It sounds like something out of a mind-control horror movie: France Télécom, the European telecommunications giant, has now seen 25 of their employees commit suicide in the past 18 months. The most recent incident occurred yesterday when a 48-year-old engineer with a wife and family hanged himself in his home. These suicides aren’t coincidental. Victims have left notes indicating that the reasons they took their lives had to do with highly stressful work conditions and company policies. France Télécom, which employs upwards of 100,000 people, began significantly cutting down its workforce and implementing new structures last year, which brought fear, new stress and oppressive management to the workplace. A new evaluation system also put employees on a scale of personal achievement, putting added pressure on the individual. Wrote one woman in a suicide email to her father: “I can’t accept the new reorganization in my department. I’m getting a new boss and I’d rather die. I’m leaving my handbag with my mobiles and keys in the office, but I’ll take my donor card with me, you never know.”

Dating in the workplace can be tricky ...

I was intrigued by the amount of interest and opinions voiced in last week’s posts about height, which led me to think that there was more on this topic than is usually discussed. When I think about height, it is usually in terms of style. As the fashion industry tends to favor the long of limb, I am not always thrilled by my lack of inches. What I found particularly interesting was that most of you who said you were short did so with pride and without fashion phobias. Clearly I was not on the same page as everyone else, so I began talking to women in all ranges of the height spectrum to see how they felt about their height and why. The results were staggering: women viewed height in the context of power and politics.

“No means no” is a phrase feminists have successfully integrated into the lexicon to use in halting unwanted sexual advances. And now some feminists are arguing the next terrain for “no means no” should be for cutting back on above-the-call-of-duty hours spent in the workplace.

So says the new book “Womenomics: Write Your Own Rules For Success,” by Claire Shipman, senior national correspondent for ABC News’ “Good Morning America” and mom of two, and Katty Kay, Washington correspondent and anchor for “BBC World News America” and mom of four. Their argument, as described by Salon:

[The authors] call for women to say no to 60-plus-hour work weeks and overly demanding jobs that yank them away from their families. Instead, they urge working women to use their clout in the workplace to demand fewer hours at the office, turn down non-family-friendly assignments, and take control of their time by working from home more, checking e-mail less and avoiding meetings whenever possible.

Breaking up is hard to do especially when you have to go to work the next day. After spending an entire evening arguing with your, now ex-boyfriend, the last thing you want to do is deal with the idiots in accounting or the crazy client who can’t make up her mind. Unfortunately, business doesn’t cease because of your broken heart. Here, readers tell us how they survived a breakup—and the ensuing workweek—and lived to love again.

A survey by the Workplace Bullying Institute found that most bullies are men—but 40 percent are women. While male bullies attack men and women, female bullies tend to go after their own kind, targeting other women more than 70 percent of the time.

My guess is that some women who want to feel powerful feel the need to dominate others, and lording over other women can be easier than commanding men. With the economy the way it is, people are trying to get ahead, and some are taking not-so-nice measures to get there. In case you’re not sure whether someone is bullying you, tactics can include being glared at in a hostile manner, being given the silent treatment, and having others fail to deny false rumors about you. Sounds like pretty catty behavior, doesn’t it?

Today The Frisky staff got to talking about male and female bosses and what happens when women hold management positions compared to when men do. The discussion started because career writer Penelope Trunk asked the question, “When women get power at work, do they use it like men do?” but she didn’t answer it.

Canon and some 1,300 other companies in Japan are forcing their employees to leave work early twice a week in an attempt to encourage them to go home and make babies. The country has one of the world’s lowest birth rates in the world, well below what is needed to maintain its population. Some think 12-hour workdays are to blame, which is why companies are forcing workers out of the office twice a week by turning off the lights and heat. Unfortunately for employees, it also means they’re making less money in overtime hours and therefore have smaller incomes to pay for said babies.

Anyone who’s watched a few episodes of “What Not To Wear” knows our attire affects the way we feel about ourselves, as well as how others view us. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that a recent survey by The Ragtrader found that what we wear to work can really affect our success rate. “This relates to both accomplishing more during 9-5 and even climbing the career ladder quicker too,” a survey author said. The survey polled 3,000 workers and found that 78 percent of women believe the way they dress affects their day at work and more than half believe dressing up affects their performance and success at work. How do these women dress for success?

If 2008 has been any indication, expect quite a few of us to start working from home in 2009. From an increase in telecommuting jobs to taking on blogging gigs and freelance work to make ends meet, more and more of us will be earning our keep from the comfort of our own homes. It’s a great setup if you can get it, but it holds the danger of being a little lonely; for some, the prospect of spending their lives working in pajamas with dust bunnies their sole source of company threatens their sanity. After the jump, 18 tips to keep sane and help you maintain a healthy work/life balance when clocking in from home.

This week, the female blogosphere is abuzz with chatter over a story by a college senior in Philadelphia entitled “My Sugar Daddy.” According to “Melissa Beech,” the pseudonymous author, she’s your average, upper-middle class girl: “I was blessed to have been raised with class, sent to the best schools, and taught to be well read, well spoken and well traveled.” During college, she worked in retail and as a waitress, but she spent more than she earned and the economy was tanking. When she set out to find a “real” job, she encountered a man who made her a different kind of offer: a “Mutually Beneficial Arrangement.” In a nutshell, he forks over around $5,000 a month, they travel together, he takes her to fancy hotels, and they have sex. He was already looking for such a relationship as a member of SeekingArrangement.com. Beech believes what she’s doing isn’t prostitution: “women have used their wiles and charms to get ahead for years.” So what do you think? Is she a smart girl working a recession to her advantage—or a call girl in denial?

Growing up, my mom and dad shared the responsibility of bringing home the bacon…well, the proverbial bacon—we’re Jewish. Anyway, my mom was a realtor and good at her job, but I’ll never forget her main competitor. His wife didn’t work and he was a jerk, the kind of guy who used too much hair grease and put his cheesy head shot up at bus stops. While my mother kept me in enriching after school programs, this other slick Realtor dude would scam his clients for sympathy by dragging his son around to meetings. One particular prospective female client even told my mother she was going to go with this guy because he was really his family’s breadwinner. Puke—that’s some serious girl-on-girl crime! I was always proud of my mama for Mary Tyler Moore-ing it up in the face of sexist foolishness, but apparently this chauvinist realtor isn’t the only man who has cashed in on close-mindedness.

There was a period in my early twenties, not too long after college graduation, and even sooner after the painful break-up of my first real relationship, that I hopscotched through a series of dead-end jobs (seven in four months!), dated recklessly, and pumped my body with substances I wouldn’t clean a carburetor with these days. Then, one day, perusing the self-help aisle in Borders, I came across a book on the “quarterlife crisis.” I picked it up, found a comfy chair in the back of the store, and skimmed enough pages to understand there was a name for what I was going through, a phase, and it was just a matter of time before I’d move past it.

It used to be that people followed in their parents’ footsteps, career-wise. If your dad was an ophthalmologist, you became an ophthalmologist, and so on, but things are changing. In part, this is because the apprenticeship system has changed, but mostly younger generations are choosing their own profession because the “do what you love” mentality has been adopted by the last few decades. “The whole idea that work should be fun is something that was invented by the baby boomer generation,” said Jenny Ungless, a career coach at Monster.com. But parents sometimes don’t even want their kids to follow in their footsteps. One-third of male lawyers in a survey by a U.K. recruiting firm said they didn’t want their kids to have the same job as them. And some jobs—like mine—didn’t even exist until a few years ago. [BBC]

Ah, the age-old debate: Why don’t women make as much as men? One social researcher at the University of Melbourne says men earn 15 percent more than women because they put in more time at work. “All high achievers in all walks of life ... put in long hours into their activity,” Mark Wooden said. “It’s (the pay equity gap) got a lot to do with the fact that women are not prepared to work longer hours.” Mark goes on to say that even if workplaces were family friendly, women wouldn’t pursue long-hour jobs. Having had at a job where I regularly worked until 10 p.m. and sometimes even 1 a.m. alongside other women I find this ludicrous. Maybe I’m a man. [Sydney Morning Herald]

The 670,000 women in the British service industry won’t let you call them sweetheart—or baby, or darling, or sweet cheeks, or even honey. Just like the women in 9 to 5 sans the ball-gagged boss, Women and Equalities Minister Harriet Harman is putting an end to womanizing in overlooked workplaces. Minister Harman has used her new position to create a statute that will require bar, restaurant, hotel, and even gym managers to be responsible for protecting their female employees from sexual harassment. Since service industry jobs are known for their client lip service, the change is expected to cost British companies 10 million pounds to enforce, according to the government office. So while sexist comments might make the employees feel cheap, the repercussions certainly aren’t.

Sure, from square watermelons to batteries that run on pee, Japanese culture can seem a little backwards to us Americans. On Valentine’s Day, traditionally, Japanese women give the men they’ve had their eye on chocolates. Then a month later, on White Day, the men have the same opportunity to gift give. While the holiday pairing sounds middle school-style romantic, it doubles the amount of days singles want to die. But luckily, Tokyo-based cosmetics marketers Hime & Company understand that flying solo is hard to do. In addition to sick days and vacation, the sensitive CEO, Miki Hiradate, offers his employees paid leave after bad break ups: up to the age of 24, you get one day a year, 25-30 years of age get two days, 30 and up’s get three days, plus two extra mornings off for everyone to shop away their sorrows! It’s like the man knows we want to curl up and cry while surfing the internet for cute shoes.