Cities That Love Women

Yesterday a friend from Italy sent me an article from his country's Greenhouse Chronicle titled, Minneapolis: The City That Loves Women. The article draws inspiration from on an annual Forbes study that ranks the nation's top fifty cities as regards to how they are for working women. I made an attempt, using Yahoo's Babelfish, to translate the article in order to share it here. The translation is a distinctively difficult when you use translation software, but one can discern the gist of it.

Tasks that, if a Scandinavian decides to emigrate, a place to the caldino chooses. Swedish, Finnish and instead Norwegian, when they caught up l' America in the 1800's, rather than to place itself in Florida under the palms, followed the callback of the tundra. And they salted up here in the Great semiArctic North, because, as I say to woman the commander of the first district of police of Minneapolis, Kris Arneson “for some reason our luterani garnishments work better under zero”.

Hmmm... Luterani garnishments?

Well, I got enough of the story to realize that Minneapolis-St. Paul received the honor of being selected as the best place for women to live and work in 2010, displacing the Big Apple, NYC, which this year stands at a bewildered eighth. Twin Cities business publications were eager to make hay with this distinction. The Twin Cities Business Journal in a story titled, Forbes: Twin Cities best place for working mothers, staff write Tara Bannow reported,

In rounding up the 2010 winners, the magazine factored in the cost of living, crime rates, unemployment rates, school systems and health care, among other items.

One reason Minneapolis beat out New York, which took the number one spot last year, was the list’s new emphasis on women’s earnings.

With only 216 crimes per 100,000 residents per year, Minneapolis’s violent crime rate is lower than any other U.S. city. That means fewer murders, rapes, robberies and assaults.

At 6.4 percent, the city’s unemployment rate is the second lowest in the country.

Way to go, Minnesota.

Just in case you're interested, here's how the top ten shook out:

1 Minneapolis-St. Paul
2 Washington, D.C.
3 Boston
4 Pittsburgh
5 Baltimore-Towson, Md.
6 Denver
7 Hartford
8 New York Metro
9 Seattle-Tacoma
10 Buffalo-Niagara Falls

On the other hand, what if you like getting soil beneath your fingernails and you don't care much for the big city life? For the record, there are still some decent rural areas around... I wonder if Forbes has ever done a piece on rural areas that love women? It sure is pretty out here today.