Yesterday, news broke that reporter and anchor Megyn Kelly was leaving Fox News to move to NBC. Now, Fox is left without a big-name, female, prime-time anchor, and without anyone who has any history of being willing to stand up to Trump.  This is politically notable for obvious reasons, but it also has implications for […]

In a 2007 study, Cornell sociologists Correll, Benard, and Paik examined the motherhood penalty, a phrase sociologists use to describe the systemic disadvantages that working mothers often encounter in hiring, pay, promotion, and other aspects of their employment. In the United States, mothers suffer a per-child wage penalty of approximately 5%, controlling for similar qualifications […]

The metaphor of ships passing in the night originated (at least according to Google) from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in a compilation called Tales of Wayside Inn. There, Longfellow laments the disconnectedness of the human condition in lines that seem equally applicable to modern life: Ships that pass in the night, and speak […]

The District of Columbia is on the brink of becoming the most generous place in the country to become new parents.  If the Universal Paid Leave Act of 2015 becomes law, D.C. workers will be entitled to 16 weeks of paid leave for the birth of a child or other qualifying family or medical event. […]

There’s been a recent push to expand public access to pre-K programs, and it’s widely acknowledged that these programs bring benefits to working parents, especially working mothers.   In these discussions though, it’s often assumed that parents’ childcare problems are solved once their kids go off to kindergarten.  The reality, though, is that many school […]

Many readers may have seen the popular story being shared on the internet, with the caption, “This Is What It Looks Like When Men Are Allowed To Take 480 Days Of Paternity Leave” (although that article could just have easily been captioned, “This is What It Looks Like When Humans Are Allowed to Take 480 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I took three weeks of paid paternity leave to be home with my wife and my second son when he was born 17 months ago.  The law firm I work for offered me more paid time off, but I did not take it because I thought doing so would make my attempt to balance family […]

As one of my colleagues wrote earlier this fall, a woman should not have to choose between having a job and having a baby.  Laura Brown agrees.  With Keira McNett, Laura founded First Shift Justice Project earlier this year to protect workers in their “first shift”—their paid employment—so they can work the “second shift”—providing unpaid […]