Women hesitant to enter the workforce should heed Missy Elliot's sage advice: "Girls, girls, get that cash/If it’s 9 to 5 or shakin' ya ass." Indeed, developing your skills and talents—iron smelting, macramé, hog wrestling—may secure you a lucrative and rewarding career. If your talents extend to playing the shamisen, fan-dancing and sleeping with your neck in a wooden cradle, then you might apply for a position as a Japanese geisha. Though it may be difficult for a Westerner to break into that secretive world, it has been done: American anthropologist Liza Dalby donned the obi and kimono in the late ’70s to become the geisha Ichigiku. And... More >>>