Elinor Ostrom, 76, known for her work on the management of common resources, is the first woman to win a Nobel in economics. She shares this year's prize with Oliver Williamson, 77, who pioneered the study of how and why companies structure themselves and how they resolve conflicts.

Monday's final prizes of 2009 capped a year in which a record five women won Nobels. And it was an exceptionally strong year for the United States, too. Eleven American citizens, some of them with dual nationality, were among the 13 Nobel winners, including U.S. President Barack Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it chose Ms. Ostrom and Mr. Williamson for work that “advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.” They will share the $1.4-million (U.S.) prize.

Ms. Ostrom showed how common resources — forests, fisheries, oil fields, grazing lands and irrigation systems — can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies.

“What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved — as opposed to just having somebody in Washington … make a rule,” Ms. Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University, said during a brief session with reporters in Bloomington, Ind.

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By Jeannine Aversa, Karl Ritter and Matt Moore
The Globe And Mail
Photo @ Indiana University

In his east Charlotte apartment less than a mile from Windsor Park Elementary, Jorge Flores Rojas created a religious shrine to a mystical figure known as the patron saint of death, who is said to protect pimps and other criminals.

Each day, Flores prayed to Santa Muerte, or “Saint Death,” joined by the teenage girls whom he forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a day.

Flores, 45, was a notorious operator in a city that has become a center for sex trafficking along the East Coast.
Local and federal authorities are not sure how extensive the Charlotte sex rings have become. They say Flores’ ring brought in hundreds of young women each year to work as prostitutes.

Flores was convicted of trafficking in April. But authorities say other pimps in Charlotte continue to prey on young girls from poor countries.

The growth is so extensive that this month ICE stationed a team of agents in Charlotte to focus on human trafficking, smuggling and exploitation. Across the Carolinas, immigrant sex rings have been broken up in Monroe, Durham and Columbia.

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One of your company's most powerful competitive weapons may at this very moment be cleaning out her desk — or contemplating doing so. Can you afford to let her go?

In researching my forthcoming book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down, we found that in the wake of last year's financial crash, high-powered women were more than twice as likely as men — 84 percent compared with 40 percent — to be seriously thinking jumping ship. And when the head and heart are out the door, the rest of the body is sure to follow.

Women are falling victim to two types of attrition: they're being disproportionately let go and they're disproportionately quitting. Yet whether they're jumping or being pushed, figures show that a female exodus is bad for business.

Research conducted by both Catalyst and McKinsey & Company demonstrates that companies with significant numbers of women in management have a much higher return on investment.

In addition, a recent study from London Business School shows that when work teams are split 50-50 between men and women, productivity goes up. Gender balance, the research posits, counters groupthink — the tendency of homogenous groups to staunchly defend wrong-headed ideas because everyone in the group thinks the same way.

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By Sylvia Ann Hewlett
Harvard Business Review

Muslims have lived in South Africa for hundreds of years - but Islamic marriages remain unrecognised in law, making divorce potentially disastrous for women. As the BBC's Mohammed Allie reports from Cape Town, that situation could be about to change.

Unlike most other women, however, this means she has been left in poverty. "Financially we are messed up, I only actually want what is rightfully mine, what I've worked for, what I've sweated for," she says. "Not just for me, but for my kids, that's all that I want."

She says she lived in a home to which she and her husband both contributed - but following her divorce she was left with nothing and was forced to move back to her parents' house.

South African couples who marry legally do so in community of property, which allows both parties an equal share of material possessions in the event of a divorce. But women married under Muslim rites have endless problems.

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Nearly three decades of war, brutal totalitarianism, invasion, occupation and insurgency in Iraq have left behind at least a million widows - and several million children without fathers.

That was the conservative estimate earlier in 2009 by Iraq's acting minister for women's affairs, Narmeen Othman. She believes there may even be two million widows.

Under Saddam Hussein, despite the brutality of his regime towards so many of Iraq's people, war widows were looked after by the state. Now, they are mostly hidden and vulnerable.

It's been called Iraq's cultural time bomb.

Close to the surface of the new normality here, there are painful memories, and a yearning for lost loved ones. And - there's anxiety about looking after the children when the breadwinner has gone.

Umm Fatima, for example, worries about her children. Their father Ahmad was shot dead nearly three years ago by men wearing military uniforms. He'd simply been refuelling his taxi cab when they killed him.

Umm Fatima has lost a husband and the family income. She believes it's very important for her and for the children that she re-marries. "A father for them would make us all more secure," she told me - financially, and emotionally.

"They miss their dad," she went on. "And when they meet men sometimes, they want them to give them a hug."

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By Hugh Sykes
BBC News, Baghdad