I opened my daughter’s history book the other day and it hit me all over again. We may be in the 21st century, but our history is still the history of men. Men who were kings, who invented machines, conquered weaker nations, compelled religious conversions, made scientific discoveries, sailed to foreign lands, and slaughtered each other with increasing efficiency as the centuries rolled by. For every Cleopatra, Nefertiti, and Dolly Madison, there’s a thousand famous men, like Caesar Augustus, Marco Polo, Eli Whitney, Karl Marx, John Locke, Mahatma Gandhi, or Richard Nixon. Honestly, you could...

I could not be more delighted about the furor over Marissa Mayer’s nixing of the telework option at Yahoo! Really, it’s all good. Anything that puts the focus on women, motherhood and work makes me gleeful. The fact that these issues finally get a public airing has been so long in coming. Fully integrating women into all the places power resides is a messy, tortured and painful process. It creates a lot of drama. There will be yelling and screaming. There HAS to be yelling and screaming, because it hasn’t been done before. It upsets the prevailing power structure. It makes people...

My favorite part of the President’s State of the Union address was his plan for expanding pre-kindergarten to all four-year-olds. The idea has been around for decades, and it did once very nearly become law until it was vetoed by President Nixon. But in the past 40 years, two big parts of the early education picture have shifted dramatically. The first is that we know for a fact that quality preschool will positively affect the child’s life through adulthood. The second is that preschool is no longer used as a weapon to make mothers feel guilty. This cultural change may be the more...

Wonky Washington is making merry about the 20th anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the Family Medical Leave. This was the federal law that required some employers to allow some employees to take up to 12 weeks away from work, without pay , to deal with the birth or adoption of a child, a family member’s serious medical condition, or one’s own serious medical condition. Millions of workers have used the leave to respond to a caregiving need, secure in the knowledge that their job would be there upon their return. By all accounts, employers have managed to incorporate the program...

The United States experiences epidemic levels of gun violence, claiming over 30,000 lives annually, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For every person who dies from a gunshot wound, two others are wounded. In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings. This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour. From Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence Does that take your breath away? It does mine. Would you suspect that gender makes a difference in the gun debate? Nothing you...

A big change in public policy could bring mothers and their new babies much closer from now on. As of January 1, a provision of the Affordable Care Act, the health reform legislation passed by Congress in 2010, now requires that health insurers cover the cost of breast pumps and lactation services for new moms. Before now, no state law required insurers to cover breast pumps. Thirty-one states made them available through the Medicaid system to low income women only. The new law compels insurers to provide lactation benefits without insisting on a co-payment from the insured mother. The...

(If I were to forget myself completely and have a screaming fit at Congress, this is what I would say.) This ridiculous and petty behavior between you two has got to stop. I have had it up to here with this incessant bickering and not getting along. While you have been competing for alpha male, our national well-being is going right down the tubes. Straighten yourselves out and get down to business double quick before your pathetic sham of leadership lands us all in the soup! The whole point of governing is to bring the best ideas and resources to a problem and find a mutually acceptable...

Crack researchers at the American Association of University Women ( AAUW ) have long been seeking the reasons behind the the difference in men’s and women’s earnings. New findings with far reaching implications were revealed as they unveiled their report, “ Graduating to a Pay Gap ”, via a briefing and live webcast from Washington, DC. The assumption was that by looking at men and women when they were most similarly placed in the workforce, with equivalent education and degrees, all single, childless, of comparable age and working full time, any differences traceable to gender would be easier...

The nature of government is a central topic in this election. What is it’s role? Whom does it serve? Can it be trusted? Does it create jobs or not? Is it like a business? Is the economy more productive if the President has experience in business? The answer to the last question has been answered by history, and the answer is no. Looking at official GDP statistics from a recent Washington Post article entitled Can A Businessman Help the Economy ?, it appears that economic growth has slowed during the administration of “business Presidents”, such as Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W...