It is no wonder our elected officials find it hard to embrace standing up against the Stupak-Pitts Amendment in the health care reform bill when the argument is presented as an either or scenario, with dire consequences on either side. As in, "either" you vote to effectively ban abortion,...

We don't talk about the ways we support each other very often, even though it is so important to recognize. Recently on this blog we've debated why women are unhappy. Pollster Frank Luntz told me last night, the majority of "Americans are mad as hell and they're not...

We're all talking about the Huffington Post column in which Marcus Buckingham dropped two pieces of disheartening news: "a) women are less happy than they were 40 years ago, compared with men, and b) as women get older, they get sadder." Using data over time from the General Social...

I spoke with Carol Evans, CEO of Working Mother Media about the media's portrayal of working mothers and pregnant women....

Q: What do you think of the current news media portrayal of working women and how it's changed over your career?

A: There are three big changes from the...

How does your generation affect how you work? I interviewed Penelope Trunk, founder of Brazen Careerist. Each week Trunk speaks about work and life to 30,000 readers on her blog. Her blogging is naked, and it's often about careers and work issues, which is unusual and compelling....

Brenda Barnes, now CEO of Sara Lee, has gotten a lot of press because she left the corporate workforce for a decade to spend more time with her children, and recently returned to be CEO of a major company. Barnes is indeed a rare person, and women can make...

Does the recession make facetime at work more important? A new survey says no...and that both businesses and employees can use flexible work schedules as a recession survival tool. Does asking for flexible scheduling affect women and men differently? What do you think?

Maria Shriver announced that we now live...

Barack and Michelle Obama know it. Catherina Zeta Jones (who performed 8 months pregnant at the Oscars) and Michael Douglas know it. And of course, there's polka dotted M.I.A, Sarah Palin and Todd, Christina Aguilera...and practically the entire cadre of celebrity moms. Just because a woman is a mother...

Here is item no. 300 of things I never thought about before I had a baby: Do you pump in public bathrooms? To me the breast pump symbolizes the inherent conflict of contemporary motherhood. How wonderful that we have the freedom to leave our babies while we work and still...

Let's keep focused on the long term goal. I wish that all the progressive anger about Rick Warren speaking at the Inauguration be focused on shedding light on the actions of last days of the Bush Administration and how to fix its legacy of social and environmental destruction (to...

A name is forever, once it's been indexed in Google. There's been much buzz about how to juice your Google presence by making your name more unusual, but what is a woman to do when she gets married? A quest for search engine optimization tips about how to preserve...

Despite the fact that over 20,000 working families asked that these questions be posed in the national debates (thank you, MomsRising), we've heard nothing at the debates. Today, Families and Work Institute (FWI) released full notes from conference calls it convened with policy leaders from both the Obama...

Palin is basically Rick Santorum cloned- but it's so much more fun to talk about her as meta-feminine symbol. Women, myself included, got so caught up in talking about what Sarah Palin-as-working-mother means, we helped build the GOP fairytale that Palin is just a hockey mom, not a regressive, GW...

Anyone who says women don't count in this country should talk to John McCain. Just looking at the McCain-Palin banner --Palin looking youthful but serious in her dark-rimmed glasses-- sends a clear message. I agree with many of the women bloggers at BlogHer.com who say McCain's pick of...

From Politico:

"...at a biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, John McCain appears to have volunteered his wife for a topless beauty pageant:
McCain felt so comfortable at the event that he even volunteered his wife for the rally's traditional beauty pageant, an infamously debauched event that's...

I've just returned from the 4th annual BlogHer conference, at which well over a thousand women from all over this country-- smart, influential, motivated and talkative but basically normal women-- got lavished with sponsors' freebies. GM let several women drive to the Conference in shiny new hybrids. I alone...

Soon the Senate will consider the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act (HR 5781), which the House just passed. A new email from MomsRising tells me "It's time for the federal government to become a model employer by offering their workforce paid parental leave, and to pave the way...

And this is a good thing. As any Democrat knows, "Working Families" are a staple of any good Dem's rhetoric. The trope "helping America's working families" is so often used, it loses its punch. But the "working women" campaign the Obamas are running brings new urgency to nearly universal battles....

Imagine if you were interviewing John McCain and Barack Obama for a CEO post. You might ask:

Tell us about a high performing team that you've built. What made it high-performing?

Can you give us an example of how you have overcome resistance to bring about a needed change?

Please...

The Hillary candidacy is safely presumed dead. Long live Hillary! And her eulogy? It's mostly about her gender. Media and speeches today read something like: "Ah, the women who almost did it! How brave! How pathbreaking! She worked so hard! Thanks to her, our daughters will have it different!" That...