The best (and worst) states for teachers wages

The best (and worst) states for teachers wagesThe best (and worst) states for teachers wagesHow much should school teachers earn considering the fact that most get several weeks off from work for summer vacation? Recent protests and labor unrest from five states suggest that many educators believe they should be earning a lot more, sometimes as much as 20% more. So, where can teachers earn the highest incomes today?The Bureau Labor Statistics tracks overall employment and average wage numbers for a variety of professions across all 50 states. We collected figures for teachers at all three levels (elementary, middle and high school) to create three color-coded heat maps of earnings. This provides us with three snapshots of teacher compensation in the U.S.We also calculated the average between elementary, middle and high school teachers to create a Top 10 list of states where teachers earn the most.Top 10 states where teachers earn the mostNew York $81,613Alaska $80,627Connecticut $78, 567California $76,523Massachusetts $75,720New Jersey $72,460Oregon $69,643Virginia $68,707Maryland $67,173Rhode Island $67,050Our maps illustrate how there are enormous differences in earning potential for teachers across the country. The coasts offer the highest salaries, led by liberal states like New York and California, where teachers can make tens of thousands of dollars more than the national average wage of about $49k. There are also a couple of states in the Upper Midwest where teachers can make between $60-70,000, including Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The combination of above-average incomes with great benefits like a pension make these places ideal for teachers.But our map also reveals places where teachers make relatively little, even less than the national average. Take a look at the South and rural Western states like Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Mississippi. The juxtaposition between low-wage states like Arizona (average $45,313) and California (average $76,513) is especially dramatic. Of course, one explanation for the difference has to do with the cost of living. Phoenix just isnt anywhere near as expensive as San Francisco.The most interesting trend in our maps has to do with different wages for different levels of education. The biggest outlier is Alaska where a high school teacher makes on average $8,390 more than an elementary school teacher. Compare that to Idaho, where middle school teachers make $4,520 more than their colleagues in high school. Likewise, in Oregon, moving from elementary to middle school results in average pay increase of $7,990. Teacher licensing requirements are defined at the state level, which could partly explain these differences in compensation. Still, making $8,000 more each year is a powerful incentive to just teach at a different grade level.Our maps indicate that some educators clearly make a lot more than others, depending both on where they live and which grade they teach. Those differences may or may not justify the teacher strikes and walkouts happening around the country, but it does highlight the different values some states place on education.Data Table 1.1This article first appeared on HowMuch.

Since #MeToo, number of men uncomfortable being alone with a woman at work has doubled

Since MeToo, number of men uncomfortable being alone with a woman at work has doubledSince MeToo, number of men uncomfortable being alone with a woman at work has doubledThe MeToo movement was supposed to be a rallying cry for employees everywhere to work together to stop workplace sexual harassment. But as one new studyfrom nonprofit LeanIn.org and online survey platform SurveyMonkey finds, the heightened awareness around the issue is causing a negative backlash that could be holding back womens careers.Survey Male managers who are uncomfortable with beratung women 3x higherSince sexual harassment became a national conversation this fall, the survey found that male managers are mora likely to keep their female subordinates at arms length. The survey found the male managers are three times more likely now to say they are uncomfortable mentoring women.Male managers are more likely to think twice with even being in the same room as a female employee. Almost 30 percent of male managers surveyed said they were uncomfortable working alone with a woman, a number thats doubled since this fall.This male hesitance and discomfort extends to opportunities for networking outside of the office. In a poll of 5,907 working adults, men with senior jobs said they were three times more likely to hesitate in getting a work dinner with a junior-level woman than her male junior-level counterpart.This research aligns with previous studies that have found that men and women maintain harder boundaries around socializing with colleagues of the opposite gender outside of the office. In one New York Times/Morning Consult poll, over half of women and 45% of men said it was inappropriate to have dinner alone with a person of the opposite gender unless they wereyour married partner. When asked why they maintained these boundaries, the male and female participants said they were anxious about a workplace interaction turning sexual, flirtatious, or into a case of sexual harassment.For workpla ces to be inclusive, mentoring needs to be available to allLeanIn.Org founder Sheryl Sandberg explained that when mentoring becomes selective, women miss out on opportunities to advance their career.If men think that the way to address workplace sexual harassment is to avoid one-on-one time with female colleagues including meetings, coffee breaks, and all the interactions that help us work together effectively it will be a huge setback for women, Sandberg wrote about the findings in a Facebook post. The last thing women need right now is even more isolation. Men vastly outnumber women as managers and senior leaders, so when they avoid, ice out, or exclude women, we pay the price.To make the workplace inclusive to all employee, everyone needs to be given the same opportunities to network with the managers who can give them their next big break or promotion. To encourage this practice, LeanIn.Org launched a MentorHer campaign to encourage more male leaders to mentor women. High-prof ile male leaders like Unilever CEO Paul Polman andDisneyCEO Robert Iger endorsed the campaign publicly.

Whats New in Design Safety

Whats New in Design Safety Whats New in Design Safety Gone are the days when a entwurf engineer could focus mainly on improving a products design functionality. With higher safety levels now both achievable and economical, the engineers role in delivering design safety has broadened considerably.At their disposal are a host of new objective analytic techniques to identify hidden hazards and potential problems, determine design countermeasures and remedies, and assess and categorize residual risk. But with behauptung new tools comes a responsibility to manage the consequences of interjecting protective mechanisms and safety devices into a products design and operation. Below is a rundown of the benefits, burdens, and opportunities of designing for safety.Designing for SafetyIn a simpler time, safety features and accessories intended to protect equipment operators were considered the responsibility of the user and owner, not the design engineer. But today, more stringent safety standar ds and rapid technological advances mean engineers can more easily ferret out a products potential for failure and then design to prevent it. While these techniques provide management and customers assurance the products they use will help andnot hurt, some design-safety mechanisms can cause problems if not used wisely.Its not enough, for example, to simply add a safe-stop mechanism that shuts down just the part of a machine where the problem occurs so that once fixed, operation can quickly resume. That mechanism may require the addition of other safety featureslike self-monitoring, redundancy, faults that fail safeto work properly. Because such systems are commonly used in high-risk situations, they often require special attention.The impact of a protective mechanism or safety device on other components must be considered to prevent secondary faults or errors, including the possibility that normal operation be resumed prematurely. Maintenance checks of the mechanism also are crucia l as over time it may become inactive or unreliable without any warning.The growing importance of software to mechanical systems is placing other burdens on design engineers. Far too many programs exhibit unexpected bugs, lockups, memory errors, out-of-bounds errors, even excessive test errors or failures. Hence, effective software reviews should begin early enough in the development and design process so that errors can be fixed, including those difficult-to-find-and-solve design safety problems that often emerge much later.Extended field-testing, not just bench testing, is needed to head off design safety problems before the customer has to experience them.Backup Warnings Safety warnings can be an effective supplement to engineering safety design. A warning cant prevent harm, however, unless clearly conveyed and tailored for the right stakeholder. Whereas warnings for users are designed to identify hazards and risks to help them avoid personal harm, the information provided to cus tomers is meant to give them what they need to know to weigh any associated risks before they buy the product.Getting the wording just right is crucial as warnings that raise too many alarms can trigger information overload that may undercut the original intent.Safety Around the WorldIts no longer enough to satisfy U.S. regulations and standards. In order to tap into international markets, businesses must broaden the design process to take into account the global regulatory landscape as well as the forces driving overseas consumer-products markets.For their part, engineers must stay abreast of safety requirements abroad to determine the design and manufacturing impact on their work. For example, the European Unions RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) directive restricting lead-based alloys used for solder and plating requires U.S. and other non-EU manufacturers to engineer around new issues of connector reliability and performance, which could change the manufacturing process and create new avenues of failure to explore.Many nations and international organizations such as the United Nations also are spearheading regulatory changes designed to eliminate barriers to trade. For example, the European Unions REACH (Regulation, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemical Substances) program is helping to bring about a global system for the classification, labeling, and packaging of chemicals and products that contain them to enable shipment of uniform products anywhere in the world.The design-safety implications of this and other related programs have some engineers wondering whether its time to begin proactively designing products and systems with worldwide safety trends in mind.End of Service Life IssuesEngineers who do their jobs too well (i.e., design products that last and last), must face other complex issues. How should end-of-life disposal and recycling be approached for products with long service life when new product safety requirements c an be passed into law at any future time? What kind of exculpatory documentation should be retained regarding safety analyses performed when they could potentially incriminate those involved with design and development at some future point? Where operational teamwork is required on a system, how can studies of operator interactions be performed to reveal design data without infringing on privacy or creating an appearance of bias?Addressing these complex issues can require engineers to look outside their discipline for answers.Adapted from Trends in Design Safety, by George A. Peters and Barbara J. Peters, for Mechanical Engineering, January 2010.In a simpler time, safety features and accessories intended to protect equipment operators were considered the responsibility of the user and owner, not the design engineer.