New Girls' Network

On April 4, 2013, the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis hosted the inaugural New Girls’ Network event, “Finding Your Voice.” The event included an interview with famed opera star Renée Fleming, a panel discussion with Vernā Myers, Sheli Rosenberg, and Michele Coleman Mayes, and an interview of Pfizer Inc. General Counsel Amy Schulman and Pfizer Inc.

In a snarky article, the newspaper of record confirms what we already know: Kate Middleton is pregnant. She’s so nauseated that she’s in the hospital on an intravenous drip. She’s just lucky she’s not an American gal. U.S. employers regularly fire pregnant women when they need modest accommodations to keep doing their jobs. When women become

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 began to

An article in this weekend’s New York Times shed some more light on Silicon Valley’s worst-kept secret: it has a woman problem. Its look at female founders of tech start-ups who also have children shows a remarkable lack of self-consciousness about Maternal Wall bias, the strongest and most open form of gender bias today. According to the article, women make

When The Atlantic’s article The End of Men came out over a year ago, I, like many women, was irritated. But it took me a long time to understand why I found the article so grating. It makes good points. It’s true that many jobs that were long dominated by men are on the decline. The statistics author Hanna Rosin

Co-written with Rachel Dempsey. In the last post, Joan 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