This morning my six-year-old snuggled next to me on the couch, an iPad on his lap open to a smurfs game app; the Wall Street Journal on my lap, headline blazing "Steven Paul Jobs, 1955-2011." I lifted the paper up to show him the photo of Jobs and told him...

A recent Government Accounting Office report found that the number of women managers increased only 1 percent between 2000 and 2007, from 39 to 40 percent. Women's progress into management has stalled despite their equal representation in the workforce and their majority in colleges and universities.

Why such a...

Earlier this week New York Times journalist David Leonhardt asked why the labor market is so punishing to mothers. He notes an obvious pattern -- that top posts in both the private and public sectors usually go to single or childless women -- and wonders if American feminists...

Flex time, job-sharing, compressed schedules, and telecommuting: these workplace practices are needed now more than ever as we juggle the demands of work and other life commitments in a global, 24/7 economy. Women sometimes need flexible work options particularly to make the pieces of their work-life puzzle fit together --...

Ten years ago I gave birth to two babies: one girl, one boy. Their birthday is today, Equal Pay Day.

Right now they are neck-in-neck with their weekly allowance, but if they were fifteen years older, my daughter's college degree, MBA, technological training, organizing and management experience, and even...

Last night a friend sent me an e-mail: she had come to realize that two parents working full-time is impossible. Once you accept that, she said, it becomes easier to do because you give up on the fantasy of work-life perfection and instead figure out how to make it work....

I've been on a one-woman campaign to resurrect the phrase, paycheck job, used by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique forty years ago.

Friedan was referring, of course, to jobs outside the home for which people receive money. She recognized that the unpaid job of caring for...

No doubt The Shriver Report, "A Woman's Nation Changes Everything," meant to stir up debate and discussion.

Hoopla has surrounded the news that women have just about reached parity with men by comprising 50% of the paid workforce; and that women and men agree on much about their evolving...

This week we celebrate National Women's Business Week and celebrate we should. Why? Women-owned businesses:

• Number 10.1 million


• Represent 30 percent of all U.S. businesses (and 40 percent of privately-held firms)


• Employ 23 million people (16 percent of the workforce)


• Generate...

A friend recently gave birth to twins. When I visited them today, she sat feeding one baby a bottle, while dad was bathing the other baby--classically--in the kitchen sink.

Does this scene surprise you? Probably not, if you're under age twenty-nine. According to a recent study by the

We've heard of the trade gap, wage gap, and gender gap. Now comes the "milk gap."

It is the gap between the time a mother is able to feed her newborn baby breast milk and the twelve months that pediatricians recommend. Why twelve months? Because the health benefits...

Sometimes our kids know more than we do. Children know that if they keep asking their parents the same question, over and over, they might just get the answer they are looking for.

For the past two weeks, MomsRising.org, has been asking the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates...

When we try to fit together the pieces of the puzzle we call our work and family lives, often there's a piece missing, another ripped in half, or one whose place we simply cannot find.

That's why everyone wants to know just how Sarah Palin does it, because we...

Soccer moms, security moms ... How will the mothers' vote be labeled this year? Broke and burned out moms?

Possibly. A new survey of 12,000 women by Working America/AFL-CIO finds mothers so strapped financially that half said they'd take a second job if they had more free time. But...

Many election-year observers have noted the absence of a compelling idea or framework to unite either party -- and ultimately the electorate -- in the Presidential race. Slogans like "change," "experience," and "security" don't suffice at a time when Americans are being pounded by waves of global, demographic, and technological...

On International Women's Day on Saturday, I started thinking about moms around the world and then moms in our own United States of America. As the mother of four children, I've spent a lot of time over the years breastfeeding babies, and so I wondered: Why do moms in the...

When our granddaughters read their history books, this week may well be one that is marked as the beginning of the end of the pay discrimination many of their foremothers endured.

On Thursday of this week, the Senate holds its first hearing on the Fair Pay Restoration Act (S.1843)...

In the waning days of the Bush administration, pro-business forces want to lock in rules in several policy areas -- health, safety, labor -- in case a Democrat moves into the White House following the '08 election. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) is among those rules they want...

On the first day of Christmas,
my true love gave me:
A lovely, bouncing baby.

On the second day of Christmas,
my true love gave to me:
Paid parental leave,
And a lovely, bouncing baby.

It wasn't long ago that presidential candidates wooed the votes of "soccer moms" and "waitress moms." With the 2008 election looming and presidential debates already underway, it's fair to ask, "What's on the minds of moms?''

I've interviewed mothers around the country for the past several years: old and new...