To read this blog post in English, click here . Por más de dos años, La Semana Laboral de Cuatro Horas ha sido un bestseller nacional. ¿Por qué? Porque la mayoría de nosotros nos resentimos estar atados a nuestros trabajos, y sabemos que podemos hacer aún un mejor trabajo si tuviéramos la flexibilidad. Pero los trabajadores están completamente sólos para descifrarlo. De 168 naciones , 163 tienen alguna forma de permiso de maternidad remunerado, dejando a Estados Unidos con la compañía de Lesoto, Papúa Nueva Guinea y Swazilandia. Lindo. Somos adultos que tienen demandas del trabajo y del hogar...

It started this summer... conversations on the playground, on my favorite blogs, at work: Is this climate change? The hottest summer on record, Midwest tornadoes and floods, out-of-control forest fires. And this after a summer hurricane (Irene) and freak ice storm on Halloween 2011 had crippled my suburban Boston neighborhood and sent 100-year-old trees crashing into our houses. Oh and don't forget, we had hardly any snow last winter. This must be it, finally, moms in my formerly sheltered area thought. Climate change is here. What will it mean for my family? And now there is Sandy. I knew it...

At the inaugural White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility yesterday President Obama stressed the profound disconnect between the needs of our families and the demands of our workplaces. As a whole our culture sees flexibility as a special perk for women rather than as a critical part of a workplace that can help all of us. Equally worrying is the way constant contact with our work--via mobile technology--is eroding any sense of separation between home and work. Sometimes the race to respond to a colleague's email overwhelms any rational sense of how urgent that email actually is. President...

I was at the Working Mother Work Life Congress this week, which showcases the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers and also provides workshops and discussions for people who work in the field unfortunately called “work life.” Companies were asking: What should we do to retain new moms, and to keep them engaged and energized? I’m throwing it out there to you, because the numbers speak to a huge need to keep us. Sharon Klun from Accenture noted that the touch point for women is three for five months after they return from maternity leave. That’s when women are often in crisis, thinking, maybe...

Cross-posted from the Huffington Post 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 themselves feel guilty and bad for making trade offs when they're raising a family. But there are plenty of women out there who illustrate that scaling back work to spend time with family is not a professional death sentence in the long run. Christine Heenan , who spent her twenties in the Clinton...

Julie Pippert writes of the battle to protect CHIP in Texas. You can act now to voice your support of CHIP in Texas. And, as more states face budget shortfalls, protecting CHIP/SCHIP in your state will be an issue to keep watching- in California, Gov. Schwarzenegger "may eliminate the State Children's Health Insurance Program, called Healthy Families, to meet a $21.5 billion budget shortfall, state officials said. The program provides health insurance coverage for almost 1 million children and teens in the state who aren't eligible for Medicaid." More from TX: The Children’s Health Insurance...

Does the Second Shift still apply? I’m re-reading Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 classic in preparing a syllabus for a course on 21st Century feminism. Hochschild’s findings were clear and familiar to many women: when they get home from work, many women with children work a “second shift” of domestic and child care responsibilities. Hochschild opens her book with the iconic advertising image of a together and perfect supermom with the “flying hair,” briefcase in one hand, baby in the other. She’s got it all down: work, home, marriage. Every woman Hochschild interviews knows that image, and most of...