Welcome to your Friday open thread. Yay for Friday! I hope you’re enjoying yours, whether at work or at play.
Pressure can work. Think Progress urged several of the sponsors of the Celebrity Apprentice to drop sponsorship of the show. At least one company responded, Groupon.
Groupon Inc. said it won’t let ads appear on the website for “The Apprentice” after customers complained about the political views of Donald Trump, the real estate developer who stars on the NBC television show.
While Groupon isn’t a sponsor of the show, its ads occasionally appear on the related site, Julie Mossler, a spokeswoman for Chicago-based Groupon, said in a statement.
“Enough consumers contacted us to warrant ensuring that we don’t place ads on ‘The Apprentice’ home page in the future,” the statement said. “This isn’t a political statement, it’s avoiding intentionally upsetting a segment of our customers.”
I really like Groupon’s statement here. I wish more companies would get it. It’s just better for businesses to stay out of politics because you are alienating potential customers. I’m hoping more companies will learn this lesson and perhaps we can get a lot of this money out of our political system.
According to new Census figures released yesterday, women have surpassed men in achieving advanced college degrees, in addition to attaining 57% of undergraduate degrees.
Women just edge out male peers. In the 25+ age bracket, 10.6 million U.S. women have a master’s degree or higher, compared to 10.5 million men. Women also now hold 1.4 million more bachelor’s degrees than men.
According to the Associated Press, this may explain a steady change in parenting roles. The number of stay-at-home dads increased to two million last year, or one in 15 fathers, while the number of stay-at-home moms dropped for the fourth year in a row to five million.
Maybe if we get more women in upper management, we will finally retire the word “balls.” One can only hope anyway.