PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi made headlines recently, saying women still can’t have it all. The question of whether women can achieve success in both their professional and personal lives has been dissected at every angle. Some, like Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, say that women absolutely can have it all, if they simply lean in to […]

Last month, Debra Harrell gave her 9-year-old daughter a cell phone and allowed her to play at a nearby park (less than a mile away from her job) for the day while she reported to work at McDonalds.  Normally, Harrell had her child accompany her to work where she sat at a table and played […]

According to research by professors at Georgia Southern University, most undergrads do not believe that discrimination will affect their careers. Ninety percent of students surveyed did not believe that women would have fewer opportunities for networking or mentoring, and 75% believed that women would not face a pay disparity. This same research found that women […]

A new study from the University of Colorado-Boulder found that women and minority corporate executives who hired and promoted other women and minorities received lower performance ratings than their white male colleagues. This penalization perpetuates the glass ceiling that women and minorities struggle to shatter. The study provides one explanation for the observation that women […]

Last week, a federal judge in New York ordered that notice of a lawsuit under the federal Equal Pay Act be sent to at least 7,000 female employees at KPMG—one of the nation’s “Big 4” tax, audit and accounting firms.  The lawsuit details how KPMG illegally paid female professionals less than it paid men for […]

I’m writing this from my office, high above a large city in the northeast, where I’m sitting, hopped up on a variety of medications designed to combat the violent nausea and sometimes blinding headaches that come, for me, with being almost ten weeks pregnant. At the moment, the meds are working ok, as they do […]

The term “barefoot and pregnant” is a figure of speech that generally refers to the idea that a woman’s place is in the home.  In other words, a “traditional” woman should not be working outside the home and should not be freely accessing contraception.  A recent study confirms a link between those two “traditional” notions. […]

Last week, a brass ceiling was shattered.  For the first time in its 238-year history, the United States Navy promoted a woman to the rank of four-star admiral, the service’s highest rank.  Admiral Michelle J. Howard is now Vice Chief of Naval Operations, making her the second highest-ranking officer in the Navy. Hopefully, the significance […]

As women’s rights activists chart a new course in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision, will they increasingly take the feminist fight directly to corporations with weak records on gender equality? In the wake of last week’s ruling, pockets of activists have taken to social media and mounted protests at locations of […]

“I love my trade very much. I love watching nothing become something.” — Mary Battle, quoted in “Women in Construction: Still Breaking Ground.” Sometimes there are glass ceilings so far from our field of focus that we fail to see them at all.  A report published by the National Women’s Law Center last month analyzes […]