Blog Posts by ForbesWoman

By Meghan Casserly

When Ivy Exec founder and CEO Elena Bajic sat down with a potential new hire last month for her first interview, she was blown away with her insight into the 5-year-old recruiting company, which specializes in placing high-level executives.

"She knew the names of key players and what hurdles we've been looking to overcome," she says. "I was impressed." But when she learned that the young woman had, in fact, arranged an informal meeting with another employee prior to her interview, Bajic was blown away. "She had done amazingly well in the interview and now I know why," she says. "It was a proactive move that showed commitment and engagement from the get-go."

In Pictures: The 10 Most Important Questions To Ask Before A Job Interview

Preparation for an interview is key. For Bajic, who vets hundreds of candidates a year for companies through her firm, preparation for an interview is a make-it-or-break-it issue. "I'm beyond passionate about this topic," she told me when I called to ask her to share her

By Jenna Goudreau

A typical day in the life of the average American worker looks something like this: After hours of (hopefully) restful inertia, she rises to greet the day, embarks on a seated half-hour commute to work, and sits in a front of a computer for the next eight hours. Usually she takes the elevator. Most days she eats lunch at her desk. Another seated commute returns her home, to the sofa, where she relaxes in front of the television before calling it a day.

"Our society has become so sedentary that we sit all day long," says physical therapist Chris Keating, the director of Strive Physical Therapy in Marlton, N.J. "We're not active in most jobs. Sitting too much can cause back and neck pain and a slowed metabolic rate. You burn fewer calories, and a higher BMI increases your risk for a host of other health issues."

In Pictures: Eight Easy Tips To Move More At Work

Do you need to move more at work? Study after study shows that chronic inactivity is a serious health risk. Even those who exercise regularly

By Meghan Casserly

When Alexa von Tobel raised a seed round of capital for her fledgling financial site LearnVest in the Spring of 2009, one thing she didn't worry about was what to wear. Her meetings with eventual partners in the $1.1 million round that included Rose Tech and Richmond Management were formal affairs, she says, meaning she dressed to the corporate nines: skirt suit, heels and polished hair. "I really think there's something important about dressing the part," she says. "There are huge decisions being made at these meetings. Show those decisions-and dollar signs-the right amount of respect and dress as professionally as possible."

For von Tobel, whose Manhattan-based LearnVest has since raised over $24 million, decisions over what to wear to investor meetings were a no-brainer. "I had two very specific outfits," she remembers, a dress and blazer combo and a pencil skirt, blouse, blazer affair, looks, she says, that both boosted her confidence and assured she would

By Meghan Casserly

Twenty-seven-year-old Army specialist Casey Bogenrief was set to deploy from Fort Wainright in Fairbanks, Alaska, in a few days when he met a young woman who invited him to her apartment to have a drink and sing karaoke. Shortly after arriving, the soldier is said to have become violent and demanded to have sex with the woman before slamming her head against a door and assaulting her.

While his attorney says that any sexual contact was consensual, Bogenrief stands trial this week for rape, putting him among the hundreds of annual perpetrators of the crime in the city that's been called a hotbed for sexual violence. For a metro area that the FBI measures at just 38,307, an incredibly high rate of rape (more than double the national metropolitan average) lands Fairbanks among the top three most dangerous cities for women in the United States at 193 reported rapes per 100,000 residents.

In Pictures: The Most Dangerous U.S. Cities For Women

Do you live in one of these cities? To calculate cities where

By Cali Williams Yost

What's one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make when they present a proposal to work more flexibly to their manager? They focus on "why" they want to work differently, when they should emphasize "how" they are going to get their job done.

Here's a true story that a manager shared with me that perfectly illustrates the different response you will get.

A young man walks into the manager's office. He explains that he'd like to talk about shifting his hours to come in by 11:00 am on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and leave later in the evening. This new schedule will help him train for a marathon, "because it's getting too dark to run at night." The manager confessed that his response was, "Yeah, and I'd like to ride in a hot air balloon on Wednesdays. I'm going to have to say 'No'."

How To Ace Your Performance Review

How to be successful at work

Thankfully, the young man came back the next day and took a different approach. He never mentioned marathon

By Larissa Faw

In between folding laundry and cleaning up after her children, a mom receives $5,000 to blog about an iPhone application for seven days. Another woman earns twice as much as her husband's $35,000 annual salary by hosting several one-hour "Twitter parties" each week. Yet another female blogger has received, over the past year, all-expense paid vacations to Hawaii, Aruba, and Florida, as well as four new cameras, a camcorder, computer, and so many DVDs, food and cleaning products that she lost count.

Are these female bloggers the minority or the status quo? It's nearly impossible to know.

There are 18.9 million women who write blogs, according to the Pew Research Center, and while these women chat openly about their lives online, discussions regarding how much merchandise or money they generate from these blogs remain noticeably unaddressed. Bloggers must legally tell their readers that they received a free toaster in exchange for a product review, per FTC government

By Stacy Dittrich

We, once again, are being subjected to photographs splashing across our TV screens of an innocent missing child, the victim in the latest possible stranger abduction.

This week, adorable brown-haired, brown-eyed, 6-year-old Isabel Mercedes Celis fell into this atrocious category. Last seen the night of April 20 at around 11 in her Tucson, Arizona, bedroom, Isabel's horrified parents discovered she was missing at 8 the next morning. Community rumors are rampant. Some say Isabel's bedroom-window screen had been forced open, but that detail has yet to be confirmed. More than 150 law enforcement officials and members of the community are helping follow leads and search for Isabel, but as far I can conclude, they are coming up with absolutely nothing. How is this possible?

Mom Keeps Daughter Under Control On Facebook And Sparks A New Cyber Discipline Idea

Several weeks ago, it was 15-year-old Santa Clara County, California, teen Sierra LaMar whose face flashed on our

By Daily Muse

The surge in "pink-collar" start-ups-businesses in traditionally feminine industries like fashion, beauty, and shopping-has been a somewhat controversial topic. Tech reporter Jolie O'Dell touched off a mini firestorm last September when she tweeted that the women starting these companies were "embarrassing" her. Concern over the threat of a "pink-collar tech ghetto" was alarming enough that the organizers of last year's SXSW Interactive conference included a panel to discuss the issue. Girly companies, it seems, aren't very cool.

But I took up the topic last fall in my article "Handbags vs. Hard Drives," in which I suggested that companies in feminine industries deserve a second look.

According to a 2010 report from comScore, women spend more time online than men, and they're overrepresented in social networking, gaming, photos, blogs, and retail. Not only do women spend time online, they spend money, too-female customers make up 61% of online transactions. In a