Just Like Us

In an epic case of What-Goes-Around-Comes-Around, Janice Min, founding editor of Us Weekly magazine (a magazine which traffics in “cute mum and baby” porn and is nearly singlehandedly responsible for introducing terms including “baby bump” and “post-baby body” into the lexicon) who helmed the junkreading juggernaut for six years and now collects her paychecks from the […]

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Are You ___ Enough?

Between “Are You Mom Enough?” (aka the extremely controversial Time Magazine breastfeeding cover) and Elisabeth Badinter’s extremely controversial book The Conflict, which cast a critical eye on the current trend (among some sets) toward attachment parenting, and the Daily Mail’s latest offense, about the “ambitious career women” who don’t want kids and “enforce childlessness” upon their partners, […]

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Declaring a Ceasefire Against Our Sisters

So, the Mommy Wars. They’re back. Again. Or still. A superquick recap: As you’ve undoubtedly heard by now, last week Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said on CNN that Republican Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s wife Ann, a stay at home mom, had “never worked a day in her life.” Naturally the Romney campaign latched on to […]

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(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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Everyone Is Wrong About You

Last week, at a reading in Seattle, WA, a young woman who’d recently graduated from none less than Harvard, raised her hand: She and her girlfriends had been so thrilled when they were accepted to the school whose name is virtually synonymous with overachievement, accomplishment, and success, she said, “it was like, this is what […]

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Botox Feminism

This week’s Newsweek poses the interesting question: Is your booty in your beauty? That is to say, do pretty people make more money (short answer: yes), and if so, should women, to quote Ru Paul, work it at work? An interesting debate, to be sure. Not least given feminism’s real–and imagined–history of trashing (and burning–that’d […]

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Unhappiness in the Time of Cougar Town

In all this analyzing we’ve been doing of the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness study, and the subsequent spinning of it courtesy of Marcus Buckingham and Maureen Dowd, there’s one point we’ve been pretty quick to gloss over: age. Not for long. I promise not to whine. But it does seem worthy of being addressed, […]

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Expectations, Part 2: Are We Our Own Worst Critics?

So I was pondering Shannon’s post yesterday about expectations, and thinking about how women today are often crushed under the weight of great ones. Then I started thinking about the ways in which those expectations lead many women to feel — or be — judged. And then, I got pinged by serendipity. First, I came […]

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