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Creativity has always been an important business skill, but in our turbulent economy it is essential. The current economic realities have placed us all beyond what is known. The only way to meet this challenge of operating in this unknown terrain is to make it up as we go. It follows then, that building a creatively agile company will not only help us survive but give us a powerful competitive advantage (Juanita Weaver, How to Incorporate Creativity into Your Business Practice).

The work that women do has always been fundamental to the global economy. For thousands of years, and all over the world, women have been traders, farmers, entrepreneurs.

Women now make up more than 40 percent of the work force in every G8 country except Italy. Women are part of a seismic shift taking place in the global economy. The best word for the change is womenomics. The huge growth of the female labor force has coincided with the rise of the service sector. New industries like computer technology are also a godsend. It's easy for women to break in, and performance measures tend to be more objective. Financial services have a similar gender-neutral air as well: you either make money or you don't. But women are not equal to men yet. The United Nations estimated in 1993 that economic equality between the sexes would take, at the pace then prevailing, 1,000 years to achieve.

Corporate life can be tough; nobody ever said it was easy to find the balance between work and family. In the United States and Britain, a lack of affordable child care is the top of concern for many women. Only 2 percent of employers offer workplace nurseries. A year of daily care for two children in the United Kingdom costs nearly $10,000, about 28 percent of an average full-time working parent's income. American families easily spend the same amount for a five-day-a-week nanny. Continental Europe, by contrast, has sought to balance work and family, but the results have often been perverse. In Germany, laws requiring employers to provide up to three years of maternity leave cement gender roles - the women leave work and inevitably fall behind on the career track. Though the laws also allow for paternity leave, few fathers take advantage of them. Since women are inevitably the ones to leave work and use tax breaks, employers are reluctant to hire married or even worse - pregnant women. Hiring a 26-year-old just-married woman is almost prohibitive for a small company. Recruiters routinely ask candidates their age, marital status and whether or not they have children.

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