Jing Wang Herman has plenty of experience as the lone female in the office. Currently the CEO for the USA operations of GetTaxi.com, Wang Herman previously racked up eight years on Wall Street, landed on a Forbes 30 Under 30 list - and earned her taxi driver’s license.

“I’m always in male-dominated environments. I don’t even realize it anymore,” she said.

As she climbed the corporate ladder, her mentors have been men, a fact of little consequence, said Wang Herman, whose tech company makes an app to hail and pay taxis. “To me, mentoring is gender neutral.”

Some might wonder if she’s a Queen Bee, a powerful, conniving woman who undermines competing females.

The answer is no, according to the co-authors of the 1974 study that coined the term “Queen Bee,” which they said has mutated into an outdated, sexist and negative stereotype.

As more women rise in the ranks of business, research indicates they are doing more mentoring, especially of other women. And while some say there is a difference between male and female mentoring styles, many like Wang Herman say it doesn’t matter.

“There were few women in senior positions at JP Morgan and Bear Stearns,” and she wasn’t mentored by any of them, Wang Herman said. “But I never felt undermined. They had to fight very hard to get where they are. It was gender neutral.”

Yet the Queen Bee syndrome still gets a lot of press.

The Wall Street Journal was the latest publication to misuse the Queen Bee term, the researchers said. “I was really surprised and frankly kind of appalled by it,” said Carol Tavris, a social psychologist who was a co-author of the original study for Psychology Today with Graham Staines and Toby Jayaratne.

“I think people misunderstood our term” said Jayaratne, who is now a research psychologist in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. “What they missed was the political climate and the sexist climate that created it. We wanted to focus on the atmosphere that created it.”

The term no longer means what it once did. “I hate it,” Tavris said.

“There is never any ‘King Rat’ syndrome,” Tavris said. “An angry man is an angry man, but an angry woman is a bitch.”

Queen Bees do exist but they are rare, said Jayaratne and Tavris.

“For every Queen Bee, there are a thousand women mentoring women,” Tavris said.

“The stereotype of the Queen Bee has gotten out of control, and it is no good.” Jayaratne said. “Most women do support other women and they do mentor.”

These days, women are more likely to be mentors than “Mean Girl”-type Queen Bees, according to a study published in June by Catalyst, a research and advisory group that seeks to improve workplaces by advancing more women into leadership roles.  The study concluded that 65 percent of women who received career development support in turn worked to develop new talent, while only 56 percent of men did the same.

“Not all women are developing women, but neither are all men. The main difference? When men don’t, it doesn’t reflect poorly on their gender. But when women don’t, it becomes an indictment of ALL women,” Catalyst CEO Ilene Lang wrote when the research was published.

Donna Bookout-Coe, the first woman president of the California Tow Truck Association, said she once experienced the wrath of a Queen Bee, but it was while she was in her 30s running the typing pool of a law firm. There was one secretary who basically appointed herself office manager, Bookout-Coe said. “She was considered the Queen Bee. Everyone was afraid of her.” That happened in the early 1970s, around the time of the original Queen Bee study.

Bookout-Coe left the law firm in 1977 and started her own tow truck company, where she occasionally encountered more traditional types of sexism, she said. In those days, there was only one other female tow truck company owner in the state, who Bookout-Coe credits as a mentor.  “I have been sought out by a lot of other women in the industry for advice,” Bookout-Coe said. “The more of us who are out there, the stronger we get.”

Catherine Connors, editor in chief of Disney Interactive Family, said most of her mentors were men because she started her career in academia focusing on political philosophy.  Mentoring in her current job is a more of a “collegially supportive relationship” with the employees, who are mostly women.

Connors was asked if all women in power should be obligated, even more so than men, to mentor other women. “I would be critical of someone who didn’t support other women,” Connors said. But she was quick to point out there is a range of ways women can mentor, including one-one-one guidance to two or three junior employees. However, “I don’t think everyone’s cut out for that,” she said. 

Sometimes it’s enough just to be a good role model, Connors said. “We don’t have enough role models,” she said.

Maybe Yahoo should have done its homework before banning work-at-home.

For millions of American companies large and small, telecommuting has become a critical force in boosting worker productivity and growing profits in the information age.

Take the case of Dallas-based Ryan, LLC, the seventh largest corporate tax services firm in the U.S., with more than 900 employees in 45 locations in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. In August 2008, the company realized it had a problem. Voluntary turnover was roughly 20 percent. Some employees who quit said the long hours at the office left them little time for a personal life.

“We had a policy that required people to be physically present,” said Delta Emerson, the company’s chief of staff. “If you were not seen, you were questioned as to whether or not you were working.”

The solution: a flexible work schedule that allowed employees to work remotely and set their own hours. Though the transition had its bumps, the results were surprising.

Not only did the work all get done, the company became even more productive. Revenues went up. Client satisfaction went up. And turnover went down.

Emerson said the lesson was that there’s more to productivity than just showing up at the office. Ryan workers know that their job performance is now being measured on how much work they get done, not how reliably they show up at the office, she said.

“Everyone knows what they have to do to cut it,” said Emerson. “But people treasure this flexibility to the point that they will give their all to continue to work in an environment that allows that.”

By focusing more on measuring how well employees are doing their job, and worrying less about where the work gets done, companies with flexible work policies are seeing productivity go up, according to human resources experts.

That may be one more reason American companies are adopting flexible work policies. As of last year, nearly two-thirds of employers offered flexible work rules to at least some of their employees – up from about a third in 2005, according to a national study by the Society for Human Resource Management.

“We don’t see this trend going away,” said Michael Aitken, SHRM’s vice president of government affairs. "This is the way that work will get done in the future. I spend a great deal of time and energy in educating our members about the value that it offers.”

But old perceptions about the distractions of the home office persist. In her now widely-read memo explaining why Yahoo now forbids its employees to work from home, CEO Marissa Mayer explained that “speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home.”

The vast majority of companies who support flexible work practices, however, disagree. Employees who take advantage of telecommuting and other flexible policies often are more productive than if they worked only at the office, according to SHRM research. Some 97 percent of human resources managers at companies with those policies said that productivity is “the same or better” than with office-only work rules.

By skipping the travel time required to get to the office, telecommuting boosts the number of productive hours each employee can devote to work. In a 2010 study, American Consumer Institute economists Joseph Fuhr and Stephen Pociask calculated that roughly 1.7 trillion minutes are spent commuting every year – at a cost in lost work time and transportation expenses of roughly 7.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.

The economic benefits of expanding telecommuting could be huge. The authors estimate that, over 10 years, a 10 percent increase in telecommuting hours would save nearly $100 billion in lost time and expense.

We would all also breathe a little easier. Fuhr and Pociask calculated that by saving 4.4 billion gallons of gasoline, along with the energy savings from reduced office space, a 10 percent increase in hours worked form home over the next decade would reduce greenhouse gas emission by more than half a billion tons of carbon dioxide.

To be sure, not all occupations are well-suited to telecommuting. Waiters and barge pilots aren’t ever going to be very productive working from a home office. But as more occupations become tied to a computer screen for much of the day, it matters less where that screen is situated.

As many home office workers can attest, some work is better performed in a group setting – especially dull, menial tasks where the urge to goof-off and ready distractions are ever present.

That was also the conclusion of a 2012 study by economist Glenn Dutcher at the University of Innsbruck, who found that while telecommuting “has a positive impact on productivity of creative tasks” it has a “negative impact on productivity of dull tasks.” So if your job involves a lot of copying and collating, you’ll probably get more done chatting with co-workers while visiting the water cooler in the copy room.

Mayer also cited those kind of chance encounters in defense of her “everyone back to the office” mandate.

“Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” she wrote.

From TODAY: KLG sticks up for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer

But for every serendipitous encounter that sparks the creation of a winning new product, there are many hours wasted sitting in someone else’s unproductive meeting or listening to a cube neighbor justify their picks in the Oscars pool, said Aitken.

“(Telecommuting) allows for less interruption at the office,” he said. “No people swinging by and wanting to talk about what happened over the weekend.”

And while detractors argue that a home office present too many productivity-killing distractions, workers who telecommute are better able to juggle their work and home lives. That helps reduce absenteeism.

“I may want to go to a doctor’s appointment or pick up the dry cleaning or go to my son or daughter’s school play,” said Aitken. “Telecommuting allows that worker the peace of mind to be able to do the things they may need to do for their life side and still meet their work obligations.”

Supporters of flexible work policies say the key to making the transition work is the development of better ways to measure how well their employees are doing. Being the first in the parking lot in the morning and the last to leave at night usually has little to do with how much actual work gets done in between.

“We used to measure people based on hours worked, and the person who worked the most hours was like a hero,” said Emerson. “There was frequently no tie-in related to what else they had done. So people who put in the hours could get away with a lot. Now, we don’t even pay attention to hours anymore. We’re looking at results.”

Related story:

Hey Marissa! Working from home is alive and well

Updated 12:00 p.m. ET - Silicon Valley firms are known for cushy perks: free food, bringing your dog to work and so on. But starting in June, Yahoo employees will lose the benefit of working from home. According to an internal memo leaked on Friday to The Wall Street Journal's AllThingsD.com by numerous disgruntled Yahoo employees, the new policy calls for workers “physically being together.”

“We need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices... Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” reads the memo from Jacqueline Reses, a private equity veteran brought on board by Mayer in September to be the company’s HR boss.

“Hiring, managing and incentivizing talent will be of key importance,” Reses said in the press release announcing her hire.

Although Yahoo beat Wall Street expectations and reported an increase in revenue last month, this recent good news follows a long stretch of poor performance and management turmoil. Some have speculated that Yahoo’s no-telecommuting policy could be a defensive move, a way to lower the embattled tech giant’s headcount without undertaking formal layoffs. 

Shortly after CEO Marissa Mayer took the helm in July, she implemented changes like free lunch, free phones and other perks reminiscent of her former employer, Google. Earlier this month, a Business Insider list of top U.S. employers ranked Yahoo eighth, behind second-place Google but ahead of Microsoft, which came in 14th.

This new policy might make holding onto that spot harder. It drew a scathing response on Twitter and blog comment threads, with many users saying that keeping a stable of unproductive workers is a management failure, and that the policy would prompt a brain drain. (A handful of smaller tech companies used the news as a chance to recruit, inviting frustrated Yahoo! employees to come work — on a flexible schedule — for them instead.)

Others defended Mayer, saying an all-hands-on-deck approach was the only way to keep the company's new momentum going.

In her short stint at Yahoo, this isn’t the first time Mayer’s work-life balance choices have been criticized. After giving birth to her first child last fall, Mayer planned to be back at work in only a week or two.

Carley Roney, co-founder of the parent company for TheBump.com, told TODAY that Yahoo!’s policy change could convey an “anti-parent” sentiment. Yahoo did not respond to the question of whether new mom Mayer sometimes works from home. "We don't comment on rumors or internal matters," a company spokeswoman said via email.

The Yahoo memo made it clear that workers shouldn’t expect a lot of wiggle room or exceptions. “For the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” Reses said.

Studies that have tried to determine whether working from home helps or hurts productivity have drawn mixed conclusions. A study in June by Wakefield Research found that 43 percent of people said they watched TV while “working” from home, and roughly a quarter each admitted to taking a nap or knocking back a drink on the clock.

But a paper published just last week out of Stanford University said performance increased 13 percent when employees of a Chinese travel agency were allowed to work from home on a trial basis. “[A]bout 9 percent was from working more minutes per shift (fewer breaks and sick-days) and 4 percent from more calls per minute (attributed to a quieter working environment),” researchers wrote. When the company ended the trial and extended the work-from-home option to the rest of its people, performance rose 22 percent.

What's more, there is a correlation between working from home and higher pay. Census Bureau data released last year found that part-time telecommuters earned a median $22,800 more than those who physically go to work every day.

A Bureau of Labor Statistics report published in June found that telework is making inroads into the American labor market, albeit slowly. About a quarter of survey respondents said they worked from home at least some of the time.

“Evidence also reveals that an increasing number of jobs in the American economy could be performed at home if employers were willing to allow employees to do so,” researchers wrote. Technology-related jobs were mentioned as top prospects for telework. Hurdles, when they existed, tended to stem from management reluctance rather than technological limitations.

Based on the BLS’s findings, though, Mayer’s new edict could be a blessing in disguise for Yahoo workers. Working from home “is not unequivocally helpful in reducing work-family conflicts,” the report said. “Instead, telecommuting appears to have become instrumental in the general expansion of work hours... and/or the ability of employers to increase or intensify work demands among their salaried employees.”

More: Marissa Mayer: Being mom and CEO 'takes a lot of focus'
The new Yahoo! design: What's changed?
What to expect when he's expecting
The Marissa Mayer club: Starting a new job pregnant

That nasty flu season appears to have taken a toll on our productivity as well as our health.

More American workers called in sick in January than during any month in nearly five years, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week.

Nearly 2.9 million full-time workers only worked part-time during the week in which they were surveyed because of illness, injury or medical appointment, the BLS said. Also, more than 1.2 million people were off work for the whole week they were surveyed because they were sick, the BLS said.

That’s the highest level of people calling in sick since February 2008, when 1.3 million people missed a full week of work and 3.3 million full-time workers only worked part-time because of illness.

The BLS noted that more people typically call in sick during the winter months, when seasonal illnesses such as cold and the flu are common. But this year appears to have been especially hard on Americans, and on workers.

The flu season got off to an early and aggressive start, but the good news is that it appears to have peaked in late January, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

Still, experts warn that the flu could continue to circulate for months.

In addition, other bugs, such as common colds and the stomach flu, can keep workers from heading into the office.

For many workers, getting sick can literally be costly. There is no federal requirement that companies provide paid sick leave, although companies who are subject to the Family and Medical Leave Act requires unpaid sick leave.

About 66 percent of workers have access to paid sick leave, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Full-time workers are much more likely than part-time workers to have paid sick leave, according to the BLS.

As a growing number of men adopt the role of caregiver to their children or elderly parents, they’re fighting outdated gender norms in the workplace — a battle experts say will eventually usher in changes that benefit both male and female employees.

“Men who do take the time as caregivers are more likely to be seen as less committed to work because they’re violating gender norms,” said Kelli K. Garcia, a former fellow at O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law and current adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center.

“The law does in this country does protect the ability to take leave” for both men and women, said Eileen Appelbaum, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “I think a lot of companies don’t realize that,” she said.

Joan Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California — Hastings, said both men and women can be subject to what she termed a “flexibility stigma.” It can be an issue for women seeking a part-time or flex-time schedule, but for men, “It’s typically triggered if they even try to take leave,” she said.

Demographic factors are behind the increasing number of men taking on the role of caregiver. The recession relegated many men, especially young men, to periods of unemployment or underemployment. At the same time, women have taken on more of their families’ financial obligations. A Prudential Financial study published last year found that 53 percent of women are the primary breadwinner, and 22 percent make more money than their spouse. “Among female breadwinners, nearly a third say they earn more than their spouse as a direct result of the challenging economy,” the report said.

There also has been a shift in cultural norms that’s propelled men into caregiving roles, said Williams. “A group of young men is really drawing a line in the sand and saying ‘I don’t want to do it the way my father’s generation did it,’” she said. “They’re caught between that ideal and workplaces that haven’t caught up.”

“As women have learned, you have to assert the fact that this is not a ‘choice,’” Appelbaum said. It appears that more of them are doing just that: roughly 12 percent of the lawsuits filed alleging family responsibilities discrimination in the workplace are filed by men.

The experts think this number is bound to grow. According to a study published in 2009 by the National Alliance for Caregiving in collaboration with the AARP, nearly 30 percent of Americans perform at least some caregiving tasks for relatives, and about one-third of caregivers are men. “I think it’s clear that the demands on men as well as women are going to increase in terms of family care,” Appelbaum said.

In California, which began mandating paid family leave in 2004, the effect on men’s participation in caregiving is measurable, Appelbaum said. The number of men taking leave to care for a relative rose slightly between 2004 and 2012, from 30 percent to 33 percent, but the number taking time off after the birth of a child nearly doubled, climbing from 17 percent to 29 percent in that same time. “When we talk to HR managers about this... they told us that once the leaves were paid, it became more acceptable,” Appelbaum said.

Advocates for more flexible workplaces say men’s involvement ultimately will have a snowball effect that will lead to positive change. “The real advantage of having men taking leave is that when the issue of leave and the issue of caregiving is not just a women’s issue, you’re more likely to get good policies and not get gender-based judgments,” Garcia said.

“The more that men start taking leave and it becomes normalized and expected, then those judgments are going to change,” she said. “We’re at a moment where... we have this opportunity to change the workplace culture." 

A redacted copy of the SSA flatulence reprimand letter was posted to The Smoking Gun website.

It sounds like a "Dilbert" cartoon come to life, but the Social Security Administration has taken back a reprimand it gave to an employee who was written up for "passing gas and releasing an unpleasant odor" that created a "hostile work environment."

The official charge was "Conduct unbecoming a Federal employee." More specifically, "On September 7, 2012, and continuing, you disrupted the work floor by passing gas and releasing an unpleasant odor."

A copy of the letter, along with a picture of the employee at an amusement park standing next to an actor in a Pepe Le Pew costume, was published on TheSmokingGun.com.

The letter included a timestamped log accurate to the minute, documenting 60 separate-gas passing incidents from the employee in his office in three months, or about 9 per day.

The average person passes gas 14 times per day.

Medical conditions such as Crohn's disease, irritable bowel syndrome, and lactose intolerance, can cause sufferers to have chronic gas problems. The employee told management he was lactose intolerant.

"You have submitted medical evidence that you have some medical conditions," the letter read, "however, nothing that you have submitted has indicated that you would have uncontrollable flatulence. It is my belief that you can control this condition."

Several of the employee's coworkers in the "module," or work area, had complained to management about the smell. A supervisor, Deputy Division Director and a Module Manager all spoke with the employee on separate occasions about his need to control his flatulence. 

"You said that you would try to pass gas and that you would turn your fan on when it happens," the Module Manager wrote of a discussion that took place on May 18, 2012. "I explained to you that turning on the fan would cause the smell to spread and worsen the air quality in the module."

On August 14th the employee promised to purchase "Gas X" in order to limit his gas output.

Another incident, dated August 15th, noted "you have continued to release the odor and it has become intolerable to work in the module creating a hostile work environment for all your coworkers."

The letter quoted guidelines from the "Annual Personnel Reminder" and "2012 SSA/AFGE National Agreement" which the Module Manager claimed the employee had violated, including "courtesy and consideration while dealing with coworkers" and "refrain from coercive, intimidating, loud or abusive behavior."

If the "misconduct" was continued after the reprimand letter, it could lead to "more severe disciplinary action...including, removal from federal service."

Reached for comment, SSA spokesperson Mark Hinkle told TODAY, "A reprimand was issued to the employee; however, when senior management became aware of the reprimand it was rescinded on December 17, 2012.  The agency cannot comment further due to privacy concerns. "

Don’t dread tedious workplace assignments like reading reports or sitting through meetings — they’re making you more productive.

Boring, monotonous tasks help you become a better problem-solver, new research finds, because our brains use that unstimulating “down time” to branch out and think in more creative ways.  

“Boredom has always had such bad press, but some boredom is possibly good... especially if it gives us the opportunity to daydream,” said Sandi Mann, senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. Mann's research was presented this week at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Division of Occupational Psychology.

“Being able to have that down time when you let your mind wander can be great for creativity,” Mann said.

Americans are getting less creative overall, according to a landmark 2010 study. Kyung-Hee Kim, an associate professor at the college of William & Mary’s School of Education, analyzed results from creativity tests and found that our creativity has been on the wane for more than 20 years now, even though IQ scores are climbing.

Experts say one reason for our collective dearth of creativity is the increased stimulation we get in our everyday lives: We can watch Netflix while we wait for a bus and play Angry Birds when we're stuck in a checkout line.

No one likes being bored, but it's a mental state we shouldn't be so quick to eliminate. The reason we get bored is that our brains don’t have enough neural stimulation, Mann said, and the act of daydreaming is the mind’s attempt to self-stimulate.

Related story: Meetings can make you, uh, stupid

Subjects in Mann’s experiments who were assigned boring tasks, like reading or copying down phone book entries, performed better on a subsequent creative task — coming up with as many different uses for two Styrofoam coffee cups as they could — than those in a control group.

Reading something boring increased creativity more than writing something boring, Mann found. She theorized that the more passive nature of reading lent itself better to daydreaming.

“Once we’re allowed to daydream, our heads are free to think in different ways,” Mann said, which leads to more creative problem-solving.

But your boss might not see it that way. “In the workplace, daydreaming is not considered a positive,” said executive coach Lisa Garcia Jacobson. You can’t stare off into space at meetings or otherwise visibly display your boredom. “[You] have to practice it in a focused way,” Jacobson said.

If you’re trying to solve a problem at work, spend some time on a task that doesn’t require much concentration, skip the audiobook on your ride home or take a short walk (and leave the smartphone behind) to alleviate a cognitive logjam, Mann suggested. “Definitely, if you’re looking for a solution to something, giving yourself the opportunity to let your mind wander a bit will probably help,” she said.

Another thing that could bring you to a solution faster: Cut out the multitasking, Jacobson said. Studies have shown that when you try to focus on too many things at once, they all get the short shrift.

Focusing on the task at hand, even if it’s mind-numbing, is a better alternative. You’ll get the job done more effectively, and if a part of your mind does start to wander, those unscripted thoughts could be the key to solving your next workplace challenge.

In this tight economy, vacations are getting squeezed. Americans are using two fewer vacation days than last year, according to a new survey. On top of that, they have two fewer to use, 12 down from 14.

"Fear of being replaced" and "too much work" were two of the biggest reasons respondents cited in the survey.

The global online survey, "Vacation Deprivation," was conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of travel site Expedia from September to October, 2012 . The site has commissioned the survey annually since 2000. The survey was conducted among 8,687 employed adults 16 and over worldwide. The North American sample size was 500. It's available to read here in full as a PDF.

Career expert and best-selling author Nicole Williams told Savannah Guthrie this morning on TODAY that with "high unemployment people are afraid of taking that time off." 

Additionally, in America, there's a "sense of bravado around not taking vacation," said Williams. People brag about how long they've gone without vacation, taking pride in how much they've been able to punish themselves.

However, "vacation isn't a luxury," said Williams. Nor is it simply time you're "taking" from your employer. She said it allows you to "replenish, get more creative, and more able to produce." Sure you're out of pocket in the short-term, but in the long run it's better for your employer, and your career.

The key is to be smart about how you plan your vacation. Preparing the groundwork with your boss is integral.

Williams offered three big tips for making sure you're not a member of the "No Vacation Nation."

1. Scheduling is everything

Every industry has an off-season. Look at the calendar, mark up the best times for you and your employer, and go to your boss as early as possible so you both can plan for it. 

2. Prepare to relax

Try to get as much up-front work done as possible to clear your workload, even if it means putting in some extra hours or weekends in advance. Delegate, delegate, delegate. Pick a "vacation buddy" who will be your designated "go to" for your boss, clients and colleagues in your absence.

3. Return with grace

When you get back, don't complain about your jet lag or brag about how awesome your trip was. "You really want to keep it under cover," said Williams, to avoid stoking jealousy or resentment.

"Be polite, in other words," said Guthrie.

Jacques Brinon / AP

Partners who travel to work in the same direction tend to feel more positive about each other and are happier, according to surprising new research.

The classic line “Going my way?” may suggest a carefree and uncommitted lifestyle, but for couples at least, commuting to work in the same direction may be one of the factors that paves the way to marital satisfaction.  

At least that’s what a new study has found.

The report, “Going my way? The benefits of travelling in the same direction,” showed that partners feel more positive about each other and are happier if they travel to work in the same direction than those who don’t. The findings were based on two surveys conducted in the United States and in Hong Kong. Researchers asked more than 400 married people to rate their satisfaction with their spouses and to describe the direction, distance, and duration of their respective commutes.

“We think that similarity in commuting direction is symbolic of similarity in goals more generally, and that this is what underlies the effect,” said Robert S. Wyer Jr., a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who supervised the research. “We know from other research that individuals with similar goals are more attracted to one another, and commuting to work is essentially pursuing a goal. So, commuting in the same direction may be symbolically linked to pursuing similar goals.”

Wyer said that there is quite a body of evidence that supports the notion that similarity along many dimensions increases interpersonal attraction, even when seemingly unimportant. Two people with the same first name, or who learn they come from the same city or state, for example, “may feel attracted to one another even if they have no other information about one another,” he said.

Should people who do not commute or commute in opposite direction from their spouses be worried?

“Obviously not,” Wyer said.

“I think the results are undoubtedly of greater theoretical and conceptual importance than practical importance. Commuting in the same direction obviously contributes a very small proportion of the variance in marital satisfaction. It would be ludicrous to conclude that it’s essential to marriage when so many other, more important things contribute," he said. "The effects are statistically significant and therefore very likely to exist, but the magnitude of the effect, in relation to that many other factors, is likely to be very small.”

A followup laboratory experiment eliminated other interpretations of the survey findings, as even randomly paired strangers reported greater attraction to one another when they walked in the same direction rather than in different directions.

Considered alone, the field studies have alternative interpretations, Wyer said.

“Couples who commute in the same direction may find it easier to get together after work for dinner or other mutually enjoyable activities, and this could account for their greater marital satisfaction. The laboratory studies are not susceptible to this interpretation,” he said.

But when both laboratory and field studies are considered in combination, it increased confidence in the findings, he said.

The Harvard Business Review recently featured the study in an article, “You Can Improve Your Relationship” based on a Q&A with Wyer, who is also a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. (The study was originally published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in July, and is authored by Xun (Irene) Huang, Ping Dong, and Xianchi Dai, who were primarily responsible for the research, as well as Wyer.)

Jill Kristal, a clinical psychologist in Larchmont, N.Y., who frequently counsels couples and families on workplace transitions and work-life balance issues, was initially surprised that the topic would be the subject of scholarly research, and was somewhat concerned about the modest sample size. But once she thought about it, it made sense.

“It made me think about my wedding, and walking down the aisle to get married,” Kristal said, noting that the long-established tradition was a symbolic sharing of similar goals, much like shared commutes in the study. 

In addition, she said the findings resonate with her counseling work with couples.  “When one partner decides to stay at home, the adjustment is really difficult,” as they often have difficulty relating to each other. "They no longer understand where the other is coming from.”

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American Association of University Women

New research shows the pay gap starts right after college graduation.

The gap between what female and male college graduates earn may start as soon as new grads collect their first paycheck.

A new analysis of government data finds that, on average, male college graduates were earning more than their female classmates just one year after graduation. The gap was persistent, although smaller, after controlling for factors such as choice of major and job.

“Women are making progress, for sure, in education and in the workplace,” said Christianne Corbett, a senior researcher with the American Association of University Women and an author of the report. “But the pay gap is real. It’s still there. That’s what’s so confounding about it.”

The AAUW took a look at what 2008 college graduates were earning one year later, in 2009. They found that on average, the female graduates who were working full time were earning 82 cents for every dollar their male peers were earning.

The average salary for women was $35,296, compared with $42,918 for men.

There are some factors that can at least partially explain that gap. Although more women are entering traditionally male-dominated fields, men are still more likely to pursue majors that can command higher paychecks, such as engineering and certain science fields, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, women remain more likely to gravitate to lower-paying fields like education and health care.

So the researchers controlled for factors such as what graduates majored in, where they went to college, what field they were working in, how many hours they worked and even their grade point averages.

They found that even after accounting for all those things, the female graduates were still earning about 7 percent less than their male peers.

“There’s good reason to believe that part of that unexplained gap is due to gender discrimination, and most of it is probably unconscious,” Corbett said.

Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell who has studied the wage gap extensively, said there are things that can be done to narrow the overall wage gap, such as getting more women to go into math and science fields that pay better.

Still, she said it’s also important to consider whether bias is to blame for the remaining 7 percent wage gap that can’t be explained by other factors. She noted that in the modern era, that doesn’t necessarily mean hiring managers are consciously deciding they should pay women less for the same work.

“Discrimination doesn’t have to conscious and overt. It can be subtle and even unconscious,” Blau said. “As we’re seeking to reduce that, we should bear that in mind.”

Blau said the 7 percent gap is likely smaller than it has been in years past.

Still, she noted, there’s other evidence to suggest that the gender difference in pay will get bigger as these women get older.  It’s not clear if that’s because women choose different career paths, slow their career for family and child care responsibilities or face bias.

“I’m guessing that if we could follow these women over the years, there’s a fair probability that the gap will widen,” Blau said. “But I think they’ll still be doing better than their predecessors.”

The research comes as more women than men are going to college, and it’s becoming increasingly common for women to pursue traditionally male-dominated fields. But even when women choose the same major as men, they still may not be getting as fat of a paycheck in return, the new data suggest.

Female business majors who graduated in 2008 were making an average $38,034 one year after graduating, compared with $45,143 male business majors.

Similarly, female engineers were making an average $48,493 a year after graduation, compared with $55,142 for men.

Wages were more likely to be equal for men and women who had majored in health care, education and the humanities.

Corbett said one explanation for this difference is that women are less likely to be using the degree they earned. She said research has found that men who get an engineering degree are more likely than women to get a job that requires that degree.

Other research has shown that women with science degrees are more likely than men to then take clerical or other administrative jobs.

The researchers also found that the wage gap was much wider for men and women who attended private, nonprofit universities than for those who attended public universities.

In general, women who work full-time, year-round earned 77 cents for every dollar a man earned in 2011, according to the latest Census data released last month. That gap has been relatively stable for years.

Other government data also has shown that women tend take home less money each week even when they are doing the same job as a man. For example, the median weekly earnings of a female medical scientist was 77.6 percent of the median weekly earnings for a man in the same field, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data from 2011.

Related:

Women face stubborn wage gap as wages fall for everyone

Amid recession, an uptick in wives ourearning their husbands

More women seeking MBAs but pay gap persists

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With 1 billion females expected to enter the work force in the next decade, women are gaining ever greater influence in offices around the world.

They say it is a man’s world, but perhaps not for much longer as up to 1 billion women are expected to enter the work force in the next decade, according to the latest survey from Booz & Company on women in the workplace.

The report from the global management and strategy consultancy says the surge in women employees, employers, producers and entrepreneurs in the next 10 years would improve not only gender equality, but global economic growth. However, it also warns that governments could miss out on this potential.

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 “As the world economy grows and develops, countries cannot afford to ignore over 50 percent of their talent pool,” Penney Frohling, business strategist and partner at Booz & Company, told CNBC. “There is a view that countries that are able to tap into that talent pool are going to see higher growth. There is a very clear correlation between empowering women and GDP growth, literacy rates, infant mortality rates.”

 She added: “(Any) countries that don’t tap into that are going to fall further and further behind.” 

Booz & Company created an index that ranks 128 countries based on how effectively leaders are empowering women as economic agents, looking at factors such as access to education, market participation and anti-discrimination policies — such as those introduced by Norway that require at least 40 percent of board members in publicly listed companies to be women.

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Frohling told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box” today that such policies are an “emotive issue.”

“When you see a [government] quota, you are looking at a long history of not achieving any progress in key performance indicators,” she said. “A quota is never a starting point — it’s a point where people feel there is a need for a catalyst.”

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Though some countries have introduced policies of positive discrimination to ensure that women are reaching the highest rung of the ladder, there are flaws in the policy. The British government said that by 2015 at least 25 percent of company boards should be made up of women, yet there is a long way to go, Frohling said.

“In the U.K., there is a statistic that (shows) that out of 950 'C-suite'-level positions (corporate executives), 70 of them are occupied by women. We simply are not making progress as quickly as we could,” she said.

Child care is also a big issue for women in their career progression, as is gender equality in the workplace, Frohling said, with the U.S. making an “interesting” statistic.

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"In the U.S … there are women living hand-to-mouth in low-waged jobs, and 41 percent of their salaries are taken over by child care costs — so there’s really no way of getting ahead when you’re facing those kind of (obstacles),” she said.

Despite calls from the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for governments to invest in women, there are still many boundaries to women progressing in the developing world’s labor force.

Alluding to the high-profile Taliban shooting of teenager Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan after the 14-year old campaigned for female education, Frohling said that basic rights such as access to property and education were key in female empowerment.

"It starts with education and access to education,” Frohling said. “You need a basic infrastructure in place … Once you have that infrastructure in place to get women into the work force.”

What might be surprising are some of the more creative excuses they've tried to use to get out of work, and just how many employers are out to catch them.

The online poll conducted by Harris Interactive surveyed 3,976 workers and 2,494 U.S. hiring managers and human resource workers. In addition to raw numbers, Careerbuilder also collected the memorable excuses bosses had heard.

How about the employee who called in sick because they were "upset after watching 'The Hunger Games'"? Or the guy who said he "forgot he was hired for the job?" Or the person who couldn't come in to work because they were "sick from reading too much"?

Other eyebrow-raising reasons included "toe stuck in faucet," "dead grandmother being exhumed for police investigation," "bird bite," "broken heart," and "sobriety tool wouldn't allow car to start."

What motivates the strategies behind these excuses? "Some subscribe to a 'less is more' mentality while others may feel the more detail they provide, the more believable the excuse will be," said Rosemary Haefner, CareerBuilder vice president of human resources.

And here's one to stoke your paranoia. Bosses may even recruit your co-workers to ferret out the truth -- 18 percent of employers said they tried this ruse.

Employees fraudulently cash in sick days for a variety of reasons, but basically it's to carve off extra time for themselves. If they weren't actually sick, 34 percent said they called in sick because they didn't feel like going to work, 29 percent said they "needed to relax," 22 percent needed to make a doctor's appointment, 16 percent were catching up on sleep, and 15 percent wanted to run errands.

Those who call in fake sick days "may be repeat offenders for truancy or may be concerned about how their boss may perceive them," said Haefner. "However, if you’re caught lying, that can have more serious consequences and bring your professionalism and reliability into question. It’s better to be honest."

Should an employer catch you in your lie, it could lead to them becoming a former employer. Seventeen percent of bosses said they fired an employee for giving a a fake excuse. Then you'll have all the sick days you need.