Should a feminist (married) woman accept payment from her husband for a job well done? This question set the internet hive a flutter since a piece in The New York Times detailed the so-called “wife bonuses” allegedly commonly collected by hyper-privileged women on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. According to Wednesday Martin, author of the forthcoming […]

The good news: This summer, women took a majority of seats on the Austin City Council for the first time ever.  The bad news: The City felt the need to “prepare” staff to work with women by putting on a training conducted by tone deaf speakers propounding culturally incompetent and antiquated gender stereotypes. Assistant City […]

For women of New York, it’s about to get much easier to bring gender discrimination cases. A ten-point bill called the Women’s Equality Act had been languishing in the New York State Senate for nearly two years because of controversy over a plank that would have shored up abortion rights.  But in March, Democrats in […]

Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the Guaranteed Paid Vacation Act—a bill requiring employers with at least 15 employees to provide 10 days of paid vacation. The Bill currently has a whopping 0 co-sponsors, which is exactly the same number of co-sponsors Representative Alan Grayson’s Paid Vacation Act (a similar bill) received in the […]

I recently discovered what has now become one of my all-time favorite Tumblrs: Congrats, you have an all male panel! The site compiles photos and flyers of “all male panels, seminars, events, and various other things featuring all male experts” from all over the world and gives each a David Hasselhoff stamp of approval. The […]

Regular readers of this blog are very familiar with Young v. UPS, a Supreme Court case about pregnancy discrimination.  Here at Shattering the Ceiling we are excited about the case – and about the outcome.  My colleagues have written here about why accommodating pregnant women is good for American families – and good for business and about why the […]

In a recent article published in The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert, who is the Senior Editor for the magazine’s Culture section, reviewed a recently published collection of essays titled Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed, which relates the personal choices of sixteen individuals to not have children.  As Gilbert relates, the collection’s project is to “dismantle the assumption of […]

Spoiler alerts Fans seem to be all over the map on the Mad Men series finale. When I watched it, I was candidly a little disappointed. But reflecting on it, I think that some of that disappointment speaks to the real world. In other words, Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, seems to have captured the […]

The marginalization of women in Hollywood has gotten a lot of attention lately.  The Sony hacking scandal revealed glaring gender disparities in pay among movie stars and studio executives alike, and Patricia Arquette’s controversial Oscar acceptance speech demanded wage equality for women. Now the spotlight has shifted to the discrimination faced by female directors, after […]

Grassroots efforts to provide outlets for gender bias concerns have taken various forms, such as the new workplace-rating website InHerSight that Marissa recently blogged about, and the more established online group MomsRising.  Recently, I met a woman – herself a senior manager in a large corporation – who is advocating an approach that might appeal […]