As the United States moves slowly out of the worst recession it has experienced since the Great Depression, how have employers responded? The ongoing National Study of Employers—a study of employers with 50 or more employees conducted by Families and Work Institute and released in partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management—reveals five surprising trends between 2008 (and in some cases 2005) and 2014.  → Read More

“How have you been?” That’s the universal question that comes from a chance encounter at a grocery store or kid’s baseball game with a friend you haven’t seen in a while. How do you respond?  → Read More

This week the Shriver Report launched its groundbreaking new report, A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink in Partnership with Center for American Progress which describes the tremendous problems we still have creating meaningful and rewarding work for women (often single women).  → Read More

Lucia Herrera is a 30-year-old mother of three children, with a preschooler in a Head Start program and 2-year-old twins.14 She works four days a week from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. as a family support worker at a New York City charity. This requires her to make home visits to families in the South Bronx to help them with their problems. She lives with her fiancé, but with a salary of only $28,000 a year, making ends meet has been tough.  → Read More

So many of us have spent precious time reaching for the stars, or leaning in to our careers, that we’ve forgotten how to construct a firm ground to stand on. Sadly, we often don’t have that luxury. Working full time, feeding and educating our children, caring for our parents while acting as the primary provider has left us in a vulnerable position of floating too close to the edge. Ascending that ladder to success, and learning how to dress for it once we’re there, has sent us to a satellite far away from our base. So little time, relatively speaking, is spent finding solutions as to how we can solidify ourselves, financially, emotionally and spiritually so that we don’t feel one job, one paycheck, one relationship and one prayer away from a stratospheric disaster. Houston, we have a problem.  → Read More

I recently discovered that I like to do it all, and for me, in a nutshell, that would be, writing and parenting. Being a working mom, I regularly get the question of how I “do it all,” and though I try to answer, I think this entire discourse is transforming before our eyes. “The ‘having it all’ conversation is outdated because so many of you are already doing it all,” Maria Shriver recently stated. And she is right. The question we should be posing is not about how to have it all, as Anne Marie Slaughter famously analyzed, but about how we are actually managing to juggle the constant cast of characters the play of life sends our way.  → Read More

We’re women – and we might be crazy. More on that later. We’re also mothers – six kids between us, ranging in age from 4 to 29 years old. That means we’ve changed more than 15,000 diapers, been through over 40 first (and last) days of school (from preschool to college), dealt with countless fevers, ear infections, cases of strep throat, 50 (oh, who are we kidding – more like 500) “Can you sleep with me…just for a little bit?” nights, and more than 950,000 smiles that would melt your heart. It also means we’ve experienced too many times to count where we’ve thought, “I have a wonderful life, and I want control over how I live it.”  → Read More

“Agaaaa–,” the first bit of baby noise is hushed. I only hear it because I’m back-benching so the young mother with the baby girl strapped to her chest is a few feet behind me, bouncing from side to side. Across the room from the cooing baby girl, at the front of Austin North lecture hall, the “Front Lines of Law Reform” panel consists of six alumnae luminaries discussing their work on disability rights, sex discrimination, poverty/race connection, Mexican American legal defense, and indigent defense. They range in years of experience from the class of 1988 to the class of 2005.  → Read More

When my neighbors in Oakland tried to set me up with their friend Ken in 2004, I declined. I found out later he’d declined too. We were both mid-thirties and focused on our careers, settled into the decision not to marry or have kids. Then we got to talking at a party hosted by my neighbors. We got engaged on our third date and had a daughter in the first year of being married. She’s now seven and, though she rolls her eyes at it, we call her by the nickname Bean.  → Read More