Technically, the only issue to be determined by the Supreme Court is whether a class of plaintiffs can be this big. That’s some good, wonky procedural stuff for recovering lawyers like me! But as SCOTUS watchers know, that fact that a relatively narrow question is before them hasn’t always stopped the the highest court in the land from crafting decisions that go beyond the stated issue, so the question of gender discrimination is likely to have an impact on the final outcome.

And that’s where the personal experiences of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan come in — three women who, undoubtedly, have experienced gender discrimination in their professional lives and can use that lens through which to persuade the testosterone side of the bench to see things differently.

Justice Ginsburg, as the only woman on the bench in 2006, wasn’t able to persuade her male colleagues that Lilly Ledbetter was owed $365,000 in back pay and benefits that were denied her by her longtime employer, Goodyear. But in a later case, Ginsburg was successful in convincing her eight male colleagues that there is a serious difference between being a teen boy dealing with school locker room antics and a teen girl who’s been asked to strip for a drug search in her principal’s office in Safford Unified School District vs. Savana Redding. Following the oral arguments in the case about whether Redding’s constitutional rights had been violated, Ginsburg lamented:

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl . . . It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

When it comes to the still-pending Wal-Mart case, it’s probably safe to say that the men on the Supreme Court can’t quite understand the subtle realities of gender discrimination in the workplace because they’ve never been a target, though I’d be interested in hearing what their wives and daughters have to say about their experiences. But Ginsburg has been very open about her experiences having to hide her pregnancies for fear losing her job. While Justices Sotomayor and Kagan have been more circumspect about how the legacy of gender discrimination may have impacted their careers, there’s no question that having three women on the Supreme Court for the first time ever will play a significant role in the behind-the-scenes judicial discussions that take place on the Wal-mart case, just as having an outraged Ginsburg did for Savana Redding.

Reports of the oral arguments indicate that even the women justices have concerns about how to manage this case as a class action. But the menfolk asked questions suggesting that maybe the merits of the case should just be viewed through the lens of a few “bad apples.” After all, one justice said, even if Wal-mart has policies against gender discrimination in place, that doesn’t mean a handful of supervisors won’t discriminate from time to time.

Except that was the argument that the world of symphony orchestras made when women musicians contended they were being discriminated against in favor of men. Those doing the hiring said, “NONSENSE! We’re merely applying the same criteria to everyone and you ladies are falling short.” Then, women were successful in advocating for “blind” auditions – those hiring musicians would not be able to see the performer while they played and would only be able to assess the applicant on the music they heard. And you know what happened? Increasing numbers of women were hired and those making the decisions were shocked that they were, whether on purpose or not, favoring the men applicants. Their purportedly objective standards were tainted by subjective attitudes.

We all know how that goes in the real world.

Since we know that the uber-conservatives on the court have taken liberties in the recent past about broadening the legal questions to be addressed, it would come as no surprise if any opinion issued also tries to slap down existing law on gender discrimination suits. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the three women justices can at least keep any decisions focused on the procedural question about whether a class of plaintiffs can be this big — whether they can, in fact, share the common injuries and similar situations that are required to meet the test. Because then we can move on to the real issue — how to explain away the facts that women, as a general matter, get paid less and promoted less than the men of Wal-mart.

Joanne Bamberger is an authority on the political involvement of women and mothers, and writes the political blog, PunditMom.  She is the author of the forthcoming book, Mothers of Intention: How Women and Social Media are Revolutionizing Politics in America.

In my suburban neighborhood, even with cutbacks and belt-tightening, we’ve got good schools, libraries and lots of resources for our children. In many inner city neighborhoods in America, that’s not the case, and it’s often the fault of adults who have other agendas.

I was shocked when my political gal pal Veronica Arreola, aka Viva la Feminista, told me the story of a handful of moms in Chicago who have been waging a sit-in to prevent the demolition of a field house next to their children’s school, Whittier Dual Language Elementary School.  It’s a not-so-fancy building that families have been using in connection with their kids’ school programs, but which the City of Chicago has decided is going to be torn down in order to build a sports field that supposedly will be leased to a local private school, instead of being renovated to be used as a library for the children in that neighborhood — a library they desperately need and that parents have been begging and fighting for for over seven years.

These are some serious Mothers of Intention. And it made me wonder — would I have the fortitude to do this, knowing the odds were seriously against me, in order to give my child a better shot at a good education and access to books that many other kids have at their fingertips? I’d like to think so, but these parents are facing the wrath of Chicago politics — not always a pretty prospect.

Parents, mostly moms, have been staked out at the field house since the middle of September so the demolition can’t proceed. When the Chicago Public School system got tired of the sit-in, they ordered that the heat and electricity to the building be turned off (it gets cold on Chicago evenings even before the official start of fall), apparently in an attempt to get the parent protesters to go home and allow the building to be torn down. The Chicago City Council ordered last week that services be restored to the building.

These are families who’ve been fighting to get their children a library for years. And they’re not waiting for “Superman.” They’ve decided to be superheroes on their own. I don’t know exactly what we can do to help them other than get the word out. I don’t live in Chicago and I’ve never met anyone involved in Chicago politics.

But there are a few high profile people in Washington, D.C. who I hear used to have some connections there. I wonder what it would take for one of them to step in — Barack? Michelle? Valerie?

Rahm, you want to be that city’s next mayor. I’m betting you could get all kinds of votes if you took up this cause, which shouldn’t be a controversial one at all.

You can also find Joanne Bamberger writing on lots of other topics at the intersection of politics and parenthood at her place, PunditMom.

The release of Walmart’s study for the 2010 election entitled, “Who Can Win the Walmart Mom?” takes a look at not just mothers, but also who fits the demographic mold of a typical Walmart customer and what those women are concerned about when deciding how to vote in November. While much of what’s in the report didn’t come as any big surprise to me, there were some fascinating tidbits that those running for office should definitely pay attention to — because you know what happens when you don’t listen to your mom!

It turns out that most of the women polled for this Walmart report voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and voted Democratic for other candidates then, as well. For 2010, however, a majority of them are unhappy with Congress, are skeptical about health care reform legislation and are leaning toward voting Republican, even though they usually vote blue.

The report paints a picture of who the typical Walmart mom is — she’s a white, educated woman under 45 with a couple of kids under 18 with a middle-class income, but who thinks her family is really a lower class family when it comes to finances. Of course, there are large numbers of women they polled who don’t fit that description, but the majority of those polled did.

And what is that women are focused on for the 2010 mid-term elections?  The ECONOMY!

Not a big surprise, since that’s been the story at least since Bill Clinton ran for president. Lots of reporters are all abuzz about this all new, very shiny theory that will shed light on how things turn out in November! But here’s the thing — people love to put labels on women who are mothers to try to distill us into groups that can be addressed in tidy little soundbites. Those who want our attention and our votes do that at their own peril.

One thing I found interesting about the event I was invited to to hear about this study was this — the majority of those in the room were middle-aged white men. Some of them chuckled and rolled their eyes at the thought of these mothers worrying about anything other than putting food on the table and saving money. The women on the panel — a representative from Walmart and Margie Omero, the Democratic pollster who worked on the study, didn’t think it was any laughing matter to review and analyze the voting patterns, habits and concerns of these women. As they spoke, it was clear they took the information seriously.

So are Walmart moms the new soccer moms? Politicians, pollsters and officials would be a lot better off if they stopped trying to put a label on us (of course, this one isn’t even really new – it’s been around since 2008) and actually focused on what we’re concerned about in addition to the economy. Just because the economy is at the top of our list, doesn’t mean we don’t have a lot of other interests on our plate, as well.

When all those people can stop seeing women who are mothers as nothing more than a one-dimensional stereotype that can be dissected for political purposes, they’ll get a lot more involvement and a lot more of our votes, regardless of which side of the political aisle we’re on! Because the thing is this — no one likes being labeled, especially when a label becomes shorthand for something akin to a backhanded compliment.

For the politicians, pollsters and, yes, even businesses like Walmart, I’ll just say we are paying attention to all the things that concern us, even when we’re pinching pennies, juggling our work lives and businesses, trying to decide how we can afford health care for our kids and driving to soccer practice.

Joanne Bamberger also likes to hang out at her blog, PunditMom, where she writes about the intersection of motherhood and politics.

Aside from whether the summit was more serious policy discussion or brilliant political stagecraft, I have to put the obvious question out there — where were the women? You know, the women who make the bulk of the health care decisions for their families? The ones who make sure all the insurance paperwork gets submitted? The ones who fight to find health coverage for their families when a few ear infections and a broken bone get a whole family labeled uninsurable because of “pre-existing conditions?”

Sure, there were some staffers in the background and an expert or two wearing skirts. But other than that — not so many women lawmakers, at least compared to the sea of older white guys. Of course, when women only make up about 17 percent of Congress, it is sort of hard to have them represented at the table on anything — there just aren’t enough of us!

I’m sort of surprised that the media noticed at all. Dan Rather commented in a back-handed sort of way:

“If more women were in the room, might the debate have been different? If there were more women in Congress … might our politics be less rancorous and might our elected officials get more accomplished? There’s a school of thought that is emerging that suggests the answer is yes.”

A school of thought? An emerging suggestion? The funny thing about that remark is this — no one is screaming at Dan Rather for making such a wild, crazy suggestion that women might run things differently and get us different results! Yet, when Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter essentially suggested the same thing recently, she was criticized by the right for being a sexist!

Fortunately, one Congresswoman spoke up at the summit. Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) reminded us that when women aren’t included, how an entire issue is viewed becomes skewed. And she wasn’t just talking about politics — she was also referring to medical studies that are relied upon in treating women that don’t include women in the studies!

Unless we’re willing to do something about it, though, neither of these phenomenon — lack of inclusion of women in medical studies and too few women in Congress — will change. I know it’s hard to step up to the plate on that one, but surely there are more women out there with the intestinal fortitude to go “woman a mano” with the guys.

Photo, Getty Images

Joanne Bamberger  writes about the intersection of motherhood and politics at her place, PunditMom.

The updated EEOC guidance is in response to the ever-increasing numbers of jobs being lost in this tight economy and the fear that employers may, in times of needing to cut jobs, use inappropriate and illegal criteria when it comes to working parents and other caregivers. There might be instances when job cuts can’t be helped, but using care giving responsibilities as an excuse is often prohibited by federal law in a variety of circumstances.

While caregivers are protected under a variety of federal anti-discrimination laws, many gender based stereotypes remain that wrongfully influence employers’ hiring and firing decisions and pregnancy discrimination is apparently on the rise. The good news is that the EEOC has stepped up and issued its new guidelines, along with posting the testimony of a variety of experts, to make sure that businesses know where the lines are and which ones they can’t step across.

There are reports that employers are cutting flexible work arrangements because they are too costly or employees are giving them up out fear that using them will cost them their jobs. But Cynthia Calvert of The Center for WorkLife Law reminded the EEOC in her testimony:

[Employers need to provide] training for managers, supervisors, and human resources professionals about the causes and common patterns of [family responsibilities discrimination by] adopting a policy stating that the employer will not discriminate based on family caregiving obligations, and reviewing other policies such as those relating to hiring, attendance, leave and promotion, to ensure they do not negatively impact caregivers.

Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, reiterated he importance of employers focusing on these issues because:

… both men and women are overwhelmingly likely to be working, most families do not have a stay-at-home parent or anyone available to provide care if a family member falls ill. This means that most workers are also caregivers.

But not everyone believes that and that’s probably the biggest reason we need to ensure the laws are being enforced and employers are aware of these updated guidelines. Interestingly, a comment on an unrelated post at my blog reflects that:

On behalf of The Powers That Be, take my word for it that [you women are] free to be as successful in business as you wish, right up to the point at which you reschedule a meeting because you want to be at a soccer game or call in sick because your little one is ill.

Unfortunately, I am sure that commenter isn’t the only power that feels that way. Here’s hoping that Mr. “Powers That Be” and others like him will take a hint from the EEOC.

Joanne Bamberger writes about the intersection of motherhood and politics at her place, PunditMom.

The Army now says that Pagan will be discharged, but some are wondering — was this the act of a mother who had no choice or was it a stunt to get what others have been unable to get?

But my question is this — what was Lisa Pagan supposed to do? Not show up and get thrown in the brig? Or leave knowing that she didn’t have anyone to take care of her kids?

Why do her critics assume that she has options she’s not pursuing? I don’t know what family support she does or doesn’t have, but I know that there are lots of mothers, myself included, who would find themselves in an impossible bind if we had to start looking for alternate ways to take care of our children if we were in Pagan’s shoes.

There might be grandparents around, but maybe they’re not in good enough health to lend a hand. Siblings? Maybe they are too far away and can’t help because that would mean they would have to quit their jobs. Aunts? Uncles? Maybe, but there are really only so many realistic options when it comes to raising our children and not completely uprooting them from the homes and lives they know. And in this economy, it’s not realistic to argue that the dad should find another job that would allow him to cut back on travel.

I know there are many military families who struggle with this every day. And probably a lot of them are pretty angry that Lisa Pagan is getting to go home with her children when they can’t. But why is it so much to expect for the military to actually take family into consideration when it’s making decisions about deploying parents?

I know there’s not an easy answer, but I give Pagan a lot of credit at least for the chutzpah it took to be in the face of the Army, to show them the faces of the children who didn’t have a place to go or a family caregiver to keep them safe and to make the military see the reality of what it’s doing to mothers, and fathers, who thought they were done with military service only to find themselves pulled back in at a different stage of their lives.

If I was in Pagan’s shoes, I might have done the same thing because I know I don’t have any family members who would be able step up to care for PunditGirl if someone said I had to be gone for a year or more. School and babysitters can only get you so far.

How do I know if I don’t have a Ph.D. in something that involves math or economic theory?

Well, I had lunch at Burger King last week and there was no one in line ahead of me, which struck me as a little odd. And there was no one behind me. The cashier behind the counter exclaimed when he saw he, “Oh, thank God — a customer!”

The cashier at Ann Taylor Loft, where I went in search of a new sweater as I was armed with my 20% off coupon, told me at the check out I wouldn’t need it. “All the sale merchandise is an additional 40% off,” she told me. That almost made the sweater free — and Ann Taylor Loft didn’t care as long as they could make some kind of sale. Any sale.

One of my stepdaughters is pretty sure a series of E-mails over the Thanksgiving day holiday, cryptic though some of them were, means she doesn’t have much of a job to go back to. And she wasn’t the only family member worried that the days ahead will bring a pink slip, not a promotion.

And when a lunch of cold-cuts is offered, but the hosts don’t eat any of nicely arranged turkey or cheese, claiming they’re really not all that hungry, it doesn’t take a team of economic advisers to know that people are hunkering down for worse things to come and want to make food stretch as far as possible.

I’m sure such anecdotal evidence isn’t the stuff that the likes of Alan Greenspan or Robert Rubin rely on. And I admit those few incidents don’t a case study make.

But the list of little things keeps growing that sends a message — sort of like when you see squirrels hoarding nuts too early in the season and know that’s just the first sign of a harsh winter that you don’t want to acknowledge.

I’d love to be wrong. If I am, the next round of sandwiches at Burger King is on me.

For the uninitiated, Kit is the Depression-era girl whose dad loses his job, moves away to look for work and the family ends up taking in boarders and keeping chickens to sell eggs to make ends meet.

While there are light-hearted moments, my eight-year-old daughter was deeply troubled by the main ideas in the movie — total loss of money and comfortable lifestyle, not having enough to eat and people with more making fun of people with less. I tried to assure her then, as I did when she read the book earlier this year, that our family was OK.

“Mommy & Daddy have saved and worked hard for a long time so we will have food and a house and money for college. Don’t worry, sweetie,” I said.

In retrospect, I was a fool.

While I’ve been working part-time since PunditGirl joined our family, I started working full-time when I entered college at 17 and pretty much didn’t step off that track until I was 42. Then it was back to “part-time” work at 45. That’s a long haul. I thought I had a moderate and growing nest-egg, in addition to some money we’ve been trying to put away for her college fund. I was positive we were on the right track and that we were lucky to be in a stable financial position.

As a former securities lawyer, I should have known that greed in the world just gets bigger and bigger and that, ultimately, that sort of blind ambition doesn’t stop at any cost. I knew that. I’d seen that first-hand. I should have known better than to trust that our government would make sure that market collapses of the past would never happen again.

How could I not have seen that we were in for even bigger problems, when I knew how hard Congress lobbied to make things easy for their big contributors and how regulations and safeguards had been watered down and chipped away at year after year, for the benefit of Barbarians at the Gate, Masters of the Universe and the Den of Thieves?

But I really didn’t think we would see a financial crisis like this in my lifetime. After seven years at the Securities and Exchange Commission, I should have known better. I should have acted sooner on my pledge to myself to further diversify the money I had invested. I told myself that when I turned 50, I would take care of that. Guess I shouldn’t have literally waited for the day because if I had acted even a few weeks ago, I would feel a little better today.

So who should we be pointing fingers at? Not just Wall Street. All fingers should be pointed at the Bush administration and people like John McCain who tried to convince us — and were able to manipulate the regulatory system — that investment and commercial bankers only had all our best interests at heart. That less regulation and more economic freedom would create more wealth for all of us.

And with the ban on short-selling just lifted, it’s no wonder that a tumbling stock market can’t recover — short sellers WANT the market to go down. That’s their whole raison d’etre. If the SEC doesn’t step in and stop the short sellers immediately, I shudder to think where the bottom of this market fall really will be.

But the truly scary thing is this — if we do recover, how long will it be before we and our representatives forget these lessons yet again and decision-makers turn right back around and start the same ‘trust us, deregulation is good for you’ song and dance?

Why did we forget the lessons of the dot.com bubble? Why did we push into the dusty corners of our minds the stories of greed and corruption on Wall Street?

And why do we keep electing the same types of people who will want to do this all over again if, and when, the economy “recovers?”

Even as things bounce up and down in the coming weeks with market valuation, tightening credit and belt-tightening, there’s one thing we can do — cast our votes in a few weeks for people who won’t allow this to happen again. All 435 Congressmen and women are up for election and re-election, as is one-third of the Senate. Keep that in mind as you watch your savings blow away and remember that at least some of those who want your vote were responsible for creating the market conditions that made this possible.

Joanne Bamberger writes about politics and motherhood at her blog, PunditMom.

Since we are both parents of daughters, I’m a bit confounded, Senator McCain, about your lack of interest in things that would benefit your girls directly. I know you probably won’t pay much attention, but here is the list of the things I want for my third-grader:

1. Equal pay for equal work. I know you seem to think that that’s all about more education and working harder, but that’s just nonsense and you know it, you just don’t have the spine to stand up to your GOP colleagues and vote for something that should be every daughter’s right in this country. Ask your daughters Meghan and Bridget — I’m betting they’d agree. Your oldest daughter Sidney, who’s an executive in the music industry, might also have some really enlightening things to chat about when it comes to women in the workplace. You might want to sit down with her about that … soon.

2. To be a feminist. I know you think that “feminist” is a dirty word. I can tell by the Dr. Evil smirk on your face in this clip with Fox News.

The funny thing is that the definition of a feminist is someone who advocates for the rights of women to be equal to the rights of men in all ways, including the social and political worlds.

Hmmm. That doesn’t sound too liberal to me, especially since, Senator, you must, by definition, be a feminist. After all, you apparently believe that Sarah Palin is as competent as you to be President. Otherwise, you would never have chosen her to be your running mate, right? Again, I’m thinking your daughters might have a few interesting thoughts on whether they think having equal rights is so horribly liberal.

3. Adequate paid maternity leave. You might be familiar with my reason for wanting this, because when my husband and I adopted our daughter from China, I was a federal employee — just like you! As a result, I did not get any paid leave, and it wasn’t because we adopted to form our family.

No federal employees get paid maternity leave, not even the parents who have their children the “old fashioned” way. I know when you and Cindy adopted Bridget, whether you got to take paid leave wasn’t an issue — Senators don’t get docked pay for taking time off and, of course, even if you had, Cindy is financially loaded, so it wouldn’t have been a problem for you. For me? It sure would have been helpful to have even part of my paycheck for those six to eight weeks.

Since she’s only in third grade, my daughter doesn’t have to make a decision yet about whether she wants to become a mother, but I know she wants to work at something, so it would be lovely if mothers in the future actually got some paid leave, like, say, the rest of the civilized world, so she won’t have to worry.

4. Access to safe and affordable birth control. I was lucky. I came of age at just the right time in terms of having access to birth control. I’m particularly happy about that because without it, there’s a big chance that my life would be a lot different today. You see, John, (may I call you John?), I made a pretty reckless decision and got married when I was a VERY young 19. The marriage didn’t last long because it turned out that my now ex-husband was pretty abusive in a lot of ways. I am thankful every day that we did not have any children that either would have tied me to him in some way for the rest of my life or would have exposed a child to an abusive father. Without access to birth control, I shudder to think how things might have turned out differently.

The Bush administration you are so cozy with is still in its waning days doing everything it can to take that right away. Now, in light of my recent birthday, that’s not something I have to worry about anymore. But don’t you and your conservative cronies dare take away from my daughter what she may want and need when she’s a young woman. Again, maybe you’ve neglected to chat with your daughters about birth control and how they feel about this?

Senator McCain, those are just a few of the things I want for my daughter that don’t have anything to do with being a conservative or a liberal, no matter how you try to paint it. What I would like, though, is for you to wipe that ‘I’m-so-far-behind-in-the-polls’ smirk off your face when you hold Sarah Palin up as the shining example of anti-feminist, conservative motherhood.

‘Cause, you know, without feminism, Palin couldn’t even be your running mate, right?

Joanne writes about the intersection of motherhood and politics at her blog, PunditMom.

I know you’re really proud of the working motherhood arrangement you’ve crafted for yourself. But since the GOP has been holding you up as the shining beacon of model motherhood, I have a few questions for you. I think a few of the other moms I know do, as well. So I hope you don’t mind me asking! We could have a quick chat over a cup of coffee, or you could just E-mail me back — I know you’re killer on the Blackberry!

Katha Pollitt at The Nation already has posed some questions to you. And I really do want to know the answers to them. But here are a few others I’m curious about, as well:

1. If you’re elected vice president, what are you going to do to help all the other working mothers in America? You know, not all of us have the kind of support system of family and friends you do to take care of our kids, but we still have to work so we can afford food for the table, gas for our cars and the after-school day care arrangements because most of us don’t have nannies (we now know you did, at least according to your own words on this video).

2. If after several years of being vice president you discovered that you had been paid less than all the other vice presidents before you, would you be OK with not being able do anything about it? If you’re not sure, I know Lily Ledbetter would be happy to talk with you about that.

3. You say you’re going to be an advocate for special needs children, now that you have one of your own. What does that mean, exactly? Will you use the power of being second-in-command for fight for health care coverage that these children need, but many of their families can’t afford? Will you make sure that parents get all the information about special needs children and that the federal government will step up to the plate with some dollars to help achieve that? Will you be honest about your son’s challenges if he grows up in the spotlight of national politics?

4. When will you be able to tell us where you stand on issues so important to the millions of working mothers in this country? Recently, one story said that you are “unable to say at this time what [your] position is on federal policies relating to job protections and benefits for working mothers.” It sure would be nice if you’d let us know sometime in the next 49 days. Sooner rather than later would be great.

5. I know you’re a little busy at the moment, but since you’re asking so many of us to vote for you, we’d like to hear a little more about these issues and less about that Bridge to Nowhere, though I would like you to be a bit more honest about what you did with the money you didn’t spend on that bridge.

6. Oh, one other thing — I know you say you’re against “earmarks” for special pet projects, but that doesn’t seem to square with the reports that you asked for over $450 million of them in the last two years. Maybe you could just be straight with us about that one, too.

Feel free to call, E-mail or drop by. I’ll put the kettle on and Piper can hang out and play with PunditGirl. I know you think some of these questions are irrelevant, but I think it’s fair to ask how your motherhood experiences will impact your potential advice an a McCain administration’s policies on FMLA, child-care and fair pay.

I’m not Charlie Gibson, but I know we could have a really lively chat.

Sincerely yours,

PunditMom