Ever since I was in high school, I’ve spent a significant amount of my free time reading.  I read in a range of subjects, including novels, history, and cultural criticism, but my favorite category is biography. This lifelong hobby made Chloe Angyal’s recent article, “Why Don’t Men Read Books By Women,” all the more unsettling.  […]

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 […]

As you may have seen, Google’s homepage  in March featured an illustration celebrating the birth 133 years ago of Amalie (“Emmy”) Noether, a German mathematician to rival the top thinkers of her day. Referred to by Albert Einstein as the “most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced” by intuitions educating women, Noether’s Theorem, and […]

When applying for a job as a police officer, you might expect to have to meet certain educational, physical, and mental health requirements.  But what if I told you that in Indonesia, you can be rejected for a civil service job because you are not a virgin?  Or because you are married?  And what if […]

Last week saw the close of New York Fashion Week, a magical time when Manhattanites come together with global taste-makers to encourage women of all stripes to display their inner beauty and outer style.  Sort of.  As much as NYFW is a salute to New York’s diverse population and global mindset, it also pays homage […]

From First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign to NBC’s controversial hit show The Biggest Loser, Americans are flooded with messages about the obesity epidemic in this country and what it means for our long-term health.  But there’s been a lot less talk about how being overweight or obese affects individuals who are trying to […]

Getting my pilot’s license was one of the greatest experiences of my life. There’s nothing like the thrill of your first solo flight or nailing the landing in a tough cross wind.  Yet aviation remains a male-dominated hobby, and, more importantly, a male-dominated career.  And it’s been that way for some time.  Why? My flight […]

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 […]

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 […]

Last year, Google unveiled a new initiative to combat implicit bias in the workplace. The initiative has garnered widespread interest in the wake of recent disclosures by several leading tech companies, including Google, regarding the diversity (or lack thereof) of their workforces—a problem my colleague Lizzy Gropman discussed last week. The concept of implicit or […]