This city attracts the most workers, why Wall St.’s powerful women skip NY, and more top insights

During the week, the Daily Rundown brings you the day’s trending professional news. On the weekend, we try to keep you current on the big ideas that can help you see what’s coming. Read on and join the conversation.

Why Wall Street’s powerful women avoid New York. The mutual funds with the largest share of women fund managers are in California, not New York. San Francisco-based Dodge & Cox and Charles Schwab took the two top spots in a recent analysis by Morningstar. What’s keeping women from rising in the East? It’s likely a combination of entrenched bias and a lack of programs geared to helping women advance, suggests Bloomberg. Morningstar has found that bond funds managed by women have outperformed those run by men since 2003. • Here’s what people are saying.

Looking for work? Consider Austin. Texas’ capital is attracting more workers than any other metropolis in the U.S., largely thanks to its thriving tech scene, according to LinkedIn’s August Workforce Report. Hiring in Austin is up by 14.3% from last year, and for every 10,000 LinkedIn members in the city today, 105 arrived in the past 12 months. Even with the influx of new arrivals, they’re still hiring. Austin has a “severe” shortage in job skills such as oral communication and digital literacy. • Here’s what people are saying.

Corn that can fertilize itself: Researchers at UC Davis have discovered that a variety of Mexican corn can pull nitrogen directly from the air, removing the need for fertilizer, The Atlantic reports. The corn’s secret weapon? Its external roots, which contain bacteria that can convert airborne nitrogen into plant fertilizer. If scientists can breed this capability into conventional corn, it could vastly reduce the need for agricultural sprays and manure, an environmental game changer. • Here’s what people are saying.

Global wealth: We’ve got good news, and bad news.

• All over the world, poverty is on the decline, with those living on less than $5.50 a day going from two thirds to less than half the world population, Axios reports.
• At the same time, income inequality is up and social mobility is down. Since 1980, the world’s wealthiest 1% achieved twice the economic growth as the bottom 50%, according to the World Inequality Lab.
• What might help? Giving employees a stake in the companies they work for, Oliver Wyman’s Peter Walsh argues. In addition to offering an additional source of wealth for workers, firms with employee ownership arrangements are more stable during downturns and more productive. • Here’s what people are saying.

These tiny spider bots could change everything. Scientists at Harvard and Boston University have developed a soft, millimeter-size robot that’s flexible and versatile enough to one day conduct surgery inside your body. Previous bots have only been able to perform a single movement, but this spidery creation has 18 degrees of freedom, vastly expanding the tasks it can perform. Such bots could one day administer drugs and perform biopsies from inside the body, or discover and treat victims during search and rescue operations. • Here’s what people are saying.

One last idea:  Our economy is increasingly powered by products we can’t touch. But, as Bill Gates notes in a review of “Capitalism Without Capital,” the methods we use to measure economic progress were built to track a world of physical goods. Gates argues it’s time to reimagine our policies and tools to take full account of all the work we’re doing.

“The idea today that anyone would need to be pitched on why software is a legitimate investment is laughable, but a lot has changed since 1986. It’s time the way we think about the economy does, too.”

Want to get ahead at work? Looking for advice from the pros? Share your burning career questions in the comments with #YouAsked and we’ll get experts to weigh in.

— Scott Olster