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The Voice of Authority

The summer after my senior year of high school, I volunteered for my local NPR station—my assignment was to do a piece on the water quality of Lake Erie (it’s absolutely fine… maybe stick to the pool).  I traveled around town collecting sound, conducting interviews; I was thrilled to use the editing equipment to put […]

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Are Women Outpacing Men in the Workplace Because They’re Mind Readers?

As detailed last week in a New York Times article, a team of researchers from M.I.T., Carnegie Mellon, and Union College have published two studies demonstrating that there is a strong correlation between the number of women in a working group and the ability of that group to accomplish real-world tasks.  The first of the […]

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Stereotypes, Stigmas, and Parental Leave

In his November 13, 2014 post “On Parenting and Careers,” my colleague, Matt Schmid, wrote about his recent decision to take three weeks of paternity leave.  Matt noted that even though we work at a firm that frequently represents women who have been discriminated and retaliated against on the basis of their care-giving responsibilities, he […]

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Stop Telling Women to Smile

Most women—no, all women—have had the experience of receiving unsolicited feedback on their physical appearance. Such commentary comes in many forms, from lewd remarks or demands for a “smile” on the street, to irksome discussions with well-meaning relatives about how much “prettier” one might look with a different hairstyle.  Women have long fought against these […]

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Bad Business: gender discrimination in small business loans

Many of my clients are highly educated, experienced professionals at the top of their industries who have prioritized and sacrificed for their careers—they’re hard workers and they’re really good at what they do.  Still, when gender discrimination in the workplace forces them out of the positions they’ve worked so hard to attain, one of the […]

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Gender bias and flexible work arrangements

As reported by The Washington Post, Christin Munsch, a sociology professor at Furman University, recently presented a study demonstrating that men who request flexible work arrangements are viewed more favorably than women who do the same: In a survey of nearly 700 people between the ages of 18 and 65, Munsch found that people rated […]

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Women and Law School: Back to the Future

We start this post with the story of a solitary figure, someone who – like the lone protester facing the tanks of Tiananmen – decides to fight mountainous odds: in this case, centuries of gender bias against women. The year is 1875; the venue: Supreme Court of the State of Wisconsin. Our protagonist-heroine is “Miss […]

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Biology Isn’t Destiny, Or Pregnant Lawyer v. “Working Mother”

As a man, my spouse didn’t have the option of trying to get pregnant. I was the one with options. For me, among those options, pregnancy felt like the least complicated, even the second time, when I feared but didn’t know for sure that I might face the unremitting sickness yet again. By contrast, we […]

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We’re Thinking About Having It “All” All Wrong

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 […]

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A Balancing Act—Heels in the Workplace

This post is the first segment of a two-part post on women’s attire in the workplace. Some women love them; some hate them; and some choose to bear with them. But beyond personal preference, heels have become a common and often an expected part of a woman’s professional attire. This was not necessarily true even […]

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