Baroness Gabby Bertin, a member of Theresa May's old task force to encourage women in their careers, said that the cult of superwomen having it all is dissuading women from starting their own businesses. She said it is time to be honest about how challenging' it is to be successful in a career while having children.

She added: All the talk of superwomen having it all is not very helpful to most women in this country.

The conservative peer was a key aide to David Cameron during his time in Opposition and as Prime Minister. Bertin is part of a group of senior women who have been appointed to ensure all policy developed by the Government considers the impact on women and strives to increase their role in politics, business and society as a whole.

Lady Bertin criticized the philosophy of lean in which urges women to be more proactive at seizing career opportunitinies. ‘Leaning in' is all very well if you are a highly-paid executive with wraparound childcare, but less so if you are a single parent or if both of you work very long hours and there is a hard stop for nursery pick-up, she said. It also should not be a crime against your career to want to see your children awake during the week.

The peer also criticized programmes like Peppa Pig for reinforcing gender stereotypes that hold women back. Deeply ingrained gender stereotypes starts early on, she said. ‘It can still subconsciously drive women and men down different paths.

Lady Bertin also addressed the challenges working fathers face and called for the stamping out of a macho culture that sniggers behind its hand at shared parental leave or dads playing a bigger role.

The Government's new task force strives to ensure all policy developed by the Government considers the impact on women and tries to increase their role in politics, business and society. Made up of a committee of peers, MPs and policy experts, the group is chaired by Nikki Da Costa, the head of legislative affairs at N010.

Helen Rose, COO of TSB and one of the most senior women in the UK's retail banking sector, has tried for many years to get more senior women in business. As a result, she is encouraging other senior women in business to share their stories to encourage women to make it to the top.

Rose meets with groups of women from across the business to share tips to make it in the business world. I tell them the story of when I was offered the COO job at TSB and was given 24 hours to make up my mind, she said. You have to just say yes and think later about how to make it work. Often women don't get as far as saying yes, because they've already thought about what would be difficult. Women need to be bolder, because if you're not, you'll find that one of your peers - often of the male variety - beats you to the top.

Rose climbed to the top despite working in a male-dominated environment. She started her career as an accountant and then became an auditor. I was told early on in my career that it was a good idea for women to move into tax, as it was less confrontational! Despite the difficulties, Rose stood her ground. That didn't resonate with me, as I believe women can be good at resolving confrontations.

She launched her career in senior finances roles in retail and worked in the industry over 15 years - at Dixons, Safeway and Forte. Although the retail industry usually attracts more women, at Forte, Rose was the only woman out of all the senior staff worldwide. There was a lot of locker-room banter. In that situation, it's hard to bring your whole self to work.

Things changed when she joined what was there Lloyds TSB in 2005 where two of her three bosses were actually women. Everyone was very generous and welcoming, but there was still a traditional, paternalistic culture, says Rose. One of my direct reports said to me: ‘I haven't offered Jo the promotion because she's pregnant and I don't want to put more pressure on her.' And I said, ‘Well, isn't that Jo's choice?'

A new opportunity opened up for Rose and her team to create the kind of company they wanted when TSB separated from Lloyds after the banking crisis. Building a bank from scratch was incredibly complex, but it was great to write our own mission statement and think about what we wanted our values to be, she said.

From the very beginning we built a much more gender-balanced team - 37% of our senior managers were women. Now we're up to 42% and we're aiming for 45-55%. Thanks to this change, Rose said you're much more able to be relaxed, be yourself and bring all of your talents to work.

Rose criticised the tag of superwoman and said it's possible to reach the top without being one. I personally don't like that tag, as it puts women off. We all face challenges; we just need to be more honest and open about how we ‘made it'.

Interestingly, Portugal recently passed legislation that outlaws the practice of some employers trying to contact workers after regular hours. Many bosses have been known to call their juniors directly, message them, send an email and do a host of other things outside the official work hours. Portugal's parliament prescribed a hefty fine for anyone who goes ahead to defy these new regulations.

The new laws are intended to strike a healthy balance in employees' lives, balancing between work and private life. Further, the law also includes other stipulations, directly responding to the modern-day shift leaning towards remote and hybrid workplaces. The latter situation has become more frequent in 2019-2022.

Under the new law, Portuguese workers were granted a right to refuse to do any remote work outside the regular hours. Depending on the prevailing circumstances, a worker can, however, choose to request such work if it suits him. Obviously, this would have to align with other factors advantageous to the worker. Fulfilling any remote duties also needs to be feasible in the employee's line of duty.

The regulations are also meant to curb the increasing phenomenon of burnout among over-worked staff. But there were other surprising features of the new landmark laws. For instance, if any employee incurs any unexpected expense as a direct result of working remotely at home or elsewhere, the employer is obligated to pay for such increased expenses.

As such, your boss would be obligated to pay for various seemingly ordinary expenses like electricity bills and gas. The new law also compels supervisors to meet face-to-face with members of staff under them every two months. Notably, the law doesn't apply to companies that employ less than ten workers on their team. Analysts also note that while the new law appears progressive, the Portuguese government didn't pass the right "to disconnect portion." If this were the case, Portuguese employees would have the right to turn off their work devices when the day ends.

The analysts note that the chances of passing such a law in a country like the US is significantly remote. This is because Americans, by nature, don't seem to warm up to the idea that anyone should dictate to them when they can call or receive calls from anyone else. Despite this, it's obvious that it has become ever more challenging to strike a reasonable balance between private life and work. This has been the situation worldwide, regardless of where people live. Interestingly, the US National Bureau of Economic Research recently reported that the average US employee's workday significantly stretched, increasing by 48.5 minutes in the days and weeks after the lockdown and stay-at-home orders began right across the nation.

To illustrate, almost 70% of US professionals who shifted to remote work in 2019-2022 admitted that they were forced to work even during weekends. 45% of the professionals said that, since that time, they are now forced to work many hours in the course of the week, much more than they ever did before. The statistics were gathered after Robert Half, a Los Angeles-based staffing firm, interviewed 2,800 employees to understand their situation.

Acknowledging this trend, one analyst noted that employers are now better off trusting employees to have their work done and keeping this faith no matter where their staff work, at home or in the office. It's also interesting to note that many employees worldwide have said that they prefer to keep working from home. This is because such an arrangement allows them to care for their families and prepare a more convenient schedule than when they have to work in the traditional office setting.

Erica Ariel Fox, a renowned writer at Forbes, pointedly says: "The new legislation dramatically demonstrates that a revolution aptly christened "work-life balance" is well underway." "At a time it's becoming the norm trying to reverse the equation, it's also becoming obvious that company cultures must significantly transform to embrace this culture," she adds. "Unless they do this, they'll helplessly watch their performance goals go up in flames," she concludes.

Some experts say that employers who suggest that a return to the traditional office is mandatory to ensure efficiency and productivity generally ignore the bigger picture. Here's the reason: Many observed that the novel work from home culture significantly boosted employee productivity by as much as 5%. Experts attribute the remarkable productivity boost to the adoption of new technology. Workers also spent less time commuting. The University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute for Economics study interviewed 30,000 Americans.

Is digital addiction really a thing or are we talking about a mere dependence? For instance, as Internet is medium rather than an activity, it's more difficult to pin down a quantifiable, negative effect of Internet use. If you find you have a compulsive need to use your digital devices and to be online to the point where it is interfering with your life and keeps you from engaging in social activities or doing things you are meant to do, that's when this digital dependence becomes an addiction.

Whether you can't live without your phone, without interacting on social media or Internet in general, these are all categorised under the umbrella of digital addiction.

Phone addiction is a syndrome where users overuse their smartphones to the extent where it has a negative impact on their daily lives. Therapist Paul Hokemeyer said that this syndrome can be a manifestation of underlying behavioural health and personality issues. Some of these underlying pathologies include depression, anxiety and a socially challenged personality. As they are affected by these issues, they rely on their phones to find some comfort.

If you feel the need to document every aspect of your life on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, then you are probably addicted to social media. Although there is no medical recognition of this addiction, recent studies have proved that overusing Facebook can decrease feelings of satisfaction and happiness.

Meanwhile, Internet addiction is defined as an impulse control disorder, which is also known as pathological internet use. People who are affected by this issue spend so much time online that they find it hard to differentiate between the virtual world and reality. This pathology increases the chances of overspending money online.

Before the days of smartphones and laptops, in 1997, psychologists were already testing the addictive potential of the World Wide Web. Even in its infant years, people who used the Net were already showing symptoms that manifest themselves with other addictions: trouble at work, social isolation, and the inability to cut back. What resulted so addictive about the Internet is the feeling of connectedness to something, rather than to an activity that could be accomplished via that medium.

Internet addiction started to be recognised as a real problem towards 2008, when The American Journal of Psychiatry published an editorial requesting the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) - also known as the bible of psychiatry - includes Internet Addiction.

Psychiatrist Jerald Block said that a decade of research had proven that the 1997 study was right in suspecting the Internet could inspired the same patterns of excessive usage, withdrawal, tolerance, and negative symptoms associated with substance abuse.

Black concluded, Internet addiction is resistant to treatment, entails significant risks, and has high relapse rates. Accordingly, Internet addiction is a pathology that needs treatment just like any other.

Nowadays, Internet is more widely believed to foster addictive behaviours in its own right. One report from 2012, for instance, studied nearly twelve thousand adolescents in eleven European countries and found that 4.4% suffered from what the authors named pathological Internet use or used the internet in a way that had a negative impact on the subjects' health and life.

When you spend too much time online and that interferes with your social and professional activities, Internet use could cause mental distress and inability to function associated with pathological gambling. Most of the surveyed adolescents who abused Internet also suffered from other psychological problems including depression, anxiety, A.D.H.D., and O.C.D.

There was not enough data to include Internet addiction on the list of officially recognized behavioural addictions in DSM-V. The landscape might change as the number of problematic use of Internet has been rising in recent years.

Marc Potenza, a psychiatrist at Yale and the director of the school's Program for Research on Impulsivity and Impulse Control Disorders, said Internet can be addictive as a medium. I think there are people who find it very difficult to tolerate time without using digital technologies like smartphones or other ways of connecting via the Internet, he said. It's the feeling of connectivity or the lack of it what makes constitutes a problem.

A recent study by San Francisco State University concluded that digital addiction increases loneliness, anxiety and depression. It also found that smartphone use can be similar to other types of substance use.

To wrap up we're not saying don't use the web but rather be disciplined about when you want to use it and it will probably be a good idea to turn off mobile and desktop notifications that distract you whilst you're working on another task, mute the Groups so you look at them when you want to.

One of the challenges the global facilities nowadays is how to tackle youth unemployment across the world. Nearly 400 million young people on the planet are unemployed and some of them lack proper education and training to compete in the global market. To solve the problem, according to the World Economic Forum, it’s pivotal for the public and private sectors to create more jobs and give young people the skills and confidence to fill them.

Although the global of youth unemployment is particularly this day and age, it fortunately is top of mind for global political leaders. In 2015, for instance, the G20 in Turkey docussed increasing employment, striving for inclusive and robust growth through collective action.

Hosted by the World Economic Forum, during the Annual Meeting of the New Champions - the foremost global summit on innovation, science and technology aimed at promoting entrepreneurship in the global public interest - the attendees discussed the role of entrepreneurship in job creation and as a provider of opportunities to young people.

Their annual Job Creation Survey (2015) showed that entrepreneurs’ hiring plans outperforms the rest. According to the report, 47% of entrepreneurs (and 77% of world-leading entrepreneurs) plan to increase the size of their workforce, compared to 29% of large corporations. Therefore, supporting entrepreneurs to grow their businesses can significantly impact employment rates.

According to the report, the major change will stem from allowing young people to follow their passion and start their own businesses. This initiative is expected to have a major impact in the youth employment statistics.

According to an EY survey from 2015, 65% of the 2,800 young people surveyed around the world professed their desire to run their own business at some point in their careers, out of which 27% want to start it immediately and 38% would like to learn from someone else first. These trends are most significant in developing markets, with Mexico leading the way.

The challenge now is to provide young people with the support and the environment they need to turn their ambitions into reality, said Maria Pinelli, Global Vice-Chair, Strategic Growth Markets, EY.

Accordingly to the report, young people want more hands-on experience and mentoring from entrepreneurship. Therefore, today’s entrepreneurs and business leaders have a clear role to play in nurturing the next generation of wealth and job creators, Pinelli said.

It’s not only up to the entrepreneurs to foster this youth employment, but governments have a role to play as wel. (Governments) need to focus on providing the right environment to enable aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs to succeed. This includes ensuring that the education system is fit for purpose, said Pinelli.

Pinelli cited a paper released at the G20 YEA conference entitled From classroom to boardroom: Creating a culture for high impact entrepreneurship, where they argue that governments must commit to, and enact, targeted education policies that support future generations of young entrepreneurs and help create a culture that is supportive of entrepreneurship, she added.

Sadly, she said, the young unemployment problem won’t be solved quickly, or easily, and it requires a range of responses. Along with shorter-term macroeconomic and fiscal policies to help drive job growth, embedding entrepreneurship at the heart of the education system is a key, long-term initiative that will help provide an environment where the dreams of millions of young people to make an impact and start their own enterprises can be realised.

With youth unemployment on the rise after the 2008 financial crisis, many graduates started their own business. That’s the story of Amie Samba, who graduated in 2009 when Britain was hit by recession and youth unemployment was on its way to a record of more than a million. Like some of her peers, the sports science and psychology graduate was only able to find short-term contracts and volunteer work, and the prospect of finding a full-time job seemed off the table.

Around 2008, 2009, with the financial crash and the way the economy was, I wondered what my options were, Samba told the British newspaper The Guardian. A lot of people were quite sceptical and scared. It was so competitive.

Unable to find full time employment, Samba started her own became and joined a generation of young entrepreneurs.