Co-written with Katherine Ullman. So you or your partner is pregnant. There are plenty of important decisions to consider: what will be the little one’s name? Will you share the name with friends and family or keep it a secret? What about gender? Do you want to know? Do you want others to know? Will the baby take your last name, your partner’s or something in between? As exciting as these considerations may be, they often distract from the more daunting task of navigating the workplace while expecting: sad to say, this is the dark underbelly of pregnancy in the United States. What you may not...

Co-written with Katherine Ullman. "My small contribution to feminism is leaving the office at 5:15 PM three times a week to pick up my daughter...and not hiding it." You might expect that these are the words of a working mother who, after too little sleep and too many people wondering "how she does it," decided to draw a line in the sand for all to see, with work firmly on one side and family on the other. But you'd be wrong--we heard this from a young professional father. And who could blame you for your guess? With all of this recent hullabaloo about female breadwinners (elegantly...

How many employed American mothers work more than 50 hours a week? Go on, guess. I've been asking lots of people that question lately. Most guess around 50 percent. The truth is nine percent. Nine percent of working moms clock more than 50 hours a week during the key years of career advancement: ages 25 to 44. If we limit the sample to mothers with at least a college degree, the number rises only slightly, to 13.9 percent. (These statistics came from special tabulations of data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2011 American Community Survey .) This "long hours problem," analyzed so insightfully...

Co-written by Katherine Ullman. An essay this month in The Wall Street Journal recycled a tired trope : “queen bees” in the office are making the lives of other women a living hell. We’ve heard this before. Powerful women are just grown up high-school “mean girls” chipping away at the self-confidence of the women who work with and for them. Suggesting that these women are at once “encircling” their prey and protecting their “perches,” author Peggy Drexler paints two incompatible pictures of the infamous “queen bees.” In one, queen bees cause the workplace to be unfriendly to women, by using...

If I hear once more that the reason for the wage gap is that women don't negotiate, I may just blow a gasket. Linda Babcock herself, the author of the studies that gave rise to the "women don't ask" industry, has shown that women don't negotiate for a very simple reason: they sense—correctly—that it will hurt them if they do. Babcock and her colleagues found that women don't negotiate their initial salaries as much as men. No doubt you’ve heard that. This finding has received a wild amount of coverage in the press. What you probably haven’t heard is what happens when women do negotiate. Often...

Co-written with Katherine Ullman. Joan once wrote that the way for women to gain equality was to die childless at thirty, based on data that young women without kids earn almost as much as men. Turns out even that won't guarantee equality. A new report released last week by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) finds that the average female college graduate working full-time makes nearly $8,000 less than her male counterpart--only one year after graduation. This is an astounding figure. One would assume that the income gap between the men and women studied in this report--recent...

Every year The Center for WorkLife Law, which I direct, runs a leadership academy for women law firm partners . One key message we send is that sometimes what it takes to make partner is different from what it takes to rise in the partnership. “I’ve noticed that the women work so exceptionally hard,” said a management consultant, when I asked her whether she thought women have to Prove It Again! “It’s really hard for anyone to be biased against them because they are doing above and beyond many of their male peers.” This could be, she continued, because they sense the bias. Or it could be that...

Co-written with Katherine Ullman Like just about every other feminist on the Internet, I've read quite a bit about Marissa Mayer lately: She's the new CEO of Yahoo , she's about to have her first child , she's going to be making $59 million , she's behind some of Google's most influential contributions and she likes periwinkle turtlenecks . But then I read some strange rumors about Marissa Mayer saying that she's not a feminist. Huh? A woman (from Silicon Valley , no less) enters the ranks of Fortune 500 CEOs -- that elite, all-powerful, nearly 4% female club -- and she's not a feminist? In...

Advice literature for women is a crowded field and a predictable one. Most advice falls into one of two camps. Man up! The most common advice assumes that women’s problem is that they need to act more like men. Men tend to negotiate harder, act more confident, and go after plum assignments that will require them to stretch and swagger. All this is good advice—sometimes, for some women. It will work for you if you tend to act in traditionally feminine ways: modest, happy to play support roles, attuned to the comfort of others at the expense of their ambitions. For another group of women—...