60% women get sexually harassed by male colleagues at work

Here’s a weekly round up of all that affects you at your workplace and jobs.

A new study has revealed that 60 per cent of women are harassed by a male colleague in office.

Almost a quarter of female workers have had a more senior member of staff make a pass at them, but only 27 per cent of victims have reported the matter to their boss, Metro.co.uk reported.

Employment lawyer Claire Dawson, of Slater and Gordon, which commissioned the poll said that we are well into the 21st century now and the message doesn’t seem to have got through to everyone that this just isn’t acceptable.

Dawson added that harassed women often ended up being “unfairly disadvantaged” after the event.

Her firm’s poll of 1,036 female workers also found that two-thirds of harassment victims had been targeted by married men.

The most common places for harassment were at the woman’s desk as she worked a late shift, in a lift or staff corridor, and at an office party. 

A new survey suggests that go-getting girls are forging careers and settling down faster than men their age.

According to the Australia’s biggest Gen Y marketing survey, young men are more likely to “live in the moment”, while women plan ahead for financial security, the annual Lifelounge Sweeney report showed.

One in three teenage boys and men aged 16 to 30 reckons the future will “take care of itself”, compared to just one in four girls and young women, News.com.au reported.

Half the women surveyed declared that they were “impatient to have what I want”, compared to 39 per cent of men.

The survey showed that teenage girls and young women are more connected to family and friends, with 57 per cent turning to family for advice and guidance, in contrast to 46 per cent of men.

And half the young women declared that they often thought about those less fortunate -- compared to just one in three men.

But Gen Y men find it easier than women to make new friends.

A researcher has revealed that talking about your positive goals and dreams activates brain centres that open you up to new possibilities, but if you talk about your problems, it closes you down.

Richard Boyatzis, a psychologist at the Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve, explored these contrasting effects in coaching, The Huffington Post reported.

Boyatzis and his team interviewed some college students and scanned their brains.

For some of the respondents, the interview focused on positives like that question about what they’d love to be doing in ten years, and what they hoped to gain from their college years. The brain scans revealed that during the positively focused interviews there was greater activity in the brain’s reward circuitry and areas for good feeling and happy memories.

Meanwhile, for others the focus was more negative like asking them about how demanding they found their schedule and their assignments, difficulties making friends and fears about their performance. As the students wrestled with the more negative questions their brain activated areas generated anxiety, mental conflict and sadness.

Boyatzis argued that a focus on our strengths urges us toward a desired future, and stimulates openness to new ideas, people, and plans. While, in contrast, spotlighting our weaknesses elicits a defensive sense of obligation and guilt, closing us down to.

The study is an excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s new book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. 

To avoid missing out on a good job opportunity, there are things you need to watch for before you sit for an interview.

Jayne Mattson, who is the senior vice president of Keystone Associates, has revealed that the millennials are not re-evaluating their interviews, and they should always research well on the company, Mashable.com reported.

He said that job seekers must visit the company website and research the products, mission statement and find out about their competition.

Mattson said that doing a Google search on the people one is supposed to meet, helps in developing a quick rapport.

Interviewee should always make sure that he/she has prepared the answers according to anticipated questions based on the job qualifications.

Mattson said that not re-evaluating the interview before following up is a mistake most people commit, and they should always take at least 24-36 hours to think about how the interview went, so that selling oneself in the follow up correspondence becomes easier. 

It is important to watch out for the common mistakes people make on their resumes which leads to missing out on job opportunities.

Jayne Mattson, who is the senior vice president of a career management and transition services consulting firm Key Stone Associates, has said that millennials don’t take the time to re-evaluate the resumes they send out, Mashable.com reported.

According to Mattson, one shouldn’t create a resume that reads like a job description rather than showing or explaining previous work, and should think of mentioning the skills they have acquired over time.

Making grammatical, spelling and punctuation mistakes can prove to be a great blunder if not checked properly.

It is very important to add a summary statement in the resume that reflects the kind of work one wants to do.

A new study has revealed that emotionally intelligent people have the ability to influence the emotions of others to suit their own interest, rather than achieving general pro-social outcomes by managing the emotions of others.

Emotional intelligence refers to the ability of a person to appropriately regulate self-related and other-related emotions, and is generally associated with pro-social behaviour and better interpersonal relationships.

To test these possibilities, Yuki Nozaki and colleagues at Kyoto University experimentally manipulated whether someone was ostracised, i.e., ignored or excluded, in a laboratory game. This “ostracised other” could then attempt retaliation against the other two players that ostracised him or her.

The ostracised other could either act rationally and accept fair offers in the monetary game, or act irrationally and reject fair offers, which would reduce rewards for both him or her and their ostracisers.

They found that people with high emotional intelligence were more likely to recommend that the ostracised other inhibit retaliation and accept fair offers when they have a weaker intention to retaliate.

However, they were more likely to recommend that the ostracised other reject fair offers when they had a strong intention to retaliate, in an attempt to manipulate their decision.

This study helps refine our understanding of emotional intelligence, and clarifies its social function.

The study is published in journal PLOS ONE. 

Women are better than men at multi-tasking, especially when it comes to planning and devising strategies, scientists have found.

Researchers in two experiments found that under certain conditions, women have an advantage over men at multitasking.

They designed the experiments to test a certain type of multitasking; situations where you're faced with many tasks but don't need to carry them out all at the same time.

The first lab-based, computer experiment indicated that, in general, people are not good at multitasking, slowing down when they were asked to do more one task.

Women did slow down less than men, implying they may have an advantage when faced with multitasking situations.

The researchers then went on to pit men and women against each other in an experiment designed to better simulate real world multitasking.

Participants were asked to complete three different tasks in eight minutes. On top of this, during the task a phone would ring. If they chose to answer it, the participants would have to answer general knowledge questions.

Although there was no difference between men and women when the entire experiment was analysed, women did score better on the task that required them to devise strategies for locating a lost key.

"Using two very different experimental set ups, we found that women have an advantage over men in specific aspects of multitasking situations," said author of the study, Gijsbert Stoet, from the University of Glasgow.

"The lack of other empirical studies, though, should caution against drawing strong conclusions; instead, we hope that other researchers will aim to replicate and elaborate on our findings," he said.

The study was published in the BioMed Central's journal.