Think Negatively!

So, you know that special brand of squelched eye-roll/mini-smirk you trot out whenever you find yourself cornered by your Positive Thinking-evangelizing sister/friend/coworker? Turns out, raining on her parade might be the best thing you can do for her. In a comical opinion piece in Sunday’s NYT that’ll make the cynic in you chuckle, Oliver Burkeman […]

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I Think Therefore I CAN!

Two new studies, just out this week, show that the brain is mightier than the baggage — especially when it comes to those stereotypes we women carry around in our backpacks.  It’s fantastic news for women, but before we dive in: Parallel parking: Good at it?  And speaking of driving: Get lost much? Stereotypes tell […]

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Gimme a Smile and Pass the Kool-Aid

Just when we thought it couldn’t get any weirder, there’s this: on-the-job happiness coaching. Kid you not. According to the Wall Street Journal, corralling employees in a conference room and showing them how to make happy is apparently the new black: Happiness coaching is seeping into the workplace. A growing number of employers, including UBS, […]

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Newsflash: Gloria Steinem Did NOT Cause The Happiness Gap

Before we put the happiness gap to bed, here’s a fitting last word: some smoking-smart commentary from Barbara Ehrenreich I found on Mother Jones. The piece is entited “Are Women Getting Sadder? Or are we all just getting a lot more gullible?” That should tip you off. Ehrenreich’s essay echoes a few of the points […]

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There’s Nothing Wrong with Women: A Guest Post by Charlotta Kratz

Charlotta Kratz, a lecturer in the communication department at Santa Clara University, takes on Marcus Buckingham and the happiness gap and scores big. Maybe the study shows there’s nothing wrong with women whatsoever. Maybe it’s the culture. THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH WOMEN by Charlotta Kratz Marcus Buckingham has written three posts on Huffington Post recently, […]

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It’s Not Me… It’s You.

The other day, a good friend who is Swedish emailed me a link  to post by Ann Charlott Altstadt, a Swedish writer who suggests that when life gets us down, we’d sometimes be better off ditching the trip to the yoga studio or the psychologist and seeing a sociologist instead. Funny, my friend said, but […]

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Men in Pink

In a meeting last week, another editor and I got to discussing the state of the food section of our paper. (Perhaps we were hungry.) He immediately went on a tangent (okay, we were hungry), talking about how he was so interested to learn recently of the history of food criticism; how the food pages, […]

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New Generation, Same Story?

Bryce Covert’s recent post on The Nation’s website got me thinking today. It’s about an Accenture survey of Gen Y working women which found that -they have the most positive outlook for women in the workplace of any other generation. And yet: -when it comes to their careers, they’re less likely to proactively manage their […]

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Feminism 2010: We’ve Only Just Begun

Are We There Yet? asks a recent Newsweek headline, with the kind of slug that leaves you with a distinctive sense of dread: In 1976, 46 women filed a landmark gender-discrimination case. Their employer was NEWSWEEK. Forty years later, their contemporary counterparts question how much has actually changed. It’s a great piece, as it shows […]

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The Amazing Race

Do you remember when you were little and you wanted a perm (okay, I’m really dating myself here), a belly ring, a tattoo, and you’d whine to your mom, “But mooooom, everyone else is doing it!” And she’d say, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?” Depending on my mood, I, smartass that […]

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