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 […]

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 […]

We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about discrimination. Sometimes, we talk about specifically about retaliation for complaining about illegal discrimination, which is itself illegal. But I want to talk today about a subset of retaliation that we haven’t talked about much on this blog: Retaliation against whistleblowers.  Retaliation against whistleblowers is […]

Last month was big for those interested in the fight for gender equity in the workplace, as two largely publicized cases reached important turning points. On Wednesday, March 25, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Peggy Young in her pregnancy discrimination case against her employer, UPS.  On Friday, March 27, 2015, […]

Recently, the California Supreme Court posthumously granted Hong Yen Chang admission to the California Bar – reversing a 125-year-old decision that denied his application because of his race and national origin. (Read the Court’s decision here; read more about the case here, here, and here.) Chang was born in China and immigrated to the United […]

Earlier this year I coordinated a panel with the Women’s Bar Association on pregnancy discrimination.  The panel focused on a question currently pending before the Supreme Court: whether a federal pregnancy discrimination law requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnant women.  [Bloggers Note: For more information on this check out my interviews with the […]

It’s not every day that we get to report good news for working women – especially that there is good news for working women coming from the Supreme Court.  Today is one of those days. As we’ve previously written, the Supreme Court was considering the case of Young v. UPS.   That case raised questions about […]

In the midst of the Ellen Pao trial, much chatter has erupted on gender politics in the tech industry. Ellen Pao, a former junior partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, is suing her former employer for gender discrimination. Among Ms. Pao’s claims is an allegation that Kliener failed to promote her to top […]

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 […]

Angela Ames, a Nationwide Insurance worker in Iowa, returned to work in July 2010, after her eight-week maternity leave, and found that she had no place to pump breast milk.  She was told that there was a three-day waiting period to process her paperwork in order to use the lactation room and was given the […]