10 Bold Ideas to Consider: OZY’s 100

We know that women are paid less than men for the same work, but have you thought about the extra costs of simply being a woman? Take workplace attire and a beauty regimen, throw in the $18,000 a woman spends on her periods over the course of her lifetime and, yeah, the scales are imbalanced. So it’s high time employers are mandated to pay women more than men. Or, failing that, for the federal government to institute a 25% working-while-female tax credit.

Henry Ford was seen as ahead of his time when he closed his factories two days a week. But why shouldn’t we do him one better? A three-day weekend represents a much-needed reprieve, reminding everyone that the goal is to have more time to kick back, not for an extra moment on Slack, not for being the Uber driver who gets there first. Write that novel, go to your kid’s play, take a nap.

If you’ve ever suffered a broken heart, you know that desperate desire to end the mental anguish, no matter the cost. A broken heart is temporary, but suffering a mental illness is often chronic, and it'd be great to be able to pinpoint and modify the afflicted part of the brain. It’s not possible yet, but, as some neurotechnology experts reveal in an intriguing episode of the Future of X: Health, one day we could have a neural implant inside our brains that can anticipate, and eliminate, our depression symptoms before they set in.

How much human suffering would be eliminated if we could avoid unwanted pregnancies? Turns out, it could be as simple as giving all young males an antibody that would make their sperm unable to swim. If they want offspring, these men would simply pop a pill that blocks the antibody for the duration of time they want their sperm to spring into action. It could be a simple and elegant solution.

You may know iconic actor Sean Penn for his Oscar-winning roles in movies like Mystic River and Milk, but do you know how he’s revolutionizing the world of public service? The change-making actor discusses his organization’s involvement in Haiti relief, COVID-vaccine distribution and more, including why he thinks we need a moratorium on technology.

It’s well past time to overhaul the job interview, which — let’s face it — is pretty flawed, what with unconscious bias, short face times that yield no real sense of the person, and questions that either lend themselves to canned answers or are head-scratchingly random: What kind of tree would you be? We propose an alternative: Ditch the mechanical, robotic interviewing in favor of … improvisation.

It’s easier to tolerate long work hours during the dark of winter, but when kids are out of school and the sun is shining, the whole darn system feels terribly cruel. So here’s one solution: The official workweek for the month of August should be zero hours. If employers want their employees to stick around during inconvenient periods, they should pay overtime.

Which of the above ten ideas do you like best? Could it work?