From Maria Shriver’s groundbreaking multi-platform The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From The Brink in partnership with Center For American Progress comes an emotional film in partnership with HBO Documentary Films that will ignite a conversation in the nation about the story of our time, told through the life of one woman, Katrina Gilbert, whose daily struggles illuminate the challenges faced by 42 million women and the 28 million children who depend on them. PAYCHECK TO PAYCHECK: THE LIFE & TIMES OF KATRINA GILBERT offers a deeply personal, unvarnished and moving story of Katrina Gilbert, a single mom of three, struggling to get ahead but constantly getting knocked back by a system that almost seems designed to see her fail. The documentary premieres Monday, March 17th at 9pm on HBO.  → Read More

The key to leading a joy-filled life comes from finding inner peace. So says His Holiness the Dalai Lama. I had the chance to speak with His Holiness and introduce him to a large gathering at The Forum this past week here in Los Angeles.  → Read More

As a kid, I remember seeing the Virginia Slims commercials targeting women with the slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby,” on the television of our home in rural Georgia. It was 1968, a time when cigarettes could still be pitched on TV and the women’s movement was in full swing on the way to passage of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972. Forty years ago, only 1 in 3 American workers was a woman; today, it’s 1 in 2. In many ways, American women have come a long way. If only this were true in the rest of the world.  → Read More

Growing up in Caribou, Maine, a small rural town and farming community that is the northernmost city in the continental United States, women were told that we had two choices – who we were going to marry and how many children we were going to have. My mother, who had twelve siblings and never left Caribou, always felt that her future had been capped. And she made it her life’s mission to make sure the same didn’t happen to me.  → Read More

If you focus on bringing in interns to do grunt work, you’re doing it wrong. If you hire on the premise that they can single-handedly elevate your entire brand’s presence for free, you’re even more in the red here. Interns need a confident, responsible manager to guide these women along on their chosen career path. The manager is the root behind the internship and can really make all the difference when it comes to enriching this experience for everyone involved.  → Read More

Not too long ago, a group of activists at my university were organizing an annual event called “Take Back the Night“, which is an internationally held march and rally intended as a protest and direct action against rape,rape culture and other forms of sexual violence. As the organizers wrote, “Take Back the Night” will be an opportunity “to heal, resist, and speak out and is for those of you who are constantly silenced and harmed at this school… to reclaim voice in spaces that keep trying to suppress it, spaces keeping you unsafe”. I was following a Facebook feed that the organizers had started and was soon frustrated by how dark the comments turned. The context of the recent well-publicised attacks on women added fuel to the fire. What struck me as particularly frustrating were the responses by mostly men who were arguing, reasoning, shaming, shouting, pleading and blindly clawing their way out of any sense of shared responsibility for what was happening on campus.  → Read More

When was the last time you talked to your boss about your breasts? Breastfeeding and working is no longer an exception for new mothers. It is no longer a valiant few women, secretly locked in closets with breast pumps: it’s the new reality of an America where women are all at once breadwinners and, for the first few months to few years of a baby’s life, milk-makers.  → Read More

We certainly don’t buy into a business plan that bases a woman’s success on marrying a wealthy husband, but apparently some people still do. Recently, two separate posts caught our attention online, both on the subject of women making sexists remarks about the success of other women. The first comment was in a a February 20th Facebook post by best-selling author, Elizabeth Gilbert where she noted that, “In the past year, I have overheard no fewer than four women in my personal acquaintance suggest that their lives would be completely solved (and that their creative potential would be completely realized) if only they had married (or could marry) a rich man.”  → Read More