A Day In Line At Greece's ATMs

ATHENS -- National Bank of Greece, Formionos street branch, around 1:30 in the afternoon. Nearly 25 people are in line waiting their turn at the ATM. Some are worried that the machine will run out of money and want to reach it before that happens. People offer financial analysis to strangers. Comments are interspersed with personal experiences, socio-political criticism, patriotic and European ideals.

A gentleman next to me looks calmer than the average person in line. I ask him for an anonymous comment.

"I was supposed to come either way," he says. "Every week on this day I come here to withdraw my mother's pension because she's not familiar with ATMs."

"So, you are not withdrawing money out of fear?" I ask him.

"No, I'm not afraid of anything. And of all versions available, I prefer the one with the referendum and 'no.'"

Line at ATM, National Bank of Greece, Formionos street branch

A lady comments on the position of the Greek government and its leader, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who has called a referendum for next Sunday on a bailout proposed by the country's international creditors. "Tsipras will win," she says. "Both at the referendum and the elections, whenever they will be."

I ask her if she, too, is withdrawing money driven by the uncertainty of developments. Her response is negative, with a keen nod of disapproval.

I wonder if this accumulation of customers might be random, though unusual. On the other hand, why should it be considered morally reprehensible or hypocritical if a person is anxious about their savings and tries to protect them, whatever his or her political view?

At the Eftichidou street branch, where most of the people are not interested in speaking with a journalist, one middle-aged man agrees to talk to me.

"Europeans are trying to terrorize us. I was living in Germany, they are advanced, I give them that, but now they just want to subjugate us. Schäuble does not accept an honest, democratic agreement," he says, referring to German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble. "He is so zealous against us, I think, that his plan is to overturn the first left-wing government, the left wing is their enemy," he adds.

A lady next to him, who was listening to the conversation, suddenly bursts out: "They don't want to see Tsipras and Kamenos. Because they don't do whatever they tell them."

The man continues: "Let them kick us out. The European south, Italy, Spain, they will follow. Let us form a union with them. Greece has a lot of advantages: geopolitical, agricultural, in tourism, in shipping. In the prospect of the drachma, the first couple of years will be difficult. After that we will recover. And Europeans will want to take us back. We had the drachma before and everything was all right."

"He's very optimistic, that one," I hear two girls whispering.

Across the street, under a shadow, a group of DIAS motorcycle police is watching the queue. "We have orders to supervise ATMs and supermarkets," they tell me.

At the Piraeus Bank branch at Pangrati Square there is no line; across the street, the Eurobank ATM must be serving tens of people. A young man, around 30, angrily addresses the few clients of Piraeus Bank: "Withdraw everything and next Sunday vote for 'no.'"

No one replies. He laughs to himself.

"I would have withdrawn money today, anyway," he tells me. "Now I will withdraw more to be safe for the next few days. I am certain that ATMs will run out of money -- it has already happened at some places."

"What do you think about the decision to have a referendum?" I ask.

"I am completely against the idea. It's a backlash because they do not have the political will to make the necessary decisions. They never had it and that always made our situation worse."

I ask him if he is not contradicting himself.

"To me there is no dilemma. I am a working person, not privileged at all. But our only option is Europe. The motivation of the SYRIZA-ANEL government is the return to the drachma, and right now is the climax of an organized plan with that sole purpose. Some will return their capital to the country and buy us, like notables."

He plans to vote, "no matter the proposed agreement," he says.

Two young women walk away. They did not withdraw any money.

"I voted for Syriza, without being their follower before, hoping for better terms after the negotiations and reinstatement of a minimum wage," one says. "They did not negotiate anything all these past months, that's what I feel. They could have lowered those pensions that are still high and remained tenacious for the social solidarity benefit for pensioners. But I cannot stand them pretending to negotiate hard. And now, five months later, they throw the ball in our court, to decide on a financial issue without knowing all the evidence. Which exactly is the agreement?"

"Are you scared?" I ask her.

"Yes. I am scared of bankruptcy, of the ruthless devaluation of currency and the general isolation of the country once it exits the EU."

She is an accountant, like her friend, who adds: "In 1974, my mother emptied the supermarkets." That was the year Greece went from a military government to a democracy. "They didn't need anything. Nothing will happen now either."

This article originally appeared on HuffPost Greece and was translated into English.

Why Marriage Equality Is Great For The Economy

Thanks to marriage equality, this could be a big year for Sophie Pyle's company.

The founder of Tweet The Bride -- a service that posts live Instagram and Twitter updates during clients’ weddings -- expects the Supreme Court’s Friday decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the country to be a major boon for business.

“It just makes the wedding industry and the number of people getting married that much bigger,” Pyle told The Huffington Post on Friday morning. “There are that many more customers and weddings. I’m very excited about it.”

Pyle's year-old business is based in Virginia, which was one of 37 states (and Washington, D.C.) that recognized same-sex marriage prior to the Supreme Court's new ruling. Her clients don't always live or marry nearby, and she often travels to attend ceremonies in other places. She has worked only one same-sex wedding -- all the way in Denmark! -- but she expects more in the future.

Just married in Copenhagen! #hamiltondevoss

A photo posted by #HAMILTONDEVOSS (@hamiltondevoss) on Jan 24, 2015 at 8:40am PST

The #HamiltonDevoss wedding in February was the fist same-sex wedding Pyle worked at.

Aside from the obvious benefits to the wedding industry, marriage equality could have a positive impact on the economy overall.

In the first three years of nationwide marriage equality, spending on same-sex weddings could add $184.7 million in tax revenue and 13,058 jobs to states’ economies, according to a report from the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute. The U.S. economy could get a $2.6 billion boost over the next three years.

New York, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2011, has already benefited from same-sex weddings, as data-driven news site Vocativ points out. In the first year after New York passed its Marriage Equality Act, New York City alone received a $259 million economic boost as 8,200 marriage licenses were issued for same-sex weddings and more than 200,000 guests traveled in from out of town to attend the ceremonies.

For those in the industry who have already worked with gay couples, the value of same-sex marriages is apparent.

“Those who embraced it benefited from it,” Chris Jaeger, a wedding industry marketing consultant, told HuffPost. “It’s a real positive thing.”

He recalled struggling to convince one of his a clients, a wedding officiant in California, to preside over same-sex unions. But that was five years ago, when the legality of same-sex weddings in California was complicated.

Times have changed.

“She [has] embraced it,” Jaeger said of the officiant. “Now there are pictures of her doing ceremonies with men marrying men and women marrying women.”

In the 13 states that had not recognized marriage equality before the Supreme Court's new ruling, some business owners are just happy to finally have the opportunity to work with gay couples.

Jackie McGrath, owner of Sweet Treets bakery in Texas -- where, until Friday, gay marriage was banned -- said she was “ecstatic” to hear the news.

“We have a gay wedding this weekend. It wasn’t going to be official, but now it could be,” McGrath said, adding that she and her staff began working on a rainbow wedding cake on Friday, just after the ruling was announced. “We’ll probably give it out to customers to celebrate."

Jenny Che contributed to this report.

Health Care Stocks Soar After Obamacare Victory In Supreme Court

On Thursday morning, stock prices of hospitals and five of the biggest health insurers climbed after the Supreme Court handed a victory to Obamacare.

The 6-3 decision in King v. Burwell upheld a key part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act, which offered tax subsidies to states to establish their own health care exchanges.

Major hospitals led the surge. Dallas-based health service provider Tenet Healthcare soared nearly 12 percent after the ruling. Community Health Services, the biggest non-rural hospital chain, climbed nearly 10 percent. HCA Holdings, the parent company of Hospital Corporation of America, rose close to 9 percent. LifePoint Hospitals, which provides health services in rural areas, swelled about 7 percent.

Stock prices increased more modestly for health insurers. UnitedHealth and Humana surged the highest, climbing nearly 3 percent following the decision. Shares in Anthem Blue Cross, Aetna and Cigna rose, too.

“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not destroy them,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the landmark ruling. “If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.”

This post has been updated with new information throughout.

Why Young People Are Scrambling To Work For The Same Few Companies

The improving economy doesn’t seem to be enough to push college students to broaden their horizons very much: For the last few years, young people have been setting their sights on the same few companies.

The most attractive companies to young people continue to be big names like Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs and IBM, according to a global survey of 240,000 business, engineering and IT students released Wednesday by employer branding firm Universum.

Among business students, Google ranked first, followed by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young, Goldman, KPMG and Deloitte. Apple, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase and Procter & Gamble rounded out the top 10.

The results indicate that tech, banking and consulting industries are increasingly competing for the same pool of top students.

"They're absolutely going for the same talent," said Kortney Kutsop, senior account director at Universum. "What Google and Apple have that accounting and banking firms don't is a product. They have strong brand recognition. In accounting and banking, the people are their product."

Even the exhausting work culture of Wall Street (Goldman Sachs recently told its interns to stop working between midnight and 7 a.m.) and consulting doesn't seem to deter students. Banks and the Big Four -- Deloitte, PwC, EY and KPMG -- are still the "gold standard" for business students, said Kevin Troy, head of Universum's research and insights in the Americas.

"They have great training programs, they look great on your resume, and they're competitive and challenging," Troy said.

But these companies are losing appeal among students seeking more creative work, and the tech industry is snapping up the talent.

"Fifteen or 20 years ago, students wouldn't have said they were looking for a kooky environment where people stay up till midnight but get free meals," Troy said. "But Google came along and many other Silicon Valley companies adopted culture. We're in a different paradigm."

Some students, however, may not be as drawn to the tech industry's relaxed hierarchy.

"Where the consulting and banking firms have an advantage is being able to articulate what the advancement path looks like for analysts," Troy said. "Tech companies tend not to focus on job titles and have flatter organization structures, and that's part of the appeal. But for someone who really wants to know what they'll be doing in two, four years, recruiting websites will tell you how long it takes you to make partner."

Engineering and IT students also named Google as the most attractive employer on Universum's survey. Other companies among the top 10 include Microsoft, Apple, BMW, GE, IBM and Intel.

While these are consistent with past surveys, one industry climbing the ranks is consumer packaged goods, or CPGs, like Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Nestle and L'Oreal. These companies have begun to emphasize their values over the products they churn out.

"Millennials want to be part of a bigger purpose and give back," Kutsop said. "Companies are talking about how you'll advance, training and development programs, rather than showcasing that Unilever owns Ben & Jerry's and Dove."

How To Stop Working All The Time And Get More Done

The always-on, sleep-with-your-smartphone ethic is so pervasive that last week Goldman Sachs actually had to explicitly forbid interns from working all night long. Two years ago it gave its analysts the privilege of taking Saturdays off.

Surface moves like this, while laudable in intent, will do little to change the culture at elite, high-paying firms where the "best" workers put in absurdly long hours and are always available. Obsessive overachievers who are consistently rewarded for working a lot will just figure out workarounds.

"The intent is right but it doesn't work. It's a bit like saying you want to control the weather by telling the thermometer, 'don't go over 80 degrees,'" said Grant Freeland, a partner at Boston Consulting Group, which over the past few years has actually figured out a way for employees to work fewer hours -- not by using a blunt hammer like a work ban but by deeply examining how people work and facilitating conversations about how to do it better.

Before I tell you how the Boston Consulting Group did it, you might be thinking: Who cares? These are the country's most well-paid workers -- total compensation for an entry-level consultant can reach six figures -- so why not let them work as much as they want?

But we can't just ignore this: Consultants and bankers set cultural norms in the business world. They work with a range of other companies. Their values spread. Recall that hard-charging investment bankers helped create "CrackBerry" culture, fueling the dawn of smartphone addiction for everyone. Basically, investment bankers are part of the reason your boss can email you at midnight.

The idea of rational work schedules is also of significance to a growing army of hourly workers who don't have predictable hours and whose managers and managers' managers don't seem to care. These people are not well-paid and can't afford round-the-clock childcare to accommodate their unpredictable schedules. Perhaps if corporate culture were to change at the upper-income levels, that change would spread, as well?

Boston Consulting started to change its ways more than a decade ago, when it began a research experiment with Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow. She was interested in finding out if work-life balance was even possible for the kind of overachievers who go into professions like consulting and investment banking -- Type As who need to be told not to work at 3 a.m.

Perlow and a team of researchers studied the Boston office of Boston Consulting for a year to figure out what kinds of work-life issues were making people miserable. She came back with a theory about how to get consultants to work less: Give them predictable time off. (Banning work in the middle of the night so they can sleep doesn't count.)

This was a radical theory to consultants. "They thought we were crazy. It was really hard for them," said Freeland, who worked with Perlow. "They cheated."

But after about five months, the consultants started to like this new world. They actually restructured the way they worked in order to make getting predictable time off possible. And that doesn't always mean one night off a week -- it could be an accommodation for a personal event like a child's recital.

They created processes that led to more productivity -- sharing responsibilities for certain aspects of a project, for example, so they could cover for each other. They also dropped work that was redundant or unnecessary.

In order to have a productive team where everyone gets a night off, they had to talk to each other a lot -- about how to work smarter and, crucially, about their personal lives.

"It was helpful to know that the reason the partner missed a meeting was that he was taking his daughter on a college tour," one consultant said, according to a piece that Perlow wrote in the Harvard Business Review. "I had never heard a partner talk like that before. My work is really important to me, too, but it is not the most important thing in my life. [His openness] made me comfortable to admit that."

The group's experiment was a success. Consultants rated themselves as more productive and they were doing less work. Fewer consultants quit the firm -- there was less burnout.

Boston Consulting has since expanded the project and now just about all of its 6,000 consultants participate in what they call PTO, or Predictability, Teaming and Openness.

Notably, Boston Consulting ties succeeding in this program to advancing within the firm: "If you want to be promoted, you have to have good upward feedback on this," Freeland said.

So far, though, not a lot of other companies have gotten the message on this.

"Occasionally, I will get calls from other firms to come and talk about this. The problem is: You talk to them and they're like, 'we'll stop working at midnight,'" Freeland said. "So I get kind of frustrated."

Goldman Sachs is obviously filled with smart people so it's certainly possible they'll figure out how to do more. A spokesman for the firm told The Huffington Post last week that the recent move is part of an ongoing process to improve the work experience of its junior bankers. The firm is also experimenting with new kinds of software to improve productivity, according to The New York Times.

What Happens If Greece Defaults On Its Debts?

As negotiations between Greece and its creditors continue to fail to produce a bailout deal, the Greek central bank warned on Wednesday that the nation could start down the path to leaving both the euro and the European Union if it defaults on its debts.

Greece owes the International Monetary Fund 1.6 billion euros by the end of June. The IMF says it will allow no grace period, although it has occasionally done so for debtors in the past. Most likely, if Greece cannot secure an agreement with the so-called "troika" of creditors -- the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission -- it will be unable to make the payments, 7.2 billion euros in bailout aid won't be released and the country will go into default immediately.

While both sides wish to avoid such an outcome, the talks seem to be at loggerheads. Greece's left-wing Syriza government stands opposed to harsh spending cuts while the troika demands the government make more internal reforms.

The specter of a Greek exit from the euro, sometimes called the "Grexit," has loomed over this year's bailout talks, just as it did in previous years of debt negotiations. However, as the deadline approaches, observers have started analyzing what will actually happen if the country does default on its debt.

Two men walk under graffiti on a billboard in Athens. (AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)

There are multiple scenarios that could occur in the event that no deal is reached. Many economists and financial writers predict that the effects on Europe would be bad, but not nearly as harmful as what would happen within Greece itself.

WHAT COULD HAPPEN TO GREECE?

1. Default without exiting the euro.

Despite the Greek central bank's warning that a default could force the country to give up the euro and leave the eurozone (the group of nations that use the currency), that wouldn't automatically be the case.

If Greece defaults, the ECB will need to decide whether to continue authorizing emergency lending to Greek banks or to pull the plug altogether, Reuters notes. Should the ECB continue lending, Greek banks could stay afloat for a little while.

This default-without-exit plan, The Wall Street Journal explains, could give Greece more time to reach a bailout deal, or might simply mitigate the consequences of an immediate default.

2. Greece leaves the euro and adopts its former currency.

An obstacle to the emergency lending is that Greece has more big payments approaching in July, which it doesn't have the money to pay. If the ECB decides to cut off lending and the country runs out of money, Greece would likely be forced to abandon the euro and print its own currency.

In this event, the country might return to the drachma, its old currency.

Experts fear that this move could cause a bank run, in which citizens take euros out of their accounts en masse before the euros can be converted to drachmas. This hasty withdrawal would damage Greek financial markets and cause capital to flee the country, Reuters notes. Actually, a slow-motion version of this has already been taking place, with Greek bank deposits hitting a 10-year low earlier this year.

To make these bank runs less likely in the event of a return to the drachma, Greece could institute capital controls in an attempt to limit the amount of money that could be transferred out of the country. It's not known exactly how this would work in Greece, but a recent Bloomberg article explained that Cyprus instituted comparable policies during its financial crisis. These included daily caps on ATM withdrawals and limits on the amount of money Cypriots could take while traveling and on how much they could send abroad.

Some economists, like Paul Krugman, see a long-term upside to defaulting and switching to the drachma. They argue that Greece could devalue its currency and begin an export-based recovery, as well as restore funding to social programs. On the other hand, these economists ackowledge, European creditors would lose out on payments they would get if Greece remained in the eurozone.

Protesters holding national flags take part in an anti-austerity rally in front of the parliament in Athens on Wednesday. (AP Photo/Yorgos Karahalis)

3. Greece leaves the euro and starts a parallel currency.

Another potential scenario is that instead of reverting to the drachma, Greece could start a parallel currency to the euro that it could print and use to pay government workers' salaries. This would free up euros with which Greece could pay its international creditors, with the new currency acting as a kind of IOU from the government to its citizens.

The problem is that the government needs to be able to convince Greeks that it will actually honor these IOUs. The parallel currency could also be perceived as a kind of "Disneyland" money that's good within Greece but not accepted under the same terms as the euro. Or the notes could be printed in excess, which would devalue the currency, Bloomberg notes.

4. Greece leaves not only the eurozone, but the European Union as well.

There is also the question of whether Greece could ultimately exit the European Union if it defaults, as the Greek central bank suggested. Martin Schulz, president of the EU parliament, told The Guardian on Wednesday that dropping out of the eurozone would also mean leaving the EU.

But it's not clear how that would transpire without a legal mechanism to give Greece the boot: Under current EU treaties, there's no process for kicking a country out of the union. Although states can leave voluntarily, the majority of Greeks want to stay.

Greek Finance Minister Yianis Varoufakis listens to Greece's prime minister at the Greek Parliament in Athens on June 16, 2015. ( LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images)

WHAT COULD HAPPEN TO EUROPE?

1. Financial contagion.

The European Union worried in previous "Grexit" scares that if Greece left the euro, French and German banks that had lent funds to Greece would be threatened. There was also concern about default spreading via a domino effect of sorts: Markets in weak eurozone economies would be spooked by the ECB letting Greece default, resulting in bank runs in nations like Portugal, Ireland and Italy. Fearing a currency devaluation, companies might be compelled to withdraw huge amounts of capital from these countries, thereby causing further economic crisis.

In this round of negotiations, however, there is less worry about this possibility. The EU has set up the European Stability Mechanism rescue vehicle, which seeks to provide a bulwark for weak economies that could be affected by a Grexit, according to The New York Times. Also, Greece mostly paid off the French and German banks with its first bailouts, The Washington Post notes. Greece now owes the majority of its debt to European governments, meaning that a default, while harmful, wouldn't destroy these countries' broader economies.

European banks are also doing better than they were during the last round of negotiations, with regulatory measures and increased capital designed to withstand stress, the Times notes.

2. The end of a political project

A more serious way in which the default could hurt Europe has to do with the desire to preserve the eurozone as a political project. European leaders have tried for five years to keep Greece part of the eurozone, and as Germany's Der Spiegel explains, it would be seen as a disaster if all that time and effort were for nothing.

Greece would be the first country to leave the euro, and its departure would be a huge blow to the idea of the eurozone as a project for prosperity in a united Europe. The BBC notes that a Grexit could benefit anti-EU political groups and shake the sense that the euro was permanent.

3. A poor precedent

Greece leaving the euro could also set a precedent for other nations to leave in the future.

Portugal is a candidate for a similar outcome, as it also faces its own debt crisis. The country's prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, has denied that Portugal would be next if Greece is to go.

Wealthier nations like Germany also fear that if Greece succeeds in receiving a bailout without making the spending cuts that creditors demand, a precedent would be set in which countries could threaten to leave the eurozone in exchange for receiving loans.

This Company Proves You Can Hire More Women In Tech Right Now. No More Excuses!

New ThoughtWorks hires during a break from training in Pune, India. (Credit: ThoughtWorks)

No tech company wanted to hire Danie Banks two years ago.

She had an Ivy League pedigree -- Cornell 2004! -- but her degree was in general studies. After graduating, the 33-year-old Bronx native worked a series of office manager jobs, filing, getting coffee, organizing schedules.

“I was pretty bored,” she told The Huffington Post recently.

Banks always had an interest in tech, so when she wasn't working she taught herself how to code online. She joined the Startup Institute, which offers a course that aims to help people break into the New York startup world. She landed interviews.

“Those interviews were just talking through my resume: ‘Have you done this? No?’ Pass it back,” she said. Rejection came quickly. “Nobody got to know me.”

Then Banks went to a networking event for "black nerds" -- Blerds Night Out -- at ThoughtWorks, a global tech consulting firm headquartered in Chicago with 3,000 employees and a passion for social justice bordering on obsession. She dropped off a resume, landed an interview and went through a process unlike anything she’d previously experienced.

ThoughtWorks tested her coding skills, asked her about her views on social justice, made sure she interviewed with a diverse roster of employees for a position as a software developer. And, dear reader, she got hired. The way it happened offers lessons for any company -- in tech and other industries -- looking to hire more women and minorities.

Danie Banks

For the past five years, ThoughtWorks has aggressively sought to increase the number of women in its ranks, with impressive results -- nearly doubling the percentage of women in tech roles to 32 percent from 17. The company’s most recent hiring class was 57 percent women, surpassing its 50 percent target. These are unheard of numbers in tech.

The stats on women in tech are typically depressing: Just 26 percent of computing jobs in the U.S. were held by women in 2013, according to a recent study. At big companies like Google, Apple and Facebook, women are the minority, particularly in engineering and technical roles. At big trade shows, attendees neatly summarize the problem by tweeting photos of long lines at the men’s bathrooms and no lines at the women’s bathrooms.

At #WWDC, it's apparent the quest to get women interested in software engineering still has a ways to go. pic.twitter.com/iepwRa0rFO

— Jonathan Bloom (@BloomTV) June 8, 2015

Hiring more women is something most tech companies are talking about. Many now make the rounds at women-in-tech events, throw their support behind groups like Girls Who Code and spend money to encourage more women to major in computer science. Some even offer workers training in unconscious bias, seeking to root out the kind of discrimination that holds women and minorities back at work.

ThoughtWorks is active along those lines, but two other things set the company apart: First, it actively recruits outside of computer science, hiring unconventional candidates and offering extensive training. Forty percent of its software developers have degrees outside of computer science -- think music, economics, accounting, history.

“We do not just look at education and the typical boxes when meeting a candidate. We look at the whole picture. Their life journey, their curiosity and of course their technical proficiency,” said Joanna Parke, the managing director of the company’s North America division.

Second, and perhaps most intriguing: The company takes a nontraditional approach to interviewing that deliberately combats the unconscious biases that typically lead interviewers to hire someone who seems just like them.

The interview piece proved key to boosting the numbers over the past five years, said Jo Avent, who holds the title “recruiting change agent” at ThoughtWorks. Because even as it was finding more women before that, the company found it was not actually hiring them. “It was really kind of demoralizing,” said Avent.

To help keep bias in check, at least two employees conduct each interview. And in discussions with company recruiters afterwards, interviewers try to identify “bad smells,” the company term for the unsupported prejudices that seep into one’s assessment of a candidate. Statements like “they just didn’t seem like a fit” or “she talked way too much” or "we just didn't click" are analyzed and tossed if not backed up by facts.

ThoughtWorks tries to make sure at least one female interviewer is included in the process -- to showcase diversity and to assess a candidate’s reaction. “You’ve got a candidate and two interviewers -- one male and one female -- and the candidate only makes eye contact with the man. It happens all the time. It’s a flag. Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s something you want to look at," said Parke.

The company also tries to make sure you’re interviewed by someone who looks like you. “So candidates can see the company isn’t just talking about diversity,” said Avent. That was tricky in Banks’ case -- she was interviewed by women, but no black women. Right now 8 percent of the company’s employees are black and 3 percent are Hispanic. Parke said in an email that the company knows it has a long way to go on this.

Banks also had to fill out a “values” questionnaire, where she was asked things like “If you were president of the world, what would be the first three things that you change?”

She laughed recalling her answer: “I think I said ‘world peace’ and ‘end world hunger.’" Banks said the mere fact that they even asked her about those things was amazing.

“We’re looking for an openness and a desire to learn and a curiosity about the world,” said Parke. “It’s a core part of our culture.”

Joanna Parke

ThoughtWorks makes about $350 million in revenue each year and has its fair share of corporate clients -- it’s done work for the Gap, Southwest Airlines and Caterpillar -- but the company also brands itself as strongly committed to social and economic justice.

Indeed, ThoughtWorks recently worked with the international aid group Save the Children to develop an electronic medical record system for use during fast-moving outbreaks like Ebola.

It’s been a year and a half since ThoughtWorks hired Danie Banks, and by all accounts it’s paid off: “I’ve learned so much,” Banks said. When I asked her if she thought those companies that didn’t want to hire her would be interested now, she didn’t hesitate: “Yes.”

Developing talent is a dangerous game for companies: You can train workers, and then they wind up leaving you. That’s not what’s happening at ThoughtWorks. The percentage of workers who leave the firm is very low -- just 10 percent for women and 16 percent for men.

Bank’s certainly isn’t going anywhere. “ThoughtWorks gave me a chance, I’m gonna kick butt for them.”

If you’re a women in tech and have a story to share please email me at emily.peck@huffingtonpost.com.

Twitter Is The Best Job Search Tool You're Not Using -- Here's How You Can

Sarah Alvarez got her first job after tweeting about Nutella.

She was studying abroad in France in 2012 when she saw that Shout PR, a retail and lifestyle marketing firm, had blogged and tweeted about a healthier alternative to the beloved hazelnut spread. Alvarez tweeted about the article and thanked the firm for posting it, and she later mentioned that Twitter conversation when she emailed the company about summer internships.

Shout had her come for an interview two days after she got back to the U.S. -- and it hired her as an intern.

“Because of the way I reached out, they took a look at my social media profile,” said Alvarez, now an account executive at the communications agency Bite. “I interviewed with the person who had written the blog post, and she was very excited that I’d been engaging with her content.”

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the barrage of Twitter noise -- and to favor LinkedIn instead as a professional social media tool. But if you don’t look closely at Twitter, you could be missing out on some crucial job and networking opportunities.

Twitter offers a strong network of people in various fields, and companies and hiring managers are increasingly sharing open positions on their accounts.

“It offers less structure as a job search tool, but more opportunities to connect with people,” said Pamela Skillings, an interview coach and founder of Big Interview, a job coaching program. “You can stumble on an opportunity that you might not otherwise find.”

Here are some tips to get the most out of your Twitter job hunt:

Spruce up your profile

First, think of your Twitter profile as your brand: Include an identifiable photo, so recruiters recognize who you are.

And don’t underestimate that bio under your picture. “Your bio is your elevator pitch,” said Alyson Weiss, a social media coach. “It’s your first chance to make an impression before people decide to click on you.”

In addition, Skillings recommends including your Twitter handle on your resume. “You’re giving people the ability to find you, and it shows a level of transparency."

Start following and strike up a conversation

The next step is to follow companies, recruiters, publications, job forums and industry leaders. Most brands don’t have a lot of repeat engagement from individual users, which means you can stand out from the crowd if you retweet, favorite and reply to tweets in meaningful ways, experts say.

“Just join the conversation,” said Ashley Stahl, a career coach to millennials. “Find out who your potential boss would be, retweet them and reply to their tweets.”

Too often, however, people don’t think of Twitter as a networking opportunity.

“Twitter wasn’t branded as a professional network like LinkedIn, but that doesn’t mean it has to be only personal,” said Weiss. “We don’t compartmentalize our real lives as professional versus personal.”

Once you build up a personal conversation with a recruiter or manager, it’s easier to direct message them to ask about connecting outside of Twitter or in person.

Sometimes, managers don’t even have an official job posting. Christa Freeland, now the marketing manager at the venture capital firm Powershift, found a job in 2011 at Journyx, a software company, when she started following an employee there who would later be her boss. When she saw he'd tweeted about an open social media marketing role, Freeland immediately applied for the position.

“My boss was very smart about it,” Freeland said of his search for the perfect candidate, adding that the company didn’t actively promote the position anywhere else but on its social media accounts. “It was about finding a marketing person through social media.”

Make lists to narrow in on interesting companies

One way to sort through Twitter is to create a list for target companies, Weiss suggests.

“It’s overwhelming with so much content, since you turn around for a second and you have 200 missed tweets,” she said. “With a list, you can see job opportunities from specific companies.”

You can set your list to public or private, and add as many users to it as you like. Clicking on a list gives you a timeline of tweets from just those individuals and companies.

Use search tools

You can use Twitter’s built-in search bar for job openings: Type in a location, “hiring” and seniority level (like “entry level” or “director”), and you’ll likely see tweets about open positions in your desired area.

There are also job search engines specifically for Twitter, like Tweetmyjobs.com, which allows users to add in filters by location, industry and keyword.

Hiring managers are more frequently combing Twitter for applicants, particularly in fields where social media acumen might be considered a qualification for a job, like in HR and communications. Other industries -- like nonprofits and academia -- are starting to boost their Twitter presence too, Skillings said.

Charlie Loyd, who creates cloudless satellite imagery at Mapbox, found his job after tweeting at five mapping companies and including a link to his portfolio. Mapbox responded in three minutes.

"I was frustrated, and I wanted to get this in front of someone," Loyd said. "And there was no formal submission process for, 'Hey, I'm doing work that you haven't done before.'"

Do your research

It’s important to stay up-to-date on recent business developments. If a company you follow recently received a large grant, for example, that might hint at a more aggressive round of hiring.

If you have an important interview coming up, experts agree it’s important to look up your interviewer and potential managers ahead of time. Their recent tweets could be clues about what topics they’re interested in and what the company culture is like.

“It’s a good small-talk opener,” Weiss said. “You can ask, ‘Did you see the news about subject X?’ You’re opening the interview in a knowledgeable way and putting yourself on equal standing with the hiring manager.”

Let's recap. Here is an easy list of steps you can take to become a pro at using Twitter for job searches:

Close  How To Find Jobs On Twitter of

• Your Twitter profile is your personal brand. If you're using it professionally, make sure you have an identifiable photo, so recruiters recognize who you are, experts say. And don’t underestimate that bio under your picture -- it can make a good impression on someone before they start reading your tweets.

• Look up companies that you're interested in and follow their main accounts. You can also build up a network of recruiters, publications, job forums, industry leaders and other people in the field.

• Once you've started following companies, engage in meaningful conversations. Respond to a tweet that you like, or share your insight on why something works. Retweeting, favoriting and replying to tweets will make you stand out, experts say. Once you're able to strike up a personal conversation with a recruiter or manager, it’s easier to direct message them to ask about connecting outside of Twitter.

• Creating separate lists of users you follow is a good way to keep tabs on specific companies and people. You can set your list to public or private, and add as many users to it as you like. Clicking on a list gives you a timeline of tweets from just those individuals and companies.

• Typing a few keywords into Twitter's search bar, located at the top right of the page, goes a long way when it comes to job opportunities. Try searching "hiring," along with a combination of words about the location and field you're interested in.

• Job search engines like TweetMyJobs.com offer more tailored results for job hunters. TweetMyJobs' mobile app lets you see how close you are to companies that have job openings.

• A great way to show your interest in a company is to stay updated about its business developments. If it recently received a large grant or a round of funding, for example, that might hint at a big round of hiring.

• Be transparent about your social media presence. Including your Twitter handle on your resume makes it easier for recruiters and potential bosses to find you online.

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly attributed the last quote to Stahl instead of Weiss.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Steps On Persistent Theory About Startups

Marc Benioff just burst Mark Cuban’s bubble.

While the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner and some other financial pundits believe that recent outsized valuations for startups are a sign that another dot-com bubble is forming, Salesforce CEO Benioff disagrees.

“I don’t think there’s a bubble,” Benioff said in a recent interview with CNN. “There’s a huge amount of innovation that has happened in Silicon Valley that is getting monetized.”

This puts the current market in stark contrast to that of 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, sending stocks prices plummeting and closing down some prominent early Internet companies. The poster child for the dot-com era’s excesses was Pets.com, which spent more money on shipping than it earned selling discounted pet food.

By contrast, ride-hailing app Uber, lodging service Airbnb and cloud storage startup Dropbox -- all of which are private firms with high valuations -- earn money.

Pundits like Cuban -- who argued in March that the market is in a worse bubble than in 2000 -- aren't convinced yet. But Benioff in his interview with CNN explained the difference between then and now.

"These are real companies with very significant revenue streams," he told CNN of Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox. “This is very different than 2000 because those companies in 2000 did not see revenue levels at the high level that we’re seeing with these new companies. ”

Benioff isn’t alone in his no-bubble view. In April, venture capitalist Tony Tjan pointed to the significantly smaller number of public offerings today than during the dot-com bubble -- indicating that businesses are developing mature revenue models before issuing shares. In 2000, 446 companies went public, compared to 275 last year, according to the market research firm Renaissance Capital. So far this year, just 78 firms have gone public.

“Back then, you’d have companies trying to do everything as crazy as sell 99-cent pet food in a $20 FedEx box and think that was a good business,” Tjan, managing director of the Boston-based VC firm Cue Ball Capital, told The Huffington Post in April. “You have a greater rationality and maturation of the business models, and a greater understanding of what’s going on.”

To be sure, both Tjan and Benioff have good reason to convince folks that there's no startup bubble: Benioff has invested in 59 startups, according to CrunchBase; Tjan's portfolio includes the commenting service Livefyre, legal data firm Lex Machina and the real estate analytics site SmartZip.

Jack Dorsey Won't Say Whether He'll Be Twitter's Permanent CEO

Jack Dorsey refused on Friday to say whether he would stay on permanently as Twitter’s chief executive.

The company's chairman and co-founder -- who will take over as interim CEO on July 1 when Dick Costolo steps down -- dodged questions about whether he would consider keeping the job.

“I’m not going to answer that question because it’s not what I’m focused on,” he said during an appearance on CNBC's "Squawk Box." “My job is to make sure we continue without cadence and amplify.”

Dorsey, who served as the first of Twitter’s three CEOs so far, already holds the top spot at Square, a mobile payment company he founded in 2009. When Twitter announced on Thursday that Costolo -- pilloried by investors over the company’s weak financial performance and slowing user growth -- would move into a boardroom role, Dorsey said he would lead a team to find the next chief executive. Some floated Adam Bain, the company’s head of revenues, as a likely contender.

But Dorsey told analysts on Thursday evening that he and the three other board members helming the search committee had not yet retained a headhunting firm to look for candidates.

That may be, as Business Insider’s Henry Blodget suggests, because Twitter plans to have Dorsey return permanently. The interim period could serve as a trial run and allow Dorsey to slowly exit some of his other responsibilities, perhaps even his C-suite job at Square, Blodget wrote.

Square spokeswoman Colleen Murray referred The Huffington Post to a press release in which Dorsey says he "will continue to lead" the company. Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

But Dorsey’s beard seemed to distract viewers from the question of Twitter’s future. His scraggly facial hair quickly became a trending topic on -- take a guess -- Twitter.

Jack Dorsey looks like Serj Tankian from @systemofadown pic.twitter.com/aIVu0MNtby

— Immortan Dave (@redletterdave) June 12, 2015

After a commercial break, CNBC’s David Faber asked whether the beard symbolized something about Dorsey's leadership style. Dorsey laughed and said he hadn't been expecting that question.

“People shouldn’t be measured by what they look like,” he said.

That seems to be a philosophy he has carried with him from his years, lest anyone forget his nose ring and spiky blue hair.

This post has bee updated with a comment from Square.

Focusing On Women's Advancement Blinds Companies To Their Real Problem: Overworking Everyone

By focusing on “women’s issues,” professional firms are in denial about their real problem: a culture of unnecessary, 24/7 work that makes everyone miserable.

Those are the findings of an exhaustive 18-month case study of one prestigious global consulting firm, reported in a yet-to-be published paper from Harvard’s Gender Initiative program that was recently shared with The Huffington Post.

The paper blasts away at two closely held gender stereotypes. One portrays mothers as more invested in family responsibilities than their work roles. Another assumes working fathers are fully committed breadwinners, free from the pull of family life.

The researchers found that these assumptions held women back in their careers, prevented men from finding more balance and kept the firm from understanding that everyone struggles when working long hours -- not just females.

There’s a myth that “women can’t do it, but men can. That’s not true,” said Robin Ely, a co-author on the paper and a professor at Harvard Business School who chairs the Gender Initiative.

“Virtually everyone -- women and men alike -- suffered from the competing pulls of work and family,” Ely and researchers Irene Padavic of Florida State University and Erin Reid of Boston University wrote in a summary of the paper.

The unnamed consulting firm reached out to Ely, who is known for her research on gender in the workplace, out of frustration. Despite efforts to put more flexible policies in place, women weren’t advancing. Ninety percent of partners and 63 percent of junior associates were men. The number of years it took to reach partnership were fewer for men than women.

Ely and her co-researchers interviewed 107 consultants and five human resource staffers at the firm, and found everyone suffering under the expectation to work long hours. “People here are probably doing 14, 15 hours of work a day,” one consultant said in the paper. “Your ability to get by on little sleep is a necessary skill set.”

Some were working 70 hours a week. “Such hours made it difficult to meet basic physical needs,” the researchers wrote.

Men and women reacted differently to the problem, through the lens of those two stereotypes mentioned earlier.

Because it was assumed that women want to spend more time with family, the researchers found that the firm's senior female partners were criticized in the interviews as bad mothers. “We heard not one positive comment about women partners as mothers, but many negative comments from both men and women,” the researchers wrote. Male partners' roles as fathers did not come up for criticism in the same way.

Fearing becoming “bad mothers” like those partners, junior female associates took less demanding roles and wound up losing out on promotion possibilities.

(By the way, those women weren't "bad mothers" -- they said they had flexibility as a partner to be home when they wanted to.)

When women left the office early at the firm, coworkers assumed they had family obligations. Or the women would explicitly tell others they were leaving to tend to a family need because, in part, they didn't want to be seen as bad mothers, Ely said. This all contributed to the view that the women were less-than-ideal workers.

When men left early, the assumption was that they were networking or going out for work-related drinks or dinner. The men also typically didn’t explain where they were going.

Meanwhile, men’s issues with overwork were kept under wraps. Many either suffered in silence or pretended to work 24/7 while tending to family needs on the sly. Those findings were first reported in a paper by Boston University’s Reid earlier this year.

In interviews, both men and women consultants said that the pull of family responsibilities took women off the partner track and forced them to quit. Yet the researchers found men and women left the firm at the same rate. This was masked in part because many partners were hired from outside the firm and tended to be male, and because many women never made it to partner and stalled out at the associate level.

In fact, men left the firm out of frustration with quality of life. Says one father in the paper: “I wouldn’t characterize myself as unhappy. It’s more overworked, and under-familied ... I’d bet that a year from now I’m working somewhere else.” He quit one year later, the paper says.

Worse, a lot of the work was a waste of time, the researchers found. The consulting firm's culture was one of over-preparedness, and many consultants said they had pulled unnecessary all-nighters working on presentations. In the end, they provided clients with way more material than would ever be wanted or even useful.

"When we asked why they did it, they’d say, 'That’s how you prove how smart you are,'" Ely said.

According to Ely, when she and her co-researchers presented their findings to the firm, they didn't want to hear it. The leaders wanted to talk about the company's problems with women, not bigger, harder-to-tackle cultural issues.

"They said, 'Maybe you didn’t talk to enough people,'" Ely said. "But we talked to a lot of people. We said, 'Look this is a pervasive finding.' It wasn’t like they were hostile, but basically the project ended at that point."

The researchers theorize that the partners' commitment to a set line of thinking about men as ideal workers and women as ideal mothers contributed to their denial.

Ely said that normally a second phase of research would’ve involved experimenting with the hours the consultants worked and measuring productivity and happiness. Similar research happened a few years ago at the Boston Consulting Group, which experimented with enforced time off for consultants and found that it resulted in happier workers -- and better performance. Ely said more work needs to be done to figure out whether dealing with the overwork problem would alleviate the burden of those gender stereotypes. That would take a long time to see, she said.

The paper also takes care to note that the issues faced by this firm are typical of higher-income, professional employees. For lower-wage workers, the problem usually isn’t too many hours, but rather the unpredictability of their schedules or the scramble to grab enough hours a week to make it to full time.

Still, these set stereotypes about men and women aren't limited to white-collar workers, Ely said. “The gender expectation around work and family has been around since the Industrial Revolution. That’s the way it’s been.”

Why Greece Is Not Leaving The Eurozone, Despite Its Latest Defiant Move

Greece's announcement Friday that it would postpone the latest 300 million euro repayment it owes the International Monetary Fund until the end of June has prompted a flood of doubts about Greece's future in the Eurozone.

But ominous warnings notwithstanding, a lot more would need to happen before Greece would leave the European monetary union. While key differences remain between Greece and its international creditors regarding the terms of the bailout needed to keep the country afloat, the negotiations are far from over. And experts say that both sides are concerned enough about the unknown consequences of a Greek departure that it remains a highly unlikely scenario.

Below is a primer on the latest drama between Greece and its creditors and some context for people lost in the sea of acronyms, foreign leaders and euro signs.

What exactly happened this week between Greece and its creditors?

Greece's announcement means that instead of making its scheduled payment of 300 million euros June 5, Greece will instead bundle the four installment payments it owes the IMF for the month of June into a single payment of 1.6 billion euros at the end of the month.

Greece's postponement is the latest in a series of chess moves between the country's left-wing government and the so-called troika of creditors comprised of the IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission, the government body representing the 19 Eurozone countries. On Tuesday, the troika issued a joint proposal to make available to Greece the remaining 7.2 billion euros previously-promised in bailout loans in exchange for a series of fiscal reforms. Since 2010, the IMF, the ECB and Eurozone member nations have provided Greece with loans amounting to 240 billion euros.

But Greece had submitted its own debt restructuring plan to its European creditors Monday, and Tuesday's proposal from the troika did not accommodate many of Greece's demands. As a result, it was received coldly by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and may have prompted Greece’s announcement Friday. Tsipras, head of the left-wing Syriza party, was elected in January on a platform of renegotiating the terms of Greece's international bailout in order to provide relief to the struggling Greek economy and restore funding for social programs.

Is Greece finally about to leave the Eurozone?

In response to the news that Greece would be postponing its IMF repayments, press reports were filled with doom-and-gloom pronouncements that this was finally the beginning of a “Grexit,” or Greek exit from the Eurozone. An exit would happen if Greece decided the terms of its international bailout were not worth the costs and that defaulting on its debt and readopting the drachma, its pre-Euro currency until 2001, was its best option. Economists are divided about how well an exit would work for Greece, but most agree it would be a devastating blow to the viability of the Eurozone project.

If Greece leaves the Eurozone, it would have to create a new currency overnight, which would probably cause serious market tremors and force it to stave off a run on its financial institutions. But it would allow Greece to devalue its currency, boosting exports and enabling it to restore funding on social programs.

But two experts on the Eurozone crisis told The Huffington Post that a Grexit remains very unlikely, because the other Eurozone countries are too worried about the fallout from a Greek departure to insist on terms that would force Greece to abandon negotiations.

Nicolas Véron, a visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former French government advisor, described the week’s developments as political theatre intended to reassure domestic constituencies in both Greece and top Eurozone creditor countries like Germany.

“If you simplify it by saying the two main negotiators are Alexis Tsipras and [German chancellor] Angela Merkel, they need to find a deal, but each of them also needs to sell the deal to their constituents,” Véron said. “Many of us who look at the substance believe the two parties are not too far apart, but far apart in politics and how they can sell it. There are hardliners on both sides. Merkel and Tsipras are not hardliners in their respective camps.”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, characterized Greece’s Friday announcement as a genuine negotiating tactic aimed at securing more favorable terms than those the creditors had offered thus far.

“I think it shows the troika that the Greek government is serious, that the troika cannot just dictate the terms of an agreement,” Weisbrot said. “It is a real shot across the bow and it surprised them, too.”

Weisbrot believes that even if Greece defaulted, the troika of creditors would act to head off a Greek exit from the Eurozone. He cited as an example the case of Argentina, which defaulted on its debts to the IMF in 2003. But “the IMF backed down,” Weisbrot said. It reached a compromise with Argentina that included a new loan from the IMF on terms Argentina could accept in exchange for a debt repayment.

In Greece, “the IMF does not want a default either,” Weisbrot said.

In angry speech to the Greek parliament Friday, Tsipras nonetheless declared the two sides are “closer than ever” to reaching a deal.

What are the outstanding differences between the two sides?

In the dueling proposals from Greece and its creditors, a number of differences remain. A key sticking point is how much of a primary budget surplus, or budget surplus before interest payments, Greece should be required to achieve. The troika wants Greece to achieve a 3.5 percent primary budget surplus by 2018, while Greece maintains that anything more than a 1.5 percent primary budget surplus would prevent the Greek economy from growing at a healthy pace again. The troika is calling for Greece to achieve the budget targets partly through an increase in the value-added tax and cuts to pension benefits equivalent to 2 percent of Greece’s GDP, which Greece's ruling Syriza party finds unacceptable. And Greece is asking for half of the 144 billion euro principal it owes Eurozone member nations from the first bailout round to be cancelled entirely.

The seemingly arcane dispute is part of a broader conflict between Greece and the wealthy Eurozone nations that have shouldered the lion’s share of the bailout over who and what is to blame from the current crisis. Among the creditor nations, Germany in particular has argued that Greece's economic troubles are due to its fiscal irresponsibility. Germany has insisted that the bailout include provisions requiring Greece to reduce its spending and raise taxes, as well as deregulate the labor market and adopt anticorruption measures that would render the country more economically competitive.

Greece, for its part, claims that the austerity imposed by the international creditors has prevented the Greek economy from recovering, which has caused untold suffering and in turn made it impossible to repay the money it owes. Greece's GDP has declined by more than 25 percent since 2008; recovering slower from the 2008 crisis than the United States from the Great Depression, or Germany after World War II. Currently, one out of every three Greeks lives at or below the poverty line.

What happens next?

Since the IMF's managing director, Christine Lagarde, appears to have accepted Greece’s end-of-June payment bundling plan, the next major deadline is June 30. That date marks the end of the four-month extension passed in March to allow for the newly elected Greek government to negotiate new bailout terms with the troika. If the current agreement is again extended after June 30, though, the parties will have to contend with an even more onerous July repayment schedule. On July 13, Greece must pay another 465 million euros to the IMF. And on July 19 and 20, 3.5 billion euros that Greece owes the European Central Bank comes due. It is not clear that Greece has the funds to repay these debts and continue basic government functions.

Another possibility floated by some Greek officials is for Greece to have new snap elections that might reaffirm the Syriza-led government's mandate to renegotiate the terms of the bailout.

In the meantime, Tsipras is intent on pressuring the Eurozone countries in the court of public opinion.

"The strangulation of a country is a matter of moral order which conflicts with the founding principles of Europe," Tsipras said on Friday.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated the reasons Greece might hold new elections. Snap elections might reaffirm the current government's mandate to renegotiate the terms of the bailout.

U.S. Adds 280,000 Jobs In May; Unemployment Rises To 5.5 Percent

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. employers added a robust 280,000 jobs in May, showing that the economy is back on track after starting 2015 in a slump.

The Labor Department said Friday that the unemployment rate ticked up to 5.5 percent from 5.4 percent in April. But that occurred for a good reason: Hundreds of thousands more people sought jobs in May, and not all found them.

Last month's strong job growth suggests that employers remained confident enough to keep hiring even after the economy shrank during the first three months of the year. The government also revised up its estimate of job growth in March and April by a combined net 32,000.

Construction and health care companies the drove the May job growth. On the negative side, persistently cheaper oil led energy companies to shed workers for a fifth straight month.

Still, average hourly wages rose only 2.3 percent from a year earlier. Tepid pay gains has been a persistent problem for the economy.

Over the past three months, the economy has added an average of 207,000 jobs, a decent gain though lower than last year's average of 263,667.

Consumers, the main driver of the U.S. economy, remain fairly cautious. Factory orders have dropped. But Friday's solid jobs report could help confirm the economy's vitality.

Auto and home sales are accelerating despite otherwise slow-spending consumers. More big employers, such as Wal-Mart, have unveiled pay hikes.

Those factors could power faster growth, fuel job gains and boost wages. If they do, a broader economic recovery than the one that's existed in the six years since the Great Recession officially ended could emerge.

Over the past 12 months, around 3 million jobs have been added. Those additional paychecks helped increase spending on housing and autos. Sales of newly built homes have surged 23.7 percent through the first four months of 2015 compared with a year ago, government data show. Rising demand for new homes could lead construction firms to ramp up hiring.

Americans bought 1.64 million cars and trucks in May, the most since July 2005. If that trend were to endure, it would benefit a manufacturing sector that's added a scant 4,000 jobs since January.

Employers seem to be envisioning a healthier economy, given that the weekly number of people applying for unemployment benefits — a proxy for layoffs — has remained under a historically low 300,000 for more than four months. By holding on to nearly all their workers, businesses are ensuring that they will have the capacity to respond to greater customer demand.

But the economy faces other challenges. The dollar has appreciated about 19 percent in the past year against other major currencies. That trend has made U.S. goods costlier overseas, thereby squeezing exports and the U.S.-based branches of foreign companies.

Nor has cheaper gasoline delivered much help. Instead of sparking the wave of consumer spending that many economists had expected, a nearly 45 percent drop in oil prices since July has damaged a U.S. economy increasingly reliant on energy drilling. The energy industry has shed workers and cut orders for pipelines and equipment.

The setbacks have been substantial enough that the International Monetary Fund on Thursday said it thinks the Federal Reserve should hold off on raising short-term interest rates until 2016. IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, saying a rate increase could disrupt the economy, urged the Fed to await signs of wage growth.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen has said she expects to raise rates this year if the economy continues to improve, thereby ending nearly seven years of record-low rates.

Falling unemployment usually leads to fewer people seeking work, forcing employers to boost wages. But plenty of people are still searching for jobs. The aftermath of the recession has left 8.5 million people unemployed and seeking work, about 1.3 million more than were jobless before the downturn began in late 2007.

Companies often increase pay when their workers become more productive. Yet productivity fell at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter — a sharper drop than the decline estimated a month ago, the government said Thursday.

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Is Now A Billionaire

NEW YORK -- Jamie Dimon is finally a billionaire.

The JPMorgan Chase CEO and chairman’s net worth is now estimated at $1.1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His fortune has soared as shares in the country’s largest bank by assets, in which he has a $485 million stake, near a record high.

JPMorgan stock has climbed over the past year.

Bank executives do not usually become billionaires. Though Dimon took home a pay package worth $20 million last year, financiers in the three-comma club usually accumulate wealth through money management and hedge funds, according to Bloomberg. But Dimon, long a silver-coiffed media darling, has proven himself to be a survivor, even in one of the industry’s most volatile eras in recent history.

After helping to assemble Citigroup, he was forced out in 1998 by his boss and mentor, Sandy Weill. Dimon revived Chicago-based Bank One and sold it to JPMorgan in 2004. He became the chief executive of the combined bank in 2005 and, the next year, added the chairman title.

He captained the bank through the choppy seas of the financial crisis in 2007. But, facing billions in an array of fines and settlements, he began to lose shareholders’ confidence in 2013.

Still, after a contentious vote, he managed to retain his status as an “imperial CEO,” overseeing the board as chairman and thereby acting as his own boss. That year, the Financial Times dubbed him “the last king of Wall Street.”

He is even, quite literally, a survivor. After a year-long battle with throat cancer, Dimon announced he was cancer-free last December.

Last week, he told a group of investors that listening to shareholder advisory groups critical of his management was “lazy.”

“If you do that, you are just irresponsible, I’m sorry,” he said. “And you probably aren’t a very good investor either.

JPMorgan spokesman Andrew Gray declined to comment.

At least in the fictional milieu of HBO's "Silicon Valley," Dimon is in some interesting company:

Wages For College Grads Are Now Lower Than They Were 15 Years Ago

College graduates, brace yourselves for some disappointing news.

Wages for university grads are 2.5 percent lower than what they were 15 years ago, according to the latest edition of the Economic Policy Institute's annual report on the labor market prospects of new workers. The research found that young college grads’ hourly wages currently sit at an average of $17.94, or just over $37,000 annually. In 2000, the average hourly rate was $18.41.

This drop has hit female grads hardest: Their wages fell from $17.74 in 2000 to $16.56 in 2015 -- a 6.7 percent decrease. Wages for their male counterparts actually increased by 1 percent over the same time period -- from $19.44 to $19.64.

Female grads, per the study, earn 15.7 percent less than their male counterparts, or roughly 84.3 cents to a man's dollar. Meanwhile, the wage gap between men and women in the national workforce overall sees women earning only 78 cents to a man's dollar. While the gap is narrower for female college grads, according to the EPI's study, these data show that having a higher education degree does not necessarily mean equal pay for young women.

“It’s possible that since we’re looking at averages, we’re not picking up on growth in high-end jobs,” senior economist Elise Gould, one of the study’s authors, said of the diverging wages among men and women.

Men are not faring much better, though. Their 1 percent wage increase is minuscule, considering the fact that it represents a period of 15 years.

The national unemployment rate is currently at 5.4 percent, which signals a promising wage advantage for those just entering the workforce, The Wall Street Journal noted recently. But the EPI study, which focuses on younger workers, found that unemployment remains high for college graduates, 7.2 percent of whom are without jobs.

The unemployment rate for grads was 5.5 percent in 2007, before the recession. The EPI researchers point to dwindling demand for goods and services, which negatively impacts companies’ ability to bring in new hires.

Despite their degrees and skills, many grads find themselves downgrading to less-desired employers when jobs are scarce, the researchers found.

This can be detrimental to young professionals' careers, since low starting salaries will likely set them back for subsequent jobs. Research has shown that those who graduate in a poor economy can expect wage losses for as long as 10 years as a result of low initial wages.

For young people, this loss “probably puts off other investments because they don’t have the income to pay for it, like buying a car or a house,” Gould said.

The report also found that college grads aren’t heading to graduate school as a way to ride out the poor job market. Enrollment rates for additional schooling, like master’s programs, are relatively equal to enrollment rates before the recession. While the percentage of women in grad school has picked up following a continuous decrease since 2010, enrollment rates for men dropped 6 percentage points between 2011 and 2014.

Many college students take on campus jobs to pay their tuition, noted Will Kimball, another author on the study. “If there aren’t enough opportunities for them to earn money or put themselves through college, that certainly will impact their ability to enroll in further programs.”

In order for college graduates to see better prospects, policies that bump up employment and salaries must be enacted, and all workers -- not just new graduates -- will need to have greater bargaining power.

“The biggest thing is to approach an economy that has full employment, where people can negotiate better wages and get better jobs when employers need more workers,” Kimball said.

Supreme Court Rules Against Abercrombie & Fitch In Discrimination Case

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 on Monday that retailer Abercrombie & Fitch may have violated workplace discrimination law when it turned down a Muslim job applicant because she wore a hijab, even though her religious beliefs never came up in the interview.

Samantha Elauf, the job seeker at the center of the case, applied for a sales position at an Abercrombie children's store in Oklahoma in 2008. Despite her high marks in the interview, Elauf didn't land the job because her headscarf ran afoul of Abercrombie's employee "look policy," which bars hats and promotes the retailer's preppy brand. Elauf sued with the help of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Civil rights law requires that employers accommodate workers' religious beliefs in the workplace, and forbids them from firing or not hiring someone because of those beliefs. But Abercrombie argued that it couldn't have known to make such an accommodation because Elauf, who was 17 at the time, never requested one.

The majority of justices didn't buy that argument, reversing an earlier appeals ruling in Abercrombie's favor. They said that whether or not Abercrombie had firm knowledge of Elauf's need for an accommodation was not relevant -- only whether her headscarf was a "motivating factor" in their decision not to hire her. (In Elauf's case, an Abercrombie manager had correctly assumed that Elauf was Muslim, and that she would regularly wear the hijab on the job.)

"Motive and knowledge are separate concepts," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. "[A]n employer who acts with the motive of avoiding accommodation may violate [the law] even if he has no more than an unsubstantiated suspicion that accommodation would be needed."

The ruling sends Elauf's case back to the lower court for further consideration. Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent, penning an opinion that partially concurred with the majority.

In a statement, Abercrombie noted that the Supreme Court ruling did not find that the company discriminated against Elauf, only that Elauf can pursue her claim in court. The company said it is considering its "next steps" in the case.

"We have made significant enhancements to our store associate policies, including the replacement of the 'look policy' with a new dress code that allows associates to be more individualistic; changed our hiring practices to not consider attractiveness; and changed store associates' titles from 'Model' to 'Brand Representative' to align with their new customer focus," the company said.

Abercrombie's lawyers argued that a ruling in favor of Elauf would pressure companies to ask or make assumptions about job seekers' religious beliefs -- a dicey proposition, they said, since employers aren't supposed to inquire about a worker's religion. But the EEOC said that a job applicant like Elauf shouldn't have to bear the full burden of raising the possibility of a religious accommodation, especially since the employer would know best whether there may be a conflict with company policy.

Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the court's conservative wing, signaled his leaning on the case during oral arguments in February, when he raised a hypothetical situation that, by his own admission, sounded "like a joke."

"So the first is a Sikh man wearing a turban. The second is a Hasidic man wearing a hat. The third is a Muslim woman wearing a niqab. The fourth is a Catholic nun in a habit," Alito said. "Now, do you think ... that those people have to say, 'We just want to tell you, we're dressed this way for a religious reason. We're not just trying to make a fashion statement'?"

Alito said there were ways for an employer to address the issue without directly asking a job applicant about his or her religion. In the hypothetical case of someone who appears to be Middle Eastern and who wears a long beard, he asked, "Why can't the employers just simply say, 'We have a "look policy" that doesn't permit beards. Can you comply with that policy?'"

Abercrombie has been sued at least two other times over headscarves -- once by an applicant who, like Elauf, said she was denied a job because of hers, and once by an employee who lost her job after being ordered to remove hers. Abercrombie settled both of those cases and then changed its policy to allow for headscarves, though it continued to defend its actions in the Elauf case.

In briefs filed with the court, Abercrombie had the backing of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while Elauf drew support from civil, religious and gay rights groups.

This story has been updated with comment from Abercrombie.