Last night’s GOP debate focused on economics, and I was watching to see if a single Republican candidate – really, anyone – would have anything to say about the challenges facing working women. Marco Rubio stood out as the only one. When asked whether his plan to expand child tax credits was just “another expensive […]

Japan is not a country that has often been lauded for its gender rights records. Just nine years ago, the Japanese Minister of Health, Hakuo Yanagisawa, famously referred to women as “birth giving machines” in a statement about the country’s shrinking population. Yet despite the prevalence of such harmful opinions about gender roles, Japan recently […]

Last Mother’s Day, John Oliver noted the inconsistency between companies that market to customers based on the holiday but fail to offer their employees paid maternity leave. While continued efforts are needed to require companies to offer paid maternity leave, more attention needs to be paid to the leave policies of American cities. Many city […]

July 2015 marked a new era in Maternity Leave Policies for women in the Navy.  Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus announced that, effective immediately, women who serve in the Navy and Marine Corps will have eighteen weeks of maternity leave available to use during the first year of their child’s life.  The purpose of […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

When I was a senior in high school, I wrote a submission for the Ohio Bar Association’s There Ought to Be a Law Contest (nerd, guilty as charged).  I advocated civil unions for same-sex couples.  I presented the essay at a conference organized by my school, only to have a student visiting from another school […]

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 […]