party had been building. This identified the areas of leverage in capital markets, where if things were done differently, capital might flow differently, and women might be able to allocate more of it.

We basically fell in love with each other’s purpose as well as became really good friends. And now, Ruth serves as the chair of WOWE’s board, also gave us a significant grant to really fuel our work, and we started collaborating. In that collaboration came the idea around The XX Edge. Ruth is going to tell a little bit about how that came about.

Ruth Shaber: Yeah, so the origin story of why we wrote this book, you asked Cyndi. I had been invited to lead a training in Singapore for a big impact investing summit. There was a half day training that I recruited Patience to join me.

We went off to Singapore to do this training with a bunch of Asian impact investors and we were also invited to this breakfast event by a very fancy lawyer banker, and in her private office with all of her best friends. There were about 30 people in the room, half men and half women. It was a lovely event, beautiful view over the Singapore Harbor, and we started talking about gender investing and we noticed immediately that all the women in the room were completely engaged, leaning in. They were fascinated by the topic and really anxious to share their own stories about how difficult it was for them to get access to capital and the double standards for women as founders of companies and all the things that we outlined in the book.

At the same time the men in the room, who were very happy to be there eating their very fancy breakfast, all had their heads down, shoveling their food into their mouths and really had no idea why they would be even invited. It was at that moment, I think, that Patience and I realized that we needed to find a way to jump the fence and really communicate the power of gender diverse investing to these men and not just those men in that room, but men throughout the systems of finance. Those are the folks who control 97.7% of the capital in the world. If we weren’t going to start finding a way to talk to them that we weren’t going to ever get out of the niche that gender investing has been in.

We knew that there was really powerful performance data that, if we could speak to the men in finance about how well their portfolios will perform, if they understand the power of gender diversity, that that would be an effective way. We hope that’s an effective way to speak to them.

Patience Marime-Ball: But I just wanted to pick up on what Ruth said about the importance of the data, the performance data. Earlier on, I talked about how SMEs are the engine of growth in any economy. We also know that women are starting and building small and medium size enterprises at an accelerated rate.

We also know that they also tend to employ more women in those jobs and so that’s really important. That’s just sort of the micro grounding, but in terms of the data that we were able to pull and put together, Ruth and I were actually afraid that we would end up having to cherry pick which asset classes or which sectors show better performance when it comes to women being at the decision-making table. We didn’t have to. It turns out that there is data that says when women, when you have gender diverse teams making decisions, you have a likelihood, a 21% likelihood of better performance emerging from those decisions just on a profitability basis.

If you take that to across the value chain of entities from early-stage companies, when you have one woman in a founding team of a new company, there’s a 63% likelihood that that entity will survive and actually do well and be more resilient. We have data that shows that, even in the high finance, in hedge funds, where you’d think, well, that’s just too high finance for women to do well, there’s data that shows that actually, the average of women run strategies, risk strategies in the hedge fund space outperform the average of large hedge funds by as much as 6%. This was observed over a six-year period.

I could just go on. When it comes to loans to enterprises, and this one Ruth loves to tell as well, but the portfolio that we built at the IOC allowed us to actually do an in-depth analysis of the non-performing loans within those portfolios to look at gender desegregated portfolios and see how much defaults they had in them. The women portfolios had lower NPLs, lower non-performing loans, lower defaults, and so across the spectrum you just see better performance, better risk mitigation. This book surfaced all of that data so that we could demonstrate that you get wealthier and healthier portfolios when you have gender diverse decision-making.

Cynthia Gentile I’m going to take some time in a moment to talk about just how incredibly well researched this book is, but I wanted to just back up for one moment and ask if you could clarify or give us some context around the use of the word woman in the book. What do we mean by gender diverse and what do you mean by women?

Ruth Shaber: Thanks for that question, Cyndi. I think it’s a really important one just to ground us. In my background in evidence-based medicine and evidence-based practice, I think it’s important to be really clear about your definitions and your terms.

Most of the research that’s been done around finance and diversity and the benefits of having diverse teams, at any stage in the finance supply chain, have been based on self-described women. If we’re guilty of having these descriptors that are not inclusive, it’s really because that’s where the research is.

We wanted to be clear that we’re basing our conclusions on published research. Most of the diversity science that’s out there is on men versus women, and it’s cis men versus cis women, but we fully understand and appreciate that gender is fluid and that there are many of the traits and the behaviors that we identify as being more typical for women that are certainly present in many men and in many trans women or trans men. We want to be clear the research is based on the traditional definition of women, but these are traits that appear throughout the spectrum of personalities and people.

Ivy Kempf: The XX Edge is an incredibly well-researched book, and it raises the profile of gender diverse investing or strategy to both support organizations that optimize the strengths of women as decision makers and it brings about higher returns for investors. I was particularly drawn to the way that you use data to support each and every contention you make within this book. There’s so much data, can you isolate a story or two that’s representative of why gender diversity is a successful investment strategy?

Patience Marime-Ball: Thank you very much, Ivy, for that question. And somebody said, “Well, your book is full of so much data and so many stories. I don’t know. It ends up being confusing,” but what we wanted to do, at least this one gentleman gave the feedback, but what we wanted to do was to show that there isn’t … this is the only lane where women are successful, or this is the only asset class or whatever it is. We wanted to show that these successes are across the spectrum.

One of my favorite stories, and it’s partly a favorite story because it’s very real and everyone in the world can relate to it and especially in this moment, is the story of mRNA, the research that brought about the COVID vaccines. What most people didn’t understand before we had the vaccines is that that science is very female. It starts with the CRISPR gene editing science that was the work of folks like Jennifer Doudna and Charpentier, a French scientist and American scientist who got a Nobel Prize for that science. That science is the underpinning for mRNA, which is a science that is the other side of DNA. A lot of men who went into DNA science, some women chose the path less traveled, but it was also the path less funded, and it was conviction. A couple of characteristics that we isolated in this book is the way women are collaborative, that they have the long view, and are also risk aware.

That long view part of it is that, with conviction, they stay the course. In this case, we have  Dr. Katalin Kairkó who stayed for 35 years with the study of mRNA, was underfunded when she was in the lab doing the RND, tried to take that science and start her own company, couldn’t raise funding, and it took a man who read a paper recognizing that there was quite a bit of science and validity to her science that he started BioNTech, which ended up being acquired by Pfizer, and hence the Pfizer vaccine.

The reality of it is that, if she had been funded when she was toiling in those RND labs, and less than 1% of RND capital, less than 2% goes to women scientists or women-led labs. We are missing the opportunity of funding these amazing solutions that solve all kinds of downstream problems when we don’t give capital to women.

That story is a favorite because we are now hanging out with each other, having dinners, and we’ll speak, talk about dinner later on in lunches and breakfast, et cetera, because we’re now out and about again. That is a very female science. I think Ruth has a favorite story too. Ruth, do you want to tell yours?

Ruth Shaber: Absolutely. One of the characteristics of problem-solving that I think is really important to recognize and we bring out in the book is that the people who are closest to the problems that technology or innovation is trying to solve are important contributors to those solutions.

I learned this in my career in healthcare. If you’re trying to develop a new research protocol or a new program to treat people with diabetes or how folks get care in an operating room, if you don’t actually talk to the people who are either delivering the care or who are receiving that care, you’re never going to come up with the right solutions. We call it proximity to problems, and so there are so many innovations in the world that are brilliant because the people who are solving those problems and contributing those innovations are actually the ones suffering from the problems.

One of my favorite innovations that we talk about in the book is an app called Safety Pin, which was designed by some activist women in Delhi, India, and they were responding to the violence in their city, and in particular a gang rape of a woman on a bus. They use very similar technology that we take for granted now when we’re driving, that we can use Google Maps or WAZE, and know where there’s an accident because it’s a crowdsource information that people put in where they’ve seen an accident or where there’s a traffic stop.

What they designed with Safety Pin is an app where people could put in where violence was happening in their city, where the streetlights were out and it was dark, where they knew an abandoned building and there were gangs hanging out. They developed this app as a tool, as a for-profit tool, not just as a social good, that could drive much better safety protocols, and essentially just have people know where it was safe to go in their own cities. The app has turned into a really important tool for government partnerships and has spread really around the world. I think that’s a great example of innovation because the people who were suffering the most really came to the table and designed the product.

Cyndi and Ivy, one of my favorite stories from the book is about the history of crash test dummies. And I think this is a good example of how important it is to have women at the table when you’re designing innovations, how you’re thinking about the products and the markets that you hope that they all impact.

Crash test dummies were an innovation in the 1950s. Really important, because before then, any kind of automobile safety experiments were done on live people, so we’re very grateful for crash test dummies. But interestingly, they did not consider having multiple crash test dummies. There was only one and it was the weight and size and anatomy of the average size man. As a result, when new safety innovations like airbags and seat restraints and headrests were being developed, they were really only tested on this one prototype. And as a result, women really were disproportionately impacted by crashes after the airbags were implemented and became a safety regulation.

You think about that workaround that we still have in all of our cars where you can turn off the airbag in the passenger seat. That really was because women were dying when their airbags would go off because they’d hit them in the face, because it didn’t really take into consideration the difference in anatomy. I think that’s a great example of how important it is when products are being designed to have a full understanding of the market that you’re trying to target and having women at the table when those innovative decisions are being made.

One thing I also want to really bring up is we talk a lot about gender diversity and diversity more broadly. As I said before, most of the research that we pull from in this book has been done with women. Sometimes it’s women solely led teams, but most of the research is around diverse teams where there are both men and women at the table. That’s a really important fundamental issue for us is that this is not about men versus women. This is about male only teams versus gender diverse teams.

I think that it’s true that we can extrapolate what we’ve learned in this research to any time when you have a homogeneous group of people sitting around a table making a decision. In this case, we’re comparing men to men and women together, but anytime you have one group of people who are trying to make important decisions, they don’t see all the risks. They don’t see around the corners. They don’t fully understand the impact of the decisions that are being made.

This is not a replacement strategy. This is not about switching out men for women. This is about adding seats at the table, bringing in more people, more women in the case of what we describe in the book, but more people of all types. What we know is that, when you do that, the evidence is really clear that you actually get economic growth.

At the micro level, when you have diverse teams, then you see the budgets expand and more opportunity. Certainly, at the macro level and at a country in a global level, when women are included in the economy and included in financial decision-making, you see the potential for tremendous growth in GDP and growth of our economies.

Cynthia Gentile Thank you all for helping me explore the concept of gender diverse investing. I’m Cynthia Gentile and we’ll be right back.

Cynthia Gentile Welcome back. Today, Professor Ivy Kemp and I are talking to authors Ruth Shaber and Patience Marime-Ball about their new book, The XX Edge. Let’s get right back to it.

Patience Marime-Ball: The book has sections to it. The first part was all this data that we wanted to pull together to show the evidence across asset classes and sectors. There’s another part of the book where Ruth and I have so much fun just creating moonshot thinking around what if. We called it the what if strategies like in the care economy, in the healthcare sector, in climate mitigation. What if we had more women in those seats, in the leadership seats, in decision-making seats? And so that part was fun.

In the last part of the book, we really thought, well, if by the end of the book the men are brought in, what are some of the things they need to do? We created checklists across a number of areas, including if you’re an asset owner, an asset manager, how do you need to think about moving your capital?

If you’re an asset owner, you must think about who are the people moving my capital? Who’s actually making the decisions to allocate my capital? Because we know a couple of things. A single dollar can do more than one thing at any given time. Whoever is allocating that capital gets to decide the purpose of that capital downstream.

In addition to making money, money can do many other good things. A dollar, a single dollar, can do all those other things as well. Having that diversity in the room really matters, so if you’re an asset owner, think about who you have in the rooms making decisions about your money. If you’re an asset manager who is next to you in the investment committee room making those decisions where capital is going.

Most people think that they’re not asset allocators. If you have a pension, you are an asset allocator. Right? You have sometimes the opportunity to pick which companies or which mutual funds your money is supporting. There are now tools out there that can allow you to look behind the mutual fund and actually see the companies within those mutual funds and see whether those companies are gender positive or are aligned with your values.

Every decision that we make in the capital market space, and all of us are decision makers in the capital market space, because we spend money. You make decisions about where you spend that money, right? That’s a capital market. That fuels the economy. All of those you should be able to ask. Ruth loves to talk about even supporting women founded companies in your local neighborhood. Ruth, do you want to go a little bit into that?

Ruth Shaber: Yeah. In terms of checklists, some folks that we talk to about the book don’t see themselves as investors. But actually, every time that you decide where you’re going to buy products from, you’re making an investment in that company. You can go actually on Google now and put in women owned companies near me. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t also frequent male owned companies, but it’s good to be aware and to think about, if I have a choice, where do I want my dollars to go?

At Tara Health Foundation, we started out talking about how we are a hundred percent mission aligned and we use a gender screen and that means something different for every type of capital. When we’re providing a loan, we might think about, well, how is this enterprise that we’re providing a loan to going to take women into consideration? Are there women who are owners of that debt? Are there women who are making the decisions about the budget for that entity?

We think about, when we’re investing in early-stage companies, we want to make sure that even if the founders are men, and there are plenty of companies we’ve invested in that have male founders, but we want to make sure that they’re bringing women into their market analysis and they’re thinking about how their products are going to be used and consumed by women. Certainly, in the public equity space, we think about how many women are on the boards of those companies and in the leadership team and how are they thinking about the benefits to retain and attract the most talented women to those companies, so things like paid leave, coverage of healthcare benefits.

There are checklists that are pretty easy to think about, but I think it depends on where you sit in the supply chain of finance. We’re all there whether you like it or not.

Patience Marime-Ball: Or the value chain of life, including if you are a male leader and you’re thinking about who you’re mentoring, who you’re promoting, who you’re sponsoring to those decision-making roles. You, too, can have a role to play in changing the diversity in every single room.

One of the things that we think about at Women of the World Endowment, including to all the things that Ruth said about our portfolios, is really when we have an opportunity to do direct investments in early-stage companies, we always think about how much leverage are we going to get out of that? Our investment is a small investment, but is this company well placed to actually provide us with influence, to provide us with access into rooms that we’d otherwise not have access into?

It’s very much everyone thinking to the point I made about what is the purpose of every single dollar? Right? With those investments, we are getting financial returns, but we are also getting the potential that those companies are going to influence other asset owners or other people to act differently and bring about better outcomes for more people, more opportunity for more people.

Cynthia Gentile I think it’s really interesting the way that you tie not just investing in a more traditional or technical sense, but also with where we actually spend our dollars as a consumer in this same thought process of approaching it from a gender diverse standpoint. It made me think about the idea that a budget is a moral document. It helps us think about what’s important to us, but so are our choices towards both investing and spending.

Sometimes I think people get tied into a thought, like if I’m opposed to a product or a company, then I can boycott it. But we don’t necessarily make the jump to, if I support a company, if I appreciate a company’s stance on something, then I can support it with my dollar. Even that dollar has impact.

I do think that that’s a really important piece of your lesson here in this book. Patience, one of the things that you mentioned was the term care economy. The book does discuss this a little bit and it talks about why women are so central to that conversation. Can you give me some kind of context around the care economy and maybe, Ruth or Patience, how COVID has impacted that notion of women in the care economy?

Patience Marime-Ball: Yeah, so this is another story that I love to tell, and we love doing the research around this as well because like the mRNA research that is very close to our lived experience in this moment. It’s not close to a single group of people. It is a global experience. Really beginning to appreciate what the care economy means is also a recent global experience. Everyone, women and men, experienced what it means to not have good infrastructure around the care economy.

Then, economies, actually some of them ground to a halt because of this lack of good attention to our care economy infrastructure. When we talk about the care economy, we’re talking about early age care, but also elder care, but the stuff in between. Our healthcare system is in some ways part of the care economy. The healthcare system is 70% female, by the way, at the lower levels, but not at the leadership levels. It’s less than 25% female at the leadership levels. We are proximate to the solutions that are being applied but not proximate to the budget allocations that are being made.

You are absolutely right. Budget allocations really do determine what is being prioritized. In the care economy, it has traditionally been female. It has not been recognized as something professional, so it has not been renumerated. It has just been almost outside of what people would even think of as part of the economy. That became a problem when COVID came along, and people didn’t have care infrastructure. Then, the care infrastructure that existed is not adequate.

One of the studies we have in this book, and actually in the what if, moonshot thinking, space in the book, the care economy is one of those places, one of those areas or sectors that we spent some time on. It was partly because of its really sort of recognized importance as people left jobs because they could not be present for their families and still be in the workspace. We recognized that our caregivers are also essential workers and how do those things sit alongside and allow economies to keep thriving?

We have an incredible opportunity coming out of COVID. Really, we wanted to write this book, and have it come out in the context of still struggling with the impact of COVID and the opportunities that it presented because we wanted for these memories to be proximate. The care economy is one of those things that became incredibly highlighted, and the solutions are both policy-related, but they’re also private company related, to Ruth’s point.

If you’re looking at where your money’s going, are you investing in companies that have the appropriate infrastructure for women and men to thrive in the workspace, which means provision of care, some kind of care benefits? But also, in terms of innovation, people are now really thinking about innovative solutions and investible strategies for the care economy. There are some countries that have done this incredibly well, some Nordic countries, and we give examples of how that came about.

I think it is Norway that we have in the book. I haven’t looked at that chapter in a bit, but it’s Norway that we have in the book where we talk about how, after the second World War, women who had been allowed to come to work were now told, go back to home and look after the kids. It is the story of how the activism that started with women saying, “Oh, we want to be back in the workplace, and this is the infrastructure we need for us to thrive in the workspace,” has really made Norway one of the best countries with the best care economy infrastructure.

What if the rest of the world really came to a place where it is valued, it is professionalized, it is renumerated, it is not seen as women only work, it is gender diverse in the same way that investment rooms should be gender diverse. Care economy should be gender diverse. I think we’re going to build a better infrastructure in a better world.

Ivy Kempf: You guys probably both know that this is typically a legal podcast where Cindy and I talk about legal issues. I kind of want to ask a question related to that and ask you guys what’s the relationship between the legal and the investment sectors when it comes to gender? And Patience, maybe I’ll throw it to you, since you’ve got the JD, but also I’d love to hear Ruth’s input.

Patience Marime-Ball: The reality of it is that lawyers and the ones who are doing the right thing are creating the infrastructure, the economic contract that we all have, whether it’s our jobs or whatever it is, that we have movement of capital between different entities. The legal profession is central to all of that and most of it comes at it from risk mitigation.

When you want to mitigate a risk, you go to your lawyers and your lawyers are the ones who advise you around what are the structures to mitigate that risk. I think there’s an incredible opportunity for the legal world to recognize that risk mitigation is not just about the four corners of the document. It is about who is in the room. It is the governance infrastructure around our global operations. Right?

When we don’t have the appropriate governance infrastructure that includes women, because we know that having women at the table is going to give you the risk awareness, greater risk awareness. Women tend to just; it’s traditionally been called risk averse. No. Women are more risk aware, and so having that risk awareness at the table and creating structures that actually risk mitigate and provide better governance all around will result in better outcomes. Generally, better risk mitigation is healthier portfolios, and ultimately, whether it’s a company or healthier economies, and everybody wins.

Our view is when we think about how, lawyers are the first line of defense, most companies when they want to mitigate their school, come to their lawyers. I think it’s really incumbent on the legal profession to go beyond the four letters of the document and really think what does a risk management infrastructure actually include? We posit in this book that includes having women at the table making decisions alongside the men.

Ruth Shaber: I think that these learnings are applicable to any sector. Certainly, the legal sector has a particular role to play in the risk assessment, but wherever you sit, whether you’re in local government, you’re on a school board or you are in the social services, you’re running a nonprofit, you’re in healthcare, you’re education, you’re a teacher. If you look around the room and it feels like you’re looking in a mirror, then there’s a problem.

It’s not just about bringing more women into the finance rooms, but of course that’s a fundamental core problem in the economy that we’re not taking advantage of women’s talent and the power of diversity. But anywhere you sit in the decision-making, that we need diversity in order to come up with better solutions. I think the same learnings that we’re applying to high finance and to business sectors are also true throughout the economy and throughout the sectors that we all engage with every day.

Cynthia Gentile Well, this conversation has been truly fascinating. I’m so grateful to you, Ruth and Patience, for writing this book and for taking the time to share it with us today. And thank you to our listeners for joining us. Be well and be safe.

The U.S. sent American air, ground and naval forces in conjunction with United Nations forces to successfully defend South Korea, according to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library. But in 2023, it appears that North Korea will be continuing its aggression.

North Korean Missiles Carrying Nuclear Weapons

North and South Korea are still divided today, and the United States continues to be an ally with South Korea. Today, there are 28,500 American troops in South Korea and recently a U.S. Space Force unit was established in South Korea, according to Military.com. This unit likely enables the U.S. military to closely monitor threats from North Korea, China and Russia.

In particular, North Korea continues to provoke and threaten the United States and its interests. Military.com notes that North Korean missiles – capable of carrying nuclear weapons and of striking the U.S. mainland – were recently test-fired. In the past, North Korea has threatened to use nuclear weapons against the United States and South Korea.

[Related article: North Korea calls UN nuclear watchdog ‘a marionette’ of West]

Tensions between North Korea and US Allies Continue

Tensions have been high between North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and the United States for some time. Recently, Kim Jong-un revealed North Korea’s military goals for 2023, which occurred amidst high tensions with the United States.

According to Fox News, Kim Jong-un recently told his party leaders that North Korea is experiencing a “newly created challenging situation.” He called for a “strengthening self-defensive capabilities to be strongly pursued in 2023” and set the direction for an “anti-enemy struggle.”

Hypersonic Weapons and a Reconnaissance Satellite System

Leading into 2023, North Korean missile testing was elevated. According to U.S. News and World Report, North Korea plans to speed up its military buildup and to make developing new strategic weaponry a top priority. This weaponry includes nuclear missiles, hypersonic weapons, at least one reconnaissance satellite system, and other advanced weaponry.

In addition to South Korea, North Korea has also focused its aggression on Japan, another United States ally. Fox News reported that North Korea threatens to take “bold military steps” against Japan and put out a statement that said, “Japan’s foolish attempt to satiate its black-hearted greed – the building up of its military invasion capability with the pretext of a legitimate exercise of self-defense rights – cannot be justified and tolerated.”

North Korea has a history of making veiled threats toward the United States. On November 1, 2022, the Associated Press said that in response to U.S.-South Korean large-scale joint military drills, North Korea threatened the use of nuclear weapons and said that the U.S. and South Korea would “pay the most horrible price in history.”  

In any case, the United States must closely monitor the capabilities of the totalitarian state – particularly North Korean missile advancements – and work with allies to deter North Korea from acting on any of its threats. If you are interested in learning more about North Korea and other military conflicts, military history and military theory, consider exploring the University’s online master’s in military studies degree.

Workforce shortages in EMS agencies are serious because patient care can be adversely affected. For instance, some patients may be in life-threatening situations and need prompt medical attention, and that care can be delayed as the patient waits for an ambulance with qualified crew members to arrive.

Organizations such as Patients for Patient Safety are concerned that with a lack of healthcare workers in a variety of settings, patients may not be getting the care that they deserve. But to understand how to fix workforce shortage issues, EMS leaders need to take a comprehensive look at their own workplace culture to understand how to decrease the attrition rate for paid staff and volunteers.

[Related article: EMS Community Risk Reduction: Creating and Analyzing Data Models]

COVID-19 and the Increase of Stress in EMS Agencies

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, paramedics and EMTs struggled with a major influx of patients and worked countless overtime hours to provide appropriate patient care, according to Time Magazine. Often, these people also had to endure falling ill to COVID-19 and losing patients, relatives, and friends, which increased the stress level of an already stressful job and led to burnout.

Why Are EMS Providers Leaving the Field?

Workplace culture is a major influence in any organization, including EMS agencies. But it’s also necessary to understand the toxic traits that encourage individuals to leave an organization.

Due to culture, overwork and other problems, many EMS agencies – and their technicians and paramedics – have chosen other employment. Sarah Calams of EMS1 observes that there are seven reasons why EMS providers have fled the industry, including:

• Seeing a lack of professional opportunities
• Experiencing mental health, stress and anxiety
• Suffering sleep deprivation
• Juggling volunteer EMS work with a paying career
• Being a target of violence
• Performing a physically demanding job
• Documentation woes

Tara Vlaun of Distance CME notes that making EMS an essential service policy would help to force communities to staff their ambulances effectively. However, taking this action while communities already have strapped budgets and cannot effectively staff their ambulances could backfire in a truly spectacular way.

Improving EMS Workplace Culture Will Require More Research and Self-Examination

Often, a failure to attract and retain staff can be attributed to a poor workplace culture, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. Fixing recruitment and retention problems within EMS agencies could start with improving problems such as sexism, racism and miscommunication. Similarly, EMS agencies need to be encouraged to embrace change, empower their leaders and replace toxic personnel, according to EMS 1.

EMS agencies can create a more supportive EMS workplace culture for their volunteers and paid staff. But without doing research and self-examination – and implementing any findings – EMS agencies will keep having the same recruitment and retention problems.

But things changed after months of indirect negotiations in Vienna between the U.S. and Iran. Despite the efforts of European Union mediators, what seems to have sealed the ultimate fate of the nuclear agreement is the Iranian government’s brutal crackdown on protestors in major Iranian cities. So what will Iran do in 2023?  

The US Feels That the Iran Nuclear Deal Is Dead 

In a press briefing on January 3, 2023, Ned Price of the Department of State observed that the actions of the Iranian regime destroyed the chance to work out a nuclear deal, according to Rudaw. He stated, “The Iranians killed the opportunity for a swift return to mutual compliance with the JCPOA. They most recently did so in September when they turned their backs on a deal that was by all accounts essentially finalized, ready to go.”  

Price’s statement is not the first time the Biden administration has used this type of language to refer to the nuclear deal. In a video recorded in December 2022, President Biden said that the nuclear deal is “dead,” according to the Times of Israel. 

As a result, the sanctions on Iran remain in place and continue to have a detrimental effect on the Iranian economy. But Iran doubled down on its conflict with the U.S. when it became an integral part of the Russian war effort against Ukraine.  

[Related article: Iran Protests: Cities Suffering Civil Unrest]

Iran and Russia Have Formed a Partnership 

According to The Guardian, Iran has supplied armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to Russia central to the Russian war with Ukraine; these drones have been used to attack targets all over Ukraine. They are much cheaper than conventional ground missiles and have become a hallmark of the war in recent months.  

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy reports that the Iran-Russia relationship is only growing stronger. Henry Rome, a Senior Fellow at the Institute, noted in a recent report that this Iranian-Russian relationship is a significant threat to world peace, saying: “The recent intensification has both covert and overt components. Tehran has become Moscow’s most important military supplier, with Iranian drones repeatedly being used against Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure.  

“According to Western governments, Tehran has also deployed personnel to Crimea to train Russian soldiers in operating these drones. Both parties have tried to keep this assistance a secret, with Iran denying that it has provided drones during the war (though international pressure did compel it to claim that it had sold such systems to Russia—in 2021).  

“The Iranians may also have reached an agreement to manufacture drones in Russia and sell short-range ballistic missiles to its military. Moscow’s compensation to Tehran is less clear at this point.” 

Rome Recommends More Sanctions

In his report, Rome made several recommendations. First, the U.S. and the E.U. should publicize the information about the Iranian drones, their abilities and their limitations, which will allow other nations to develop ways limit the drones’ effectiveness in the battlefield. This information will be appreciated by other countries, especially in the Middle East.  

Second, the U.S. and the E.U. should impose more economic sanctions on Iran, specifically targeting the imported parts used in drone construction. The growing sanctions will show the Iranian public that their regime is more interested in helping the Russian army than in elevating the Iranian economy.  

Additional Executions Are Contributing to Internal Unrest  

The regime in Iran has decided to increase the pressure on its people by executing protestors who take part in anti-government demonstrations. According to CNN, Mohammad Mahdi Karami and Seyed Mohammad Hosseini were executed on January 7, 2023, and more protestors have been sentenced to death.  

The BBC says that many more people have died since the demonstrations began in mid-2022. The Human Rights Activists’ News Agency (HRANA) notes that as of January 8, 2023: 

• 519 protesters and 68 security personnel have been killed
• 19,291 protesters were arrested
• 111 protestors are estimated to be “under the impending threat of a death sentence”
• 163 cities are involved in the protests 

The hardline tactics used by the Iranian government has brought down the number of protests and the number of participants. However, this accomplishment might be very limited and short- lived.   

As Saeid Golkar of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga observed to Reuters, the government crackdown “has been relatively successful since the number of people on the streets has decreased… However, it has created a massive resentment among Iranians.” 

The Road Forward for Iran in 2023  

With the expectation of more external sanctions on Iran and more complex forms of civil unrest, the next months will reveal if the protests have started a larger movement among the youth of Iran. Iran’s crippled economy and the limits it has imposed on civil liberties will likely create more civil unrest, but perhaps this time will be different.  

We are left to wonder if actors outside Iran could help opposition forces within Iran. Saudi Arabia is interested in assisting the millions of Sunni Muslims marginalized by the Shiite regime within Iran. The U.S. and the E.U. could also render assistance to the many factions within Iran that have suffered from the heavy hand of the regime for many decades.  

It seems that Iran has chosen a path of force, internally against its own citizens and externally in its relationship with the West and other regional powers. Iran’s ailing and aging supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will not be changing his tune any time soon. But perhaps the next leader of Iran will choose a more reconciliatory path.  

Hackers seek to gain Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information (PII) from both K-12 schools and higher education institutions such as universities and colleges. While teachers and students need to be educated to reduce risk exposure (Rahman et al., 2020), cyber threats continue to evolve too quickly for many schools to manage.

Brad Zearott is a friend and colleague who has worked for schools for many years as a cybersecurity professional. He mentions that while business and schools face many of the same cybersecurity issues, there are some unique aspects to K-12 cybersecurity. “Schools are unique in that our customers are our parents and our students. This presents a challenge as we must educate both groups on safe cyber practices,” he says.

The Top Threats to K-12 Cybersecurity

While schools face many types of cyberattacks, one of the most damaging is a ransomware attack. During a ransomware attack, a hijacker accesses files and locks them away from the owner’s management.

After the attack, a communication usually follows with a financial demand to unlock the files for the original owner. Zearott mentions that while the files are usually unlocked after paying the ransom, hijackers oftentimes install a “back door” that allows them to access the files again after some time has passed.

While ransomware attacks are not the most common threat schools face, Zearott says that they are the most devastating type of cybersecurity attack. Most schools end up paying the ransom because they have no other option.

Most of the time, the ransom is in the tens-of-thousands of dollars range. The money is usually wired to offshore accounts that are difficult to trace as attackers use proxies to hide their location.

Phishing scams and identity impersonation are other threats to K-12 cybersecurity. With this scam, a hacker impersonates someone else via email. Other users receive an email from that user, asking them to make a purchase.

Oftentimes, the person being impersonated is someone in authority, so the victim ends up making the purchase. Zearott notes that getting email information is very simple for scammers as most schools have an email directory available online.

RELATED: Why It’s Important to Close the Cybersecurity Knowledge Gap

Many Schools Are Underprepared for a Cyberattack

Experts agree that it is no longer of matter of if a school will face a cyberattack, but when (Belastok, 2022). While schools have come a long way, many educational institutions are still underprepared for a cyberattack. Zearott mentions that the COVID-19 pandemic made schools examine their security protocols, but the technology push came with additional challenges.  

As schools became more dependent on the internet for instruction, their cybersecurity initiatives increased, along with their exposure to hackers. As Zearott observes, the only secure network is one that does not exist. The more online exposure schools have because of remote learning, the higher the risk of a cyberattack.

As teachers and students transitioned to remote learning, schools were forced to allow access from outside their own secure network. Remote students learn on home networks that may contain their gaming devices, mobile phones and personal computers. Should any one of those devices become infected, the risk of a cyberattack on a school increases because it is not protected by the school’s firewall.

After a cyberattack, schools must do what they can to protect information. Most schools have a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan in place, and those who do not are putting themselves at risk for a major cybersecurity breach.

Under most DR plans, servers are copied at several points throughout the day. Should there be an attack, schools can use the backup of their server to recreate the information as it was prior to the attack.

RELATED: Open Source Intelligence: How Hackers Gather Your Information

Alert and Educated School Employees Are the Best Protection Against Threats

When asked about mistakes teachers and other school employees make when it comes to cybersecurity, Zearott reports that most people are either not educated in ways to identify cyberthreats or they are too trusting of communications like emails and texts. “Teachers tend to trust the communications they receive when they believe they are from trusted sources, like a school principal,” Zearott says. In general, school employees need to be trained to recognize emails that seem trustworthy but are from malicious sources.

Various Ways to Ensure K-12 Cybersecurity

There are various technological resources to help prevent threats before they happen, including antivirus software and multi-factor authentication (MFA). With MFA, there are three ways to authenticate an individual’s identity.

One way is to have individuals show what they possess, like a cell phone. Another way is for individuals to show what they know, like a password or personal identification number (PIN). Finally, individuals can prove their identity through what they are physically, such as a fingerprint or retinal scan. MFA requires that a user utilize at least two of these methods for accurate identification.

Schools Must Do More about Protecting K-12 Cybersecurity

In the coming years, K-12 cybersecurity will continue to be a problem. While technology will certainly change over time, there will always be bad actors who wish to exploit schools for financial gain.

The key for teachers and administrators is to continually evolve and learn about cybersecurity attacks and defensive measures. While efforts to reduce threats using MFA and other technology will help to reduce attacks, end users continue to be the most important way to ensure K-12 cybersecurity.

References

Belastok, E. (2022). Our biggest nightmare is here. Cyberattacks are targeting school districts. How can schools respond to keep data and systems secure? Education Next, 22(2), 44-49.

Rahman, N.A.A., Sairi, I. H., Zizi, N. A. M., & Khalid, F. (2020). The importance of cybersecurity education in school. International Journal of Information and Education Technology, 10(5), 378-382.