Gender differences between men and women vary across countries and cultures. Understanding women s role in society and their circumstances allows us to make better management and marketing decisions. According to the United Nations, adapting training programs and removing existing barriers to women's skills and development should be part of any effort to build a competitive labor force market. In the established industrial societies , the progress of recent years has still left most women a long way short of equality. In the developing world , discrimination can take harsher forms, ranging form female genital mutilation to the lifelong discrimination in nutrition and health care.
Women are also the first to be laid off.
Women s participation in the workforce is on the rise. The most powerful lever of change in gender conditioning is education. As women become more educated, they become trained for a greater number of jobs. Throughout this century, women have made great strides in education. In the U.S., for example, a greater proportion of women enter higher education than men.