Obama Reveals What Helps Him Manage The Stress Of His Job

President Barack Obama revealed what he thinks is the most important way to manage the stress of his job in an interview with The Huffington Post last week.

Obama credited morning exercise and his Hawaiian roots for his ability to keep a calm demeanor in such a high-stress environment, but he noted family is what really keeps him grounded.

"I don't get too high, don't get too low," Obama said.

"But I think the most important -- I'm very consistent about spending time with family," he added. "And when you have dinner with your daughters -- particularly teenage daughters -- they'll keep you in your place and they'll teach you something about perspective."

Obama said it's also important to "take the long view" on issues instead of panicking about what's happening day by day.

"Everything's a crisis, everything is terrible, everything is doomsday, everything is -- if it doesn't get solved tomorrow, you know, your presidency is going off the rails. There must have been what, 15, 20 things that over the last seven years folks have said, 'This is it. It's over,'" Obama said. "You know, we had the Gulf oil spill, worst environmental disaster in history. Everybody said, 'Ah, he's handling this terribly.' A year later, nobody was talking about it, and in retrospect, it turns out that we handled that as well as any environmental crisis has been handled."

Watch a clip of Obama's interview with HuffPost above.

Antibiotic Use In Meat Is Soaring

BLT sandwiches may need to add an A to the acronym -- for antibiotics.

Soaring demand for meat across the world has caused a major uptick in the amount of antimicrobial drugs in pork, beef and poultry, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But as bacon sales sizzle and China -- where pork is the favored meat -- becomes wealthier, pig farmers around the world are meeting demand by using about four times as much antibiotics per pound of meat as cattle ranchers. Poultry is a close second.

This charts shows that pigs, for the most part, consume the highest density and amount of antibiotics.

The antibiotics serve two purposes. First, they help fatten up livestock at a faster rate. Second, they keep animals healthy despite being raised in overcrowded, filthy conditions where disease spreads easily.

In 2010, farmers around the world used more than 63,000 tons of antibiotics to raise livestock. By 2030, the researchers expect that number to rise to more than 105,000 tons.

“People are getting richer and want to eat more meat,” Thomas Van Boeckel, an epidemiologist at Princeton University and an author of the study, told The Huffington Post by phone. “Antibiotics help to provide a lot of meat for people who can afford it.”

Consumption of antibiotic-fed meat poses a major threat to humanity. Exposure to human antibiotics through meat has given rise to antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” which some researchers suggest could kill up to 10 million people worldwide by 2050 if left unchecked.

As awareness of this threat grows, some companies have removed antibiotics from their meat supply. Earlier this month, McDonald’s vowed to remove human antibiotics from its chicken supply, though animal antibiotics would continue to be used and the human drugs would remain in beef and pork products. Chicken chain Chick-fil-A removed all antibiotics from its chicken last year.

But Chipotle remains the food industry’s poster child for antibiotic-free meat. The burrito chain showed its commitment earlier this year when it suffered a pork shortage after discovering issues with its supplier.

Still, the industry seems unlikely to change unless more consumers demand antibiotic-free meat. Legislation has done little to stymie the growth of the use of antibiotics in the United States. In China, no such legislation exists.

“If things change at all, it’ll be because customers demand better products, like organic bacon,” Van Boeckel said. “But, of course, not everyone can afford that.”

Why It's A Big Deal That Google's Chairman Was Called Out For Interrupting A Woman

A powerful male executive reportedly interrupted a powerful female official while she was speaking at a panel discussion at South by Southwest, the tech and culture love-fest currently happening in Austin, Texas.

That’s not unusual. Women often get interrupted while speaking on panels and in meetings, and studies show that women are interrupted at higher rates than men.

What’s remarkable in this case is that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt actually got called out for doing it -- by an employee of Google, no less.

Schmidt had reportedly been interrupting and talking over Megan Smith, the United States' chief technology officer and a former Google executive. Along with writer Walter Isaacson, Schmidt and Smith were speaking at a panel on innovation, and their conversation actually touched on diversity issues in tech, according to reports.

During a Q&A session after the panel, audience member Judith Williams, Google’s diversity manager, asked Smith how she felt about getting interrupted. Did she feel there was some kind of unconscious gender bias at play?

In her answer, Smith didn't directly address what happened, but she did discuss the issue more generally, explaining how she sometimes goes unheard at meetings, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Schmidt didn't say anything. Neither Williams nor any of the panel participants responded to The Huffington Post's requests for additional comment.

Others, however, had a stronger response. “The crowd cheered at [Williams’] comment,” according to PopSugar, which was one of the first to report on the exchange.

Thank you to whoever respectfully asked the cut off question! Glad other people have noticed @USCTO #askwalter #SXSW2015

— Haley van Dyck (@haleyvandyck) March 16, 2015

“@haleyvandyck: @egmorant @judithmwilliams amazing. Well thank you Judith!” You're welcome!

— Judith Williams (@judithmwilliams) March 16, 2015

Williams leads Google’s unconscious bias training (yes, that’s a thing). More than 26,000 Google employees have gone through the training, she wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year. The training, Williams argued, "has created a culture where employees are comfortable with -- and held accountable for -- calling out prejudice, both blatant and subtle."

Clearly, Williams herself is pretty comfortable calling out problems. Still, who knows what all those Google employees do with that training -- the company's numbers on gender diversity aren't so great. Seventy-nine percent of Google's leaders are men, according to the company's most recent diversity report.

“Google has a very open conversation on unconscious bias,” said Joelle Emerson, co-founder of Paradigm, a strategy firm that helps companies -- such as Pinterest -- increase diversity and inclusiveness.

Emerson told HuffPost that Schmidt's interruption of Smith on the panel wasn't unusual. She often hears complaints from women in tech about getting interrupted. “It’s a big problem in meetings,” she said. “It’s hard for me to get through a meeting without getting interrupted.”

"What was an aberration is that someone spoke about it,” Emerson said, noting that Schmidt likely didn’t realize what he was doing. In studies she's looked at, researchers sat in on meetings and measured the amount of time people spoke and how often they were interrupted. Most people had no idea they were hogging the floor and not letting their colleagues finish their sentences, she said.

Emerson works with companies to improve dynamics in situations where gender roles come into play -- not just in meetings, but in hiring and performance reviews as well. She said that one solution to the problem is to have a strong meeting leader or panel moderator who can rein in the interrupters and ask the quiet participants to speak up.

“Diversity trainings aren’t effective,” Emerson said. “You have to change processes.”

What happened at SXSW is a start. “Call it out when you see it happening. That’s a good first step," she said.

Women are more likely to get cut off mid-sentence, according to several studies. Most recently, researchers at George Washington University found that women were “the more interrupted gender” -- getting interrupted even by women. When men were talking with women, they interrupted 33 percent more often than when they were talking with men, the study found. Women were even more careless about cutting off women -- they interrupted 150 percent more.

“It’s not so much who’s doing the talking,” said Dr. Adrienne Hancock, who led the research, “just that they’re talking to a woman.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Emerson had conducted research on meeting participation. She did not. Emerson has studied that research.

Proof That Working From Home Is Here To Stay: Even Yahoo Still Does It

When newly hired CEO Marissa Mayer kicked off her turnaround at Yahoo, she banned employees from working from home.

When Andy Mattes kicked off his turnaround at Diebold, the first thing the new CEO did was look for employees who wanted to work remotely.

Before Mattes arrived in 2013, Diebold’s ability to recruit had been limited by its policy of only hiring folks who would live near its headquarters in Canton, Ohio. Mattes saw this was a problem.

“We wanted the brightest people on the planet,” Mattes told The Huffington Post. “We were fishing in a small fishing pond.”

With the promise of telecommuting, Diebold, which makes ATMs, was able to lure workers away from places like Oracle, HP and Intel, Mattes said. “We got talent from a ‘who’s who’ of the tech industry,” he said. Of the 75 top leaders at Diebold, about half are based outside of Canton, in places like Silicon Valley, Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta.

Diebold CEO Andy Mattes

When Yahoo called remote workers back to the office in 2013 in order to improve worker collaboration and communication, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the future of the workplace. Was it in the office? At home?

Now, two years later, it’s clear: Telecommuting has won. Even Yahoo seems to have softened its stance. Workers inside the company told HuffPost that some employees still do occasionally work from home, depending on their job, and some do not have a desk in the office. Yahoo declined to comment for this article.

This appears to be a step away from the company's original prohibition. In a leaked memo from 2013, Yahoo's HR head even seemed to caution workers away from telework while waiting for the cable guy. “Please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” the memo said.

But many companies seem to have figured out how to collaborate remotely, and are embracing working outside the office as a way to lure top talent, boost productivity and offer a work-life benefit to employees who are increasingly stretched thin in their jobs -- and in life.

For all its benefits, working from home -- or WFH, as it’s known in modern shorthand -- is creating new challenges for workers and managers. While studies have shown that remote workers are more productive, often that’s because they’re working more hours than their in-office counterparts. Socializing and communicating remotely take a deft touch.

Workers and managers need to figure it all out soon: The virtual work world is growing rapidly. The number of people working remotely grew by about 6 percent per year between 2000 and 2010, according to Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford who has a study of WFH and productivity due out this month in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Pure WFH is still a relatively small share of the workforce -- 2.4 percent in 2010, according to Bloom’s research. Yet the proportion of employees who work at home at least sometimes is astonishingly large: Sixty-seven percent of employers were allowed occasional remote work in 2014, according to a study released that year by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute. That’s up from 50 percent in 2008, the study found.

In the U.S., remote work is more common for workers at the lowest and highest ends of the pay scale, according to Bloom's research.

Along with researchers at Stanford and Peking University, Bloom studied a group of 500 workers at Ctrip, a publicly listed Chinese travel agency. Half were assigned to WFH and the rest to work in the office.

The results were striking. Ctrip workers who telecommuted were much more productive than their in-office counterparts -- in part because remote workers put in more hours and took less time off, with fewer breaks and sick days. “Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them,” Bloom told The Harvard Business Review.

The “quit rates” of remote workers were also much lower -- half the rate of the group that worked in an office. Bloom also said that the company saved $1,900 per remote worker -- money not spent on space and furniture.

Diebold, for its part, views its remote worker initiative as a success because it was able to up its game around hiring. "Many who we have hired outside of Canton would not have joined the company had we required relocation," said Sheila Rutt, Diebold's chief human resource officer. "The proof will ultimately be in our results. It's a virtual world with a 24/7 global workday -- work is what we do, not where we are."

Still, the company has a ways to go -- Mattes came on board around the same time that several company executives left the firm in a bribery scandal. Sales were up a little in 2014, to $3.1 billion from $2.8 billion the prior year, but the company's stock hasn't really budged since Mattes arrived. It's still too early to call this a slam-dunk turnaround.

Bloom told HuffPost that remote work helps the environment because workers travel less. It is an economic boost as well, he said, because it helps parents and older workers who might want to cut back on commute times and be closer to family.

While the flexibility to work from home has clear and obvious benefits for workers, workers lose if this flexibility is ineffectively managed, said Kenneth Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute.

“Working from home removes certain time pressures, but creates ambiguity around start and stop time,” he said. There needs to be a clear conversation between workers and managers about when the day begins and ends.

That’s not often happening, according to many experts and remote workers HuffPost spoke with. For higher-level executives, clear stop times might not be particularly realistic.

“It’s hard to shut it off,” said Diebold Vice President Rachel McClary, who works out of her home in Boston. “I’m constantly on. I might be cooking dinner at 7 p.m., and I’m checking an email.”

McClary has spent most of her career as a remote worker, and most of it managing teams. She has a tested system in place to ensure clear communication with employees. For example, she tells her team upfront that she won’t be sending them “thank you” emails because they’re a waste of time to send and a distraction to receive. She also tells them not to leave her voicemails and that if an email thread gets longer than three responses, pick up the phone.

McClary said she spends a lot of time on the phone talking to her workers -- something of a lost art in 2015. “There could be two people who sit in the same office space sending emails to each other,” she said.

Might as well stay at home, then.

Starbucks Wants Employees To Start Conversations About Race With Customers

An internal meeting with Starbucks employees held three months ago stirred a powerful discussion on race in America. It has since prompted the company’s CEO Howard Schultz to officially extended the invitation to join the conversation to customers across the country.

On Monday, the coffee giant launched a new campaign called “Race Together,” which aims to tackle the polarizing topic through a series of steps built to stimulate action and encourage customers to engage in conversations on race with Starbucks baristas.

“[‘Race Together’] is an opportunity to re-examine how we can create a more empathetic and inclusive society -- one conversation at a time,” Schultz said in a statement on the company’s website.

Starbucks has sparked and sustained a growing discussion on race among its employees after Schultz held an internal meeting at the company’s headquarters in Seattle, following the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

More than 400 employees attended the impromptu meeting in December 2014 and were given an open forum to candidly discuss race among their colleagues and share ideas and solutions on how to address the topic through a collective, company-wide mission.

“This was not about demanding change, but demonstrating a willingness to embrace change and begin to bridge the divide to empathy,” Linda Mills, a Starbucks spokeswoman, told The Huffington Post in an email.

“As these events came to an end, we realized that this is the beginning of a conversation and one we intend to continue as a company into the future.”

As part of the campaign, baristas are encouraged to engage in conversations on race with customers and distribute branded cups with the words “Race Together” handwritten on them.

"If a customer asks you what this is, try to engage in a discussion that we have problems in this country in regards to race and racial inequality,” Schultz said in a video shared by the company this week.

The company has also partnered with USA Today to release a special newspaper supplement on March 20th, which will include “conversation starters” that also urge customers to carry the discussion online using the hashtag #RaceTogether.

According to newspaper, readers will also be asked to fill in a blank in one question: “In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ___ times.”

Schultz -- who has involved the company in several previous political discussions including a petition urging the end of the federal government shutdown as well as a pledge to hire more veterans, has been vocal on national debates but perhaps none as sensitive as the topic of race.

"The enduring success of Starbucks has been made possible because we as an organization, collectively and individually, have taken our company personal -- who might be different from you but doesn't have the same chance, the same opportunity and for that manner, may feel a sense of helplessness because of the unconscious bias people have towards that person," Schultz said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the location of Seattle.

'Managers Told Me To Put Mustard On It': Fast-Food Workers Say Burns Are Rampant, File OSHA Complaints

More than two dozen low-wage McDonald's workers filed health and safety complaints against the fast-food chain on Monday, alleging that understaffing and time pressures in stores have led to burns, falls and other injuries, according to the worker group representing them.

The 28 complaints, involving stores in 18 cities, were filed with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the relevant state agencies tasked with ensuring safe workplaces. The workers submitted them with the support of Fight for $15, the union-backed labor coalition that's been agitating for a $15 minimum wage and union recognition in the industry. OSHA confirmed to The Huffington Post that it received the federal complaints Monday.

One Chicago worker, Brittney Berry, alleged that she was so harried one day she slipped and caught her arm on the grill, leading her to be hospitalized and suffer nerve damage. She said she was advised by managers to treat the burn with a condiment.

"My managers kept pushing me to work faster," Berry, who was arrested last year in an act of civil disobedience against McDonald's, said in a statement. "The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. This is exactly why workers at McDonald’s need union rights."

The vast majority of McDonald's stores are operated by franchisees rather than the fast-food company, but in a Monday statement, Fight for $15 argued that the responsibility to keep workers safe ultimately falls on McDonald's.

"McDonald’s sets minimal health and safety standards for all franchisees, but even these modest measures are not properly enforced," the group said. "The company watches like a hawk nearly every aspect of its franchisees’ business operations via regular inspections, but it too often ignores health and safety problems."

"McDonald’s and its independent franchisees are committed to providing safe working conditions for employees in the 14,000 McDonald’s Brand U.S. restaurants," McDonald's spokeswoman Heidi Barker Sa Shekhe said in a statement. "We will review these allegations. It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage."

The safety complaints are indeed part of a broader shaming campaign that's brought unprecedented scrutiny to the working conditions in fast food. For more than two years, Fight for $15, which is funded by the Service Employees International Union, has organized a highly successful series of strikes by workers at McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell and other restaurants in cities across the country. Much of that attention has been focused on McDonald's.

Workers and their allies are now fighting the company on multiple legal fronts. They've brought wage theft lawsuits against franchisees and named McDonald's itself as a defendant. They've filed reams of unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, succeeding in having the fast-food company named as a joint employer alongside its franchisees. And in January they filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging discrimination against African-American workers in McDonald's stores.

Coinciding with the filing of OSHA complaints, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a federation of worker safety groups, commissioned a poll of fast-food workers by Hart Research Associates, a firm that often polls for labor and progressive groups. Hart's Guy Molyneux confirmed to HuffPost that the poll was done online, via Facebook, in a manner in which some respondents were eligible to win gift cards -- a method the firm has been criticized for using in the past. Molyneux defended the method Monday.

"I have not seen any plausible or persuasive reason to think that compromises people's response in any way," he said.

According to Hart's survey of 1,426 adults in the industry, 87 percent reported having at least one injury in the past year, and 79 percent said they had been burned at some point during that time. Two-thirds said they had been cut, and one-third said they had hurt themselves while lifting or carrying items in their store. Twenty-three percent said they fell on a wet or oily floor.

Hart said its most shocking finding related to how burns are handled.

"Incredibly, one-third (33%) of all burn victims say that their manager suggested wholly inappropriate treatments for burns, including condiments such as mustard, mayonnaise, butter, or ketchup, instead of burn cream," the firm wrote.

Correction: The original post incorrectly stated that the poll was commissioned by Fight for $15; in fact, it was commissioned by NCOSH. This post has also been updated to explain Hart's polling method.

Here's How Long It'll Take To Close The Gender Wage Gap In Each State

The gender pay gap is alive and well everywhere in America, but it's more alive in some states than in others.

It will take 144 years before Wyoming women working full time and year-round make the same as their male counterparts on average, according to an analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focused on women’s economic issues. By contrast, women living in Florida should see the gender pay gap close there in 23 years.

This chart from IWPR shows when the gender pay gap is projected to close in each state:

The researchers’ projections are based on each state’s rate of progress at closing the gap since 1959. American women overall shouldn’t expect to see pay equity until 2058 if progress continues at its current rate, according to the analysis. Progress on closing the pay gap actually stalled in recent years because the earnings of both women and men have stagnated.

Right now, American women working full time and year-round make just 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make on average, but that gap varies by state. In Florida, women make 85 percent of what men make on average. In Wyoming, women make just 67.9 percent of their male colleagues’ earnings, the IWPR analysis found.

New York has the nation's narrowest gender wage gap, with women earning 87.6 percent of what men make. Louisiana's women see the widest gap, earning just 66.7 percent of their male counterparts.

There are a variety of reasons why the gap persists. For one, the jobs that are more likely to be female-dominated -- think education, social work and child care -- also tend to pay less. It’s possible that’s precisely because these jobs are female-dominated. As Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, wrote in an August 2012 Slate piece, "Is it that women are choosing lower-paying professions or that our country values women's professions less?"

Women’s careers are also more likely to be interrupted when they have kids, which can derail their job trajectory and earnings growth.

But even when you control for things like education, career and number of hours worked, women still earn about 5 percent less than their male colleagues, according to a 2011 analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That’s likely due in part to subtle forms of bias. When women act assertive or decisive, qualities that are often necessary to succeed in the workplace, they’re judged more harshly than their male colleagues, research shows.