Ka-ching: The Cost of The Time-out.

Apparently, when it comes to the wage gap, it’s the time-out that kicks us in the pocketbook. That’s the word from labor economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, experts on the gender wage discrepancy, answering questions in Thursday’s NYTimes Freakonomics column. They’ve got some darn good data. If you’re a numbers geek like me, you’ll [...]

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30-Something… And Over It?

Earlier this week, I got an email from Feminista author/blogger Erica Kennedy (you remember the interview I did with her back in December), asking if I’d seen this item in the UK’s Daily Mail, a trend piece about (unmarried, non-mom) women opting out of the rat race in favor of waiting tables, walking dogs, and QT [...]

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Want Happy? Try Sad!

Frankly, all this hype about happy is making me sad. It’s not enough we have folks like Marcus Buckingham telling us how to be happy — and making us feel guilty because we are not. Or the incessant volleys about the paradox of women’s declining happiness. But, frankly, despite the wealth of books, blogs, life [...]

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Too Many Options? Let Your Sisters Decide For You

So, if you’ve spent much time on this blog, you know that the issue of too many choices tends to come up from time to time. (Like, daily.) As do the kind of offhand musings that naturally follow a riff on the perils of option overload: like, oh, it would be so much easier if [...]

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Sandra Tsing Loh Wants a Wife. Me, too.

So it’s about 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. I just stuffed some lemon, garlic, and fresh rosemary and thyme up into the nether regions of Rocky, a free range chicken, who is now doing serious time in a very hot oven. My husband, casting about for something to do during halftime of the second NFL playoff, [...]

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A Rant About Clay Shirky

It’s not that I’m a whiner. But, well, today has found my panties in an unmitigated bunch. Why? NYU prof Clay Shirky’s recent blog post, entitled “A Rant About Women.” Though the title is plenty irksome in its own right, it’s the content that truly grates. In it, unsurprisingly, we find yet another instance of [...]

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401K, Hold the Starch?

Had it to here with that old second shift? How about this for a solution: Workplace benefits packages that include housework — as well as healthcare? That’s what two Stanford professors proposed in an article published this week in the current issue of Academe. They argue that one way for universities to keep more women [...]

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I Do. No I Don’t. Or Do I?

Marriage. It’s what brings us together, today… It is, after all, the Mother of all decisions–I mean, when we’re in the market for a car, a house, a job, or a sandwich, must we pronounce our love and fidelity to the Passat or the Pastrami til death do us part? Of course not. (And thank [...]

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Slaying the Dragon. For Real

Sometimes we need to step back and grab ourselves a little perspective. Sure, we all complain and kvetch about how difficult we have it, trying to make our way in the male-dominated world of work when we never learned to slay the dragon. But how about, just for today, we consider ourselves lucky Because nothing [...]

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The Choice is Yours: A Happy Life or An Interesting One

As Americans, we put quite a bit of stock in happiness. Our founding fathers even name its pursuit as an inalienable right–up there with life and liberty. And I challenge you to find a person who’d answer the question “Do you want to be happy?” with an “Eh, I could take it or leave it.” [...]

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