(Wo)men at Work: Winning the Confidence Game.

Out here in Silicon Valley, you can’t cross the street without bumping into an engineer.  And what you find is that three our of four of them are men.  As Shankar Vedantam once reported in Slate: The gender distribution of engineers at top Silicon Valley companies is similar to the gender distribution of the audience at [...]

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You’ll Never Work In this Town Again!

Surely you’ve heard about that million dollar lawsuit against Amazon filed by an anonymous actress who claims that Internet Movie Database (which is owned by Amazon) damaged her ability to get work because it published her age.  According to the Daily Dot, the lawsuit claimed: “If one is perceived to be ‘over-the-hill,’ i.e., approaching 40, [...]

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So, What Do You Do?

A perfectly reasonable question, right? It’s social shorthand for “who are you?” a convenient fall-back in the face of awkward silence or prolonged mingling; polite, simple, safe chit-chat. Um, right? Well, consider: A couple of years ago, I reconnected with an old friend who’d since moved to Alaska. I asked him what it was like [...]

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What’s In A Word?

More than you might think. Especially for us women, who are often sabotaged by words in ways most of us don’t even recognize.  Language, says Santa Clara University professor Laura Ellingson, an expert on gendered communication, can shape our thoughts and perceptions, uphold double standards, and reinforce stereotypes. Half the time, we don’t even notice. [...]

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Self, How Did I Get Here?

 Last week during all the memorializing of Apple founder/college dropout/cultural visionary Steve Jobs, I found myself watching the commencement speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005 — and, in all that wisdom, one line in particular gave me the chills: Don’t Live Someone Else’s Life, he said. Actually, what he said was: Your time [...]

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Why We Are All Fashion Victims

In the ever-escalating fetishization of the female form, I was left scratching my head once again when I opened the latest issue of Newsweek to find a quick take on Paris Fashion Week. The story focused on the untimely collapse of a few high-rent benches at the Balenciaga show. News, right? But what sent me [...]

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Why Women Need to Be the Ones Occupying Wall Street

What’s the Occupy Wall Street movement–an ongoing, multi-city protest against corporate greed, cronyism and inequity–got to do with gender politics, you ask? I say: everything. The movement’s rallying cry is this: We are the 99%. As in, 1% of the population holds the bulk of the wealth and the power in this country, leaving 99% [...]

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