The Labor Day op-ed I co-authored with Anne-Marie Slaughter was written before I read a stupendous, and sobering, article by Erin Kelly, a sociologist at University of Minnesota, who is one of the foremost work-family researchers in the country. (All data and quotes in this article are from her study.) Kelly’s 2010 study estimated that only about half of [...]
Advice literature for women is a crowded field and a predictable one. Most advice falls into one of two camps. Man up! The most common advice assumes that women’s problem is that they need to act more like men. Men tend to negotiate harder, act more confident, and go after plum assignments that will require them to stretch and swagger. [...]
Marissa Mayer is naïve. Or so say a million mommy blogs, and I just can’t get this issue out of my head. Once the baby is born, say the blogs, she will see that a two-week maternity leave is not realistic. This is a typical gender war: women judging each other is one of the [...]
First, thanks to Anne-Marie Slaughter for peeling the band-aid off an open wound of American womanhood. It’s our dirty little secret: balancing work and family is still impossible for elite American women because of the way we structure work, family, love, marriage, careers, masculinity, and dignity. Yes. It’s that bad. Fifteen years ago, when I [...]
Last Thursday an online tempest erupted when Hilary Rosen went on CNN to explain that she didn’t think Ann Romney was a worthy voice for America’s women because she “has actually never worked a day in her life.” The kerfluffle might seem familiar. Twenty years ago, Hillary Clinton came under fire for a remark she [...]
co-written with Rachel Dempsey In the last post, we talked about the problem of pregnancy discrimination against women in hourly jobs – cases where mothers were refused simple accommodations that would help them have healthy pregnancies. Discrimination against pregnant women and mothers is a huge problem for working-class women, for whom a single missed day [...]
In the 1970s, after it became illegal to discriminate based on race, some employers responded by imposing high school education requirements for blue-collar jobs. Today, employers who want to keep women out of “men’s jobs” do something similar: they wait until workers get pregnant, and then deny them “light duty,” like desk work for a [...]
For years I would wake up at 5:30 in the morning every Black Friday, leaving the kids with my mother-in-law, and get to the mall by 6:15 am. Every year, I would return six or seven hours later, loaded down with presents, and my mother-in-law would say, “There you are! I took care of your [...]
Once a year or so, a study or trend piece comes out about why women are bad to work for. Like Good Morning America’s “Bad Female Boss? She May Have Queen Bee Syndrome.” Or The Daily Mail’s “Men are the best bosses: Women at the top are just too moody (and it’s women themselves who [...]
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0. When the second Google hit (after Wikipedia) for “corporate cronyism” links to a speech by Sarah Palin, you know why progressives need Occupy Wall Street. Occupy Wall Street’s power lies in the “We are the 99%” theme. The poignant and evocative stories on the Tumblr of that name feature hard-working, settled, [...]
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