The  ironic corollary to women’s need to play a more powerful role in American life and workforce is that American business itself is at a watershed moment where it is challenged to compete with global economic powerhouses while making full use of only half of its available talent pool – the male half.

            Women are, for both societal and structural reasons, the largest underutilized resource in America.  In fact, if a board saw a company being equally negligent of its other assets they would probably fire the CEO, or at least give him a good dressing down and a charge to remedy the situation immediately.

     Solutions women seek in order to advance can be part of the larger solution for companies who need to fend off competition and embrace new strategies in order to remain viable economic generators. New rapid growth off-shoots of industries spawned by perilous times–communications, particularly wireless, and satellite phones in the wake of  the catastrophic communication failures of Katrina and 9/11; emergency and disaster management; homeland security, alternate energy sources spurred by gas shortages - all will have to ramp up  fast, and would benefit by giving women a greater opportunity to fill the pipeline for better paying jobs.

For women seeking balance who wish to telecommute, businesses could offset the competition from Bangalore India with higher paid, but a more productive and efficient workforce of women willing to work later, in order to take off and pick up a child from school or care for an aging parent.  And both businesses and women, in this age of intense global competition, must stick to their core competencies, shed the rest and elevate the level of their game,  As Thomas L Friedman in The World Is Flat relates, there is an African proverb, translated into Mandarin on the floor of a fuel pump factory in Beijing:

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning a lion wakes up.

It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.

When the sun comes up, you’d better start running.

Both women and American businesses are capable of running faster if they run together.