We have written, on this blog, about the persistent gap in pay between men and women in America today.  We have written about the injustice of men being paid more for doing the same work, about implicit gender-based bias, about unjustifiable double standards—it is by no means easy (or fair) to have to navigate the […]

Just as women are over-represented in traditionally-female fields such as teaching and childcare, they remain a scant presence in the so-called “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering and math. According to recent U.S. census data, they make up only one-quarter of all STEM workers. Although there are many reasons for this dearth, two new studies […]

Last week, the New York Times asked a provocative question: Do activist investors target female CEOs?  Its article by that name considered whether the increased scrutiny that female CEOs attract, from stakeholders inside and outside the organizations they lead, can be attributed to their gender.  The article gestured at a phenomenon receiving significant attention in […]

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 […]

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 […]

Tomorrow, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in Young v. UPS, a case about a former UPS driver whose healthcare provider recommended she not lift packages over 20 pounds during her pregnancy.  She asked UPS to accommodate this restriction by either allowing her to continue doing her current job and let her colleague take […]

Working mothers are rejoicing in light of a new study which shows that over the course of a career they are more productive than their childless (female) peers. After crunching the numbers on the career trajectories of academic economists, researchers working for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis concluded that mothers outperformed women without […]

As I noted last week, it’s time for the tech industry to acknowledge its systemic bias against women.  Once that happens, the industry will be much more likely to do something about the problem.  Tech has proudly “disrupted” the status quo for how we buy books, make payments, hail cabs, use phones, play Scrabble, and […]

Women are underrepresented in tech. The numbers of women in technical jobs at major tech companies speak for themselves: Twitter: 10 percent; Yahoo!: 15 percent; Facebook: 15 percent; Google: 17 percent; Microsoft:17 percent; Apple: 20 percent; Pinterest: 21 percent; and eBay: 24 percent. The problem is also apparent in compensation – a recent study found that […]

If there is a bright spot to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s comments concerning women and raises last week, it is that his remarks have (re)opened a robust discussion about the real challenges women face in tackling the wage gap. For those not up to speed, at a conference billed as the largest gathering of women […]