Female Supremacy Articles - Page 21
Are Women Better Entrepreneurs?
Margaret Heffernan
Forbes
June 2006
Lurita Doan has always been an entrepreneur. Even while working for Unisys, she saw that there was a big new business to be built by customizing UNIX software for large corporate clients. She eagerly drew up a business plan for her bosses, but it quickly got lost in a series of mergers and reorganizations. It also didn’t help that every time she saw a new organizational chart, her group was further and further off to one side.
That chart was enough for her. Tired of being ignored, undervalued and unrecognized, she quit. It was a great move for Doan, because it propelled her into founding NTMI, a security- and surveillance-software powerhouse that has been named to the Forbes ASAP 500 list, the Washington Technology Fast 50 and the Deloitte & Touche Fast 500.
This is, of course, a success story for Doan, though not for Unisys. But we're not picking on Unisys. What is important about Doan’s story is the dizzying rate at which it is being repeated across the United States.
The World's Most Powerful Women
Every day, 420 women go out and start their own businesses--twice the rate at which men do so. And these businesses are growing revenue, profits and jobs faster than business as a whole.
The explosion in women-owned businesses explains why women’s companies now employ more people than America’s largest 500 companies combined. Women now own 46% of the private businesses in the U.S., demonstrating daily just how tough, innovative and commercial women can be.
But this success masks some important questions: If women are so successful working for themselves, why aren’t they just as successful in traditional corporations? Why do they have to leave in order to prove just how good they are?
After all, setting up your own company is fraught with risk--and women typically fund their ventures with higher levels of personal debt. So these women aren’t choosing the easy option. If anything, they’re leaving their jobs to do something harder. They’re not feeling exhausted and bitter either; they’ve leaving full of the determination and energy that every company needs.
But time and again, as I talk to female business owners, I hear two refrains: No one would take me seriously, and I wanted more control over my life. Both themes are important. Much of the growth of women-owned businesses is fueled by ideas that fell on deaf corporate ears.
Cecilia McCloy’s ISSI geological business or Carol Latham’s Thermagon--both Inc. 500 companies--sprang into being when the women's employers ignored them. What business today can afford to lose this level of innovation? We struggle to drive higher levels of creativity and develop intrapreneurs within our companies, but we might do better to stop expelling the entrepreneurs among us. These innovators may be different, but there isn’t a company in the world that can afford to waste their talent.
The second theme--wanting control of one’s life--is also crucial. Almost 60% of women say they have no flexibility about when they start and end their days, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. Their resistance to this state of affairs (Harvard University’s Larry Summers notwithstanding) has nothing to do with not being willing to work hard. You don’t get results like ISSI’s 400% growth rate over three years by slacking off. Women work very hard, they just don’t necessarily want to work a rigid schedule.
I’ve spent years talking to women who own businesses sustaining double- and triple-digit growth. Most of them have children. And while they may work weird hours, they are highly productive. As Doreen Marks, CEO of Otis Technologies (the holder of some 140 patents) remarked, “It doesn’t really matter which 80 hours you work.”
We now have all the technology we need to free employees to work more flexibly. But instead of using it to retain and liberate talent, we’re using it to send the talent screaming out of the door.
The success of women-owned businesses is cause for rejoicing. It benefits the economy and it benefits women. It even benefits men, who are more likely to be hired by women than women are by men, according to the Center for Women’s Business Research. But I’m not sure our large corporations can rejoice.
Sure, every time a woman resigns, it’s easy to imagine she’s going home, baking cookies and retiring from the field. It’s far more challenging--and a lot more realistic--to think she's leaving to find richer challenges, take on more risk and test the full range of her talents. That makes her just the kind of person companies should never want to lose.
As the economy heats up, it’s sobering to think that the real competition for talent isn’t other firms--it's the business and ideas incubating inside women’s minds.
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Girls dominate CAPT scores: Waterbury boys are outscored in every subject
BY RANDY JAMES
Republican-American
September 3, 2006
WATERBURY -- Girls are moving to the head of the class in city high schools.
New test results show girls outscoring boys in every subject, stretching the gender gap to its widest point in at least six years. Girls continued their traditional dominance in reading and writing and outperformed boys in science and math last year for the first time.
Averaging all four subjects, girls were 70 percent more likely than boys to reach state goals on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test. In reading and writing, girls were more than twice as likely to hit the marks.
Girls' performance relative to boys' in Waterbury has improved steadily since 2001, when they were barely half as likely to hit the goal in science and 60 percent as likely in math.
The growing gender divide here mirrors a larger pattern being noticed by educators in Connecticut and nationwide.
Elementary and middle school girls statewide trailed boys slightly in math on the latest Connecticut Mastery Test, but trumped boys in reading and clobbered them in writing.
"Girls definitely do better than the boys, and that's becoming a national trend," Assistant Superintendent Paul V. Sequeira said. "I really and truly believe that when it comes to education, academics, that girls take their work a lot more seriously."
The CAPT is administered every year to sophomores in public high schools statewide. About 1,100 students in Waterbury's four high schools took the test in March. Results help determine whether schools are meeting the requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind education reform law.
The tests are scored on a five-point scale; the state goal is a four.
Women's growing academic muscle has spread to higher education, as well. Males now comprise only 42 percent of U.S. college students, representing minorities at Fairfield and Wesleyan universities and the University of Connecticut. The U.S. Department of Education expects female college enrollment to grow nearly twice as fast as male enrollment by 2014.
"I think women are excelling because women have been empowered," said Post University President Patricia Sanders, in part crediting greater effort to boost girls' interest in traditionally overlooked subjects like science and math.
Sanders couldn't break down Post's overall enrollment by gender, but said its adult education program is primarily female.
Sequeira said he remembers girls as the superior students when he was in school.
"No matter what subject, they were also much more focused on learning than boys were," he said, even though "they didn't have the same opportunities back then that they have today."
Reactions to the gender gap vary, depending on how it's interpreted. To the extent it represents females reaching their full potential, Sanders said she welcomes it. But other disparities between genders -- the fact that Connecticut males are a third more likely to drop out of high school, for instance -- should raise a warning flag, she said.
"I'm not sure it's a problem, but we have to find out what's going on."
Sequeira is also encouraged to see girls improving, "but we should make sure that the boys don't fall behind," he said. "We have to make sure everyone is making the same strides forward."
News of the test scores came as no surprise to Shana Lamar, 16, a senior at Kennedy High School.
"We focus more," she said. "Boys spend more time on basketball and video games while we do our work."
Lamar said it wasn't a question of intelligence, but discipline and effort.
"Boys are smart," she said, "when they want to be."
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Ban young male drivers, says judge
Liz Keen and Lisa Jones
South Wales Echo
YOUNG men should be kept from behind the wheel until they are 24, according to a top judge.
Faced with a teenager who admitted doing 95mph when he "clipped" another car, causing a catastrophic accident, Judge Jonathan Durham Hall QC told him: "Everybody knows young men and motor cars just do not go together.
"One wonders how many dead or badly injured people there have to be before insurance companies or Parliament say enough is enough."
And after banning 18-year-old chef Ricky Boon from driving for five years, he added: "At 24 you may just be suitable to sit behind the wheel of a car - and it seems to me that's about the first time young men should drive."
Boon was showing off to friends in his newly-acquired Peugeot when a Toyota sports car driven by a 24-year old came alongside him on a 70mph dual carriageway between Pyle and Laleston, Bridgend.
Cardiff Crown Court heard how neither would give way as they sped along side by side at lunchtime on August Bank Holiday last year.
Boon, of Pwll y Garth, Kenfig Hill, admitted he had been trying to impress his passengers as he accelerated.
"I was doing 90 to 95 or maybe it was faster - I'm not sure," he said.
He had boxed himself in when he came upon another car, in front, after a bend.
He moved out, nudging the speeding Toyota into the central reservation before losing control completely and hitting a sign.
A "negligently maintained" crash barrier which was fitted with just two bolts instead of the required four, broke and one piece passed right through the Toyota.
Its driver was seriously injured with a double skull fracture and broken pelvis. He was not prosecuted.
Judge Durham Hall told Boon, who admitted dangerous driving: "The fact that you both survived is a mercy."
Boon expected to be locked up, but was spared with 100 hours unpaid community work, two years rehabilitation, £578 costs and a five year ban.
It was his third driving offence since passing his test in February 2004.
He will have to re-sit his test before driving in 2010.
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Don't waste money, girls will always be better
The Times On-Line
MORE should be done to close the education attainment gap, right? Not necessarily, a new study suggests.
Research based on international data has found that boys fail to match girls’ achievements regardless of how they are taught, writes The Times Educational Supplement (Jan 19). This means that no matter how much time, money and effort is poured into schemes to improve boys’ attainment, girls will still outperform them.
Professor Stephen Gorard, of York University, examined research on reading skills and found that girls do better than boys in all of the countries that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“The differences occur in very different education systems. Any plausible explanation for the apparent underachievement of boys must, therefore transcend all of these differences,” writes Professor Gorard in his chapter of the book Gender in Education 3 to 19.
He argues that the gap cannot simply be explained by laddishness, truancy, seating arrangements or new teaching methods.
Edited by Hilary Claire, of London Metropolitan University, the research finds gender stereotyping is common in education, within the curriculum and teaching practices.
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HOW WOMEN WON THE SEX WAR
Aug 3rd 2006
Economist.com
Larry Summers may well have been right, but men are done for anyway
ONE of last year's better entertainments was the Larry Summers show.
The row over whether Mr Summers, the then president of Harvard
University, was right or wrong to say that natural ability may be one
of the reasons why there are fewer female than male maths professors at
Harvard brought pleasure to politically correct and incorrect alike. It
confirmed the prejudices of both about each other, and led to the
downfall of a man beloved by neither.
Mr Summers may have been right. In most intellectual areas, such as
vocabulary and verbal reasoning, the differences between men and women
are statistically insignificant. But the long tail of mathematical
genius does tend to be male, along with higher rates of idiocy and
masturbation. While women show less mathematical brilliance than men,
their scores are better in some verbal skills (see article[1]).
These differences may or may not be innate, but the argument anyway
misses the point. The interesting question is not whether men are more
likely to be weirdly good at maths than women are, but whether the
things that men are good at are more or less useful than the things
that women are good at. And the answer, in the rich world at least, is
no.
Technology and globalisation are undermining the usefulness of male
skills. Take map-reading. The female tendency to call for five right
turns while holding the map upside down, playing "I spy" with the
children and remarking on interesting features of the local
half-timbering has been attested to over many decades by impartial
scientists as well as by irritated husbands. But once satellite
navigation rendered the ability to tell the cartographic difference
between a car park and a lake redundant, that aspect of male
superiority disappeared out of the window, along with the crucial pages
of the road atlas that the toddler removed while practising his
superior hand-eye co-ordination skills.
Men, studies show, are exceedingly good at rotating three-dimensional
shapes in their head. Perhaps women once stared open-mouthed in wonder
as their mates juggled pyramids of imaginary polyhedra. Such tricks are
also quite handy for engineers who specialise in building large bits of
machinery, digging tunnels or slinging bridges across rivers. But, now
that the rich world has about as many tunnels and bridges as it needs,
and the large bits of machinery which aren't made by computers and
robots are made by the Chinese, their usefulness is limited.
Modern professional life is dominated by management, which these days
sets high store by emotional intelligence, empathy and communication.
Wise chaps seeking professional advancement should therefore spend
their free time with groups of women, boning up on how to undermine
somebody's confidence while pretending to boost it, and how to turn an
entire lunch table against an absent colleague without saying a mean
word. Such skills are likely to have a greater influence on their
lifetime earnings than the ability to spin an icosahedron. It's a
girlie man's world, as Arnold Schwarzenegger didn't say.
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Are men obsolete?
By Jodie Allen
US News and World Report
One bad mistake the administration made in trying to return Iraq to civilization, according to Kenneth Pollack, was to disband the Iraqi Army. Why? Because, says Pollack, a widely respected Middle East expert, the last thing you want to do is let loose in the land a bunch of armed men trained only in mayhem. Iraq, of course, has special problems, but there is a larger lesson here. Not just in places on the margins of the medieval, but even in America, men are a perennial and perhaps deepening problem. To be sure, men--like women--aren't all alike. They vary greatly in the degree of their aggressiveness, need to dominate, and so on. Still as the social scientists say, certain "central tendencies" characterize the sexes, and in recent weeks, both Business Week and CBS's 60 Minutes have featured stories on the mounting maladies of maleness. "From kindergarten to grad school," Business Week reports, girls now outperform boys in grades, admissions, student government, and extracurricular activities. "Women are rapidly closing the M.D. and Ph.D. gap and make up almost half of law students," the magazine says. Meanwhile, boys dominate in such dubious categories as remedial education, stimulant-drug prescriptions, and suicide.
School isn't life, of course, and boys may well find their footing as they progress through the labor markets, especially at the higher reaches where daring, assertiveness--and connections--can pay off big. After all, at least for a few centuries, men have found productive niches in industrialized society, building roads, bridges, and communication networks, and founding (and periodically bilking) massive conglomerates, while contributing to the sciences, arts, and humanities. But even during these periods of industrial growth, the great majority of the male species contributed far more muscle than mind to the commonweal.
Exporting men's work. And now, in our globalized economy, many of those jobs in factories, mines, and repair and maintenance shops are fast disappearing, fleeing to foreign shores. "Manufacturing continues to hemorrhage jobs," said National Association of Manufacturers President Jerry Jasinowski recently, as he noted the 34th consecutive month of job losses in the sector, losses that extend well beyond the assembly line. A new NAM study by economist Joel Popkin points out that manufacturers now account for nearly two thirds of all private research and development and averaged twice the productivity gains of their sectors in the past two decades. But 83 percent of U.S. jobs are now categorized as "service providing." While many of these require the spatial and mathematical skills at which males still excel, the great bulk rely on the sort of diligent, low-ego, cooperative effort at which females traditionally shine.
All of which prompts the question: What shall we do with all the men? Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, was surprised when his son, a software developer, said he was considering buying a snow-removal company out west. "They can't move the snow to India," he explained. But at best that's a seasonal occupation. Sports and entertainment are other possibilities, but to make a living at them requires rare skill. Leisure is an option for those of independent means--or with productive helpmates. But women tend to excel even in non-market domains, at least at such harmless pursuits as flower arranging, shopping, and, of course, child rearing.
There remains, to be sure, one large sector in which men retain unquestioned domination: crime. In 2001, the FBI reports, men arrested for violent crime outnumbered women by roughly 5 to 1. (For murder the ratio was 7 to 1.) Even in nonviolent categories males prevailed (11 to 1 in illegal weapons possession; 5 to 1 in drunken driving). Indeed, aside from prostitution, only in the categories of fraud and embezzlement have women begun to close the gender gap. And even in these officebound areas--witness the latest round of corporate scandals--when it comes to big-time booty, the boys are still way out in front.
Unfortunately for the career aspirations of those skilled in outlaw pursuits, popular demand for the fruits of their labors is negative. No surprise then that popular prophets have foretold the coming of a male glut. In his book Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut paints a world in which computers have taken over planning, production, and much of science. War has been abolished globally, but America retains a large, if pointless, standing army. Others among the idle are enrolled in the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps (aka the Reeks and Wrecks) and spend most of their days leaning on shovels. Everyone is very depressed. Or, if you prefer, there's the Anthony Burgess dystopia of The Wanting Seed. In this not so future world, surplus males fight endless wars against unnamed enemies--who turn out to be themselves. But then, that would never happen in America.
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Tajik leader lifts glass ceiling by inviting 5 women into Govt
Russian News and Information
DUSHANBE, July 18 (RIA Novosti) - Tajikistan's president appointed five women to senior government posts Tuesday, moving the post-Soviet Central Asian nation another step away from male dominance in the top ranks of power.
Seven women now hold senior posts in the Tajik government, which the presidential press service said reflected the growing role of women in public administration.
Emomali Rakhmonov appointed Gulmira Khamrokulova deputy finance minister, Mavjuda Keldiyerova as deputy energy minister, and Aikhon Sharipova as deputy minister for water resources. He also offered the post of presidential aide for science and technology to Latofat Nasriddinova and made Bunafsha Odinayeva second in charge of the government's drug control agency.
Addressing the new appointees, Rakhmonov said: "Training young personnel and engaging women in state and public decision-making are among the priorities of the government's personnel policy."
The current share of women in high-ranking positions in Tajikistan is 15%.
The government of neighboring Kyrgyzstan has also made increasing the number of women in the corridors of power a priority.
President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, swept into power on the back of the 2005 "tulip" revolution, signed a decree in March setting a 30% threshold on female representation in the government. He said "conditions should be created for women's empowerment," adding that this was one of "the country's international obligations." Until then, the migration minister was the only woman in the Kyrgyz Cabinet and the ex-Soviet nation's 75-seat parliament had no women MPs at all.
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Men for sale?
By KATHRYN KNIGHT
The Daily Mail
August 11, 2006
Perched on the edge of her sunlounger, the young Jamaican man picks up the woman's hand and lavishes it with kisses. "You is very beautiful, you know that, girl?" he says. The 'girl' giggles as she sips her cocktail. Somewhere in her early 40s, she hardly qualifies for the description. Nor is her beauty strikingly obvious.
Yet the flattery certainly works its magic. As dusk falls, the somewhat mismatched pair can be seen smooching together to a backdrop of pulsating reggae music at a beachfront bar. Yet another example, you may think, of a lonely and vulnerable British divorcee falling for the charms of a silvertongued holiday Romeo.
In fact, on this occasion, it is the woman - 42-year-old Carol, an office administrator from Birmingham - who is in the driving seat. And, as she confides to a girlfriend, there are "plenty more where he came from".
And in case there is any doubt what she is in the Caribbean for, she is more than happy to tell you. She is, she emphasises with a knowing wink: "Just here to have a bit of fun."
She is not the only one. On the seven-mile beachfront which forms the Jamaican resort of Negril, this somewhat unsavoury scene plays out time and again every day. A longfavoured destination for British package tourists drawn to its white sand and turquoise sea, Negril has become the destination of choice for another kind of visitor: the female sex tourist.
Like supercharged Shirley Valentines, these women see casual sex with the locals as just as much a part of their Caribbean holiday as the beach and the sun. And they are prepared to pay for it - one way or another.
Sex tourism, of course, is more usually associated with the men who visit the seedy fleshpots of the Far East. Yet with rising divorce rates and young professionals remaining single for much longer, the number of women travelling abroad for sex has boomed over the past few years.
So much so, in fact, that the phenomenon is increasingly being seen as part of mainstream culture. At the cinema, Vers Le Sud (Heading South) features actress Charlotte Rampling as a 55-year-old sex tourist enjoying the attention of a parade of muscled locals during a holiday in 1980s Haiti.
Even Radio 4's Woman's Hour - a forum of middle-class discussion - this week featured a segment about the rights and wrongs of sex tourism for women, featuring a self-confessed female 'sex traveller'.
In London, a new play, Sugar Mummies, opened this week at the Royal Court theatre, focusing on the antics of four middleaged women who visit Jamaica to sample male prostitutes, or 'rent-a-dreads'.
Among the cast is Lynda Bellingham - previously the wholesome face of family values in the Oxo television commercials - playing Maggie, a divorcee and habitual sex tourist with a rampant libido.
One glance along the soft white sands of Negril beach this week could confirm that there was plenty of material for her to draw upon for the role. Every year, the flights to nearby Montego Bay disgorge thousands of unaccompanied women who make the hour-long onward journey to the beach resort.
Some are single career women, others are divorcees; some are married. Nearly all have one thing in common: the desire for, as one woman put it, in terms as distasteful as they were explicit, 'black bamboo'.
Among them is Carol, who is on her first visit to the island with her 44-year- old friend Helen. Both have children in their late teens and are on holiday to recover from fraught divorces.
Both, too, have wasted no time in 'getting to know' the locals.
Indeed, the pair chose Jamaica because they knew, as Carol told me, that they could easily get 'no strings fun' here.
They have found it in the forms of 26-year-old Byron and 22-yearold Rafael, who approached the women as they soaked up the sun on the first day of their holiday, asking if they wanted to take some island 'excursions'. The excursions progressed into drinks, dinners and, inevitably, sex.
"Neither of us is kidding ourselves about what's going on," Carol says. "But the fact is that in England, men our age aren't remotely interested. They all want 22-year-old blondes.
"Here, the men make us feel like gorgeous, sexy women again. As far as I'm concerned, you can't put a price on that." Helen, a catering manager, giggles in agreement. That night, the pair were preparing for another heady night of rum cocktails and reggae with their lovers.
'Price' is of course a key word. Most women do not like to make it explicit that they are paying for the sexual services of the local boys. Instead, the gigoloclient relationship - for in most circumstances that is what it undeniably is - unfolds in a more subtle manner.
Sex is concealed under a veil of romance and 'fun'. Byron - who, when he is not squiring female tourists of a certain age around the island, sells jet-ski rides on the beach - explains: "We are like their boyfriends while they are here. They pay for everything, sometimes they give us money to help us out, and in return we treat 'em right.
"These women say they wouldn't get looked at twice back home, but we make them feel like queens of the island. That's gotta be worth the green (money)."
Older women are best, Byron says, because they have more money and are willing to spend it. "We tell them we like a cat, not a kitten," he grins. "We is like the Foreign Service. We give good lovin'. Why should we not get the good money?"
In a country where an estimated 16 per cent of the population live below the poverty line, the favours of a Westerner can make all the difference to a local's standard of living. Even in the better class of hotels, the monthly wage is no more than U.S.$200 (around £130) a month.
Little wonder that Negril beach has an estimated 200 or so men on the lookout for 'milk bottles' - as the white tourists are known locally.
Each morning, as the tourists head for their loungers scattered along the breathtaking stretch of white sand, the men set out, cruising up and down, sauntering over to make chit- chat when they spy any unaccompanied women.
A security guard for one of Negril's middle-range hotels confides that he is rarely called upon to shoo the 'rastitutes' away. Most women, he says, don't welcome his intrusion.
"I know now if the women don't send them away immediately, they usually got something going," he says. "They don't want me breaking it up." He points out two ladies camped further down the beach topping up their already deep tans. 'Like them. They here every year, man.'
In fact, 52-year-old Jill and her sister Pippa, 54, both from the Nottingham area, have been coming to the same hotel on Negril beach for the past decade. On their first visit in 1996, they had merely come to unwind in the sun, but both ended up embarking on a holiday romance with men 20 years their junior - despite being married.
They returned to England amid promises of divorce, organising visas and money for their young lovers - only to find that the moment they left for the airport they could never get hold of the men again.
"There were lots of promises made then, but we soon learned our lesson," Jill confides. "Now we come just for some fun. We are very careful and we see it as two weeks out of our lives for a bit of romance. It's not harming anyone."
While Jill, who runs a small hairdressing salon, is now divorced, Pippa remains married, so this is questionable.
By way of defence, Pippa, who works in IT, reveals that her husband of 25 years had an affair in the early 1990s. "What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander," she says. "Anyway, what he doesn't know can't hurt him."
Tellingly, while both Jill and Pippa agree there is an 'economic element' to their liaisons in Jamaica, both were horrified to have it defined as barely-concealed prostitution, preferring instead to see their antics as 'helping' the local economy.
"We have fun - and if it helps the locals out financially, then where's the problem?" Jill says.
It is a depressing and ridiculous self-deception, and no doubt their children, both in their early 20s, would see it another way. (Not that they know - they apparently remain blissfully oblivious to their mothers' antics.)
Certainly, one imagines they would probably find Jill's assertion that she is 'helping race relations' rather risible.
Yet such sentiments were echoed by many of the women I spoke to this week. In some cases, indeed, 'helping race relations' seems to extend to enjoying the attentions of a number of different men during their stay.
At one of the grander hotels at the north end of Negril beach, two British women in their late 30s are giggling over the charms of one of the waiters at the poolside bar.
"He's just so young, though," one says. "The younger the better," says the other. "That way they have more stamina." The two roar with laughter as they engage in some crude banter about the rumoured sexual prowess of the local men.
Later, one of the two, who gives her name as Anne and says she is an accountant, admits that she came away with a girlfriend for a fortnight's holiday with the express desire to bed a local man.
After a few cocktails at the bar, she admits that she has 'fooled around' with three hotel workers during the course of the week, although her latest lover is 'by far the cutest'. Such liaisons are, of course, frowned upon by the hotel, but for many of the young workers it is an unspoken perk of the job.
For the past three nights, Anne has waited until 3am, when her latest lover finishes his shift, for him to visit her in her room.
With astonishing, not to mention unedifying frankness, she happily describes her young lover's physical attributes in explicit detail. "He's a baby really," she laughs. "There's not a flaw on him.
"He's told me he's 25 but I think he's nearer 20. But what the hell. I've never experienced anything like it. He makes me feel like a teenager."
Yet Anne is married and nearing 40, her teenage years long gone. So, too, surely, should be such unsavoury, self-indulgent behaviour-After all, while many of the women here see their holiday as harmless fun, a mutually beneficial transaction, such sexual freedom often comes, inevitably, at a price.
Many of the women find themselves nonetheless falling for their young lover's pillow talk - only to discover they are just one of many of his 'special girls' once the gifts and the money have dried up and they prepare to return home.
As a barman at Alfreds Ocean Palace, a popular reggae bar in the heart of Negril, confides: "We see it time and again, man. It starts out as fun, then the women start talking about staying in touch. They want to think they're the only one.
"But these guys have got a number of different women on the go. Some of them have got three, four different women sending them money from back home."
The previous month, one besotted holidaymaker in her 50s had flown back from Scotland just a month after she left in order to see her 27-year-old lover again - only to find him canoodling with her replacement at the very same bar where they had shared a number of heady nights.
For the local community, meanwhile, the behaviour of the Western tourists can cause resentment and anger. "These women come here and chew up our men," one young waitress tells me. "By the time they've finished romancing them, there's nothing left for us."
Then there's the risk of Aids and other sexual infections. While the women I talked to all claimed to have taken due precautions, the fact remains that the HIV rate in the Caribbean is second only to sub-Saharan Africa.
None of this, of course, is likely to dissuade the likes of Carol, Jill or Anne. Fuelled by the promise of a potent cocktail of sex and sun, they wrap themselves in a shroud of selfdelusion as they book their Caribbean sojourn. After all, this is Jamaica, where the unofficial motto is 'No problem'.
When you stop to contemplate the unedifying reality, however, it is hard to see it that way.
