Happy Graduation: Now Go Out There and Fail!

This being graduation season, the other day I asked the over-achieving rockstars in my senior journalism capstone class what they’d most like to hear from a commencement speaker. Thankfully, I heard no references to roads not taken nor endings-versus-beginnings.  (Though I would have enjoyed a quick reference to that four-word piece of advice from the […]

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Squawking Points: The War on Women Goes Stupid.

It’s not so much the right-wingers’ war on women that pisses me off — it’s the fact that they think we’re dumb enough to buy their talking points. Case in point, a Bloomberg op-ed by Ramesh Ponnuru that attempts to make the case that the gender wage gap is nothing but nonsense: we make less […]

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Ambition, Identity, Mommy Wars, and “The Most Important Job In The World.”

Last week, I attended an alumni/student networking event at my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara. The event consisted of about 50 working professionals (I was in this camp), and 100 soon-to-be-grads, sniffing around for some intel on what the “real world” might have in store. The kids (umm – ouch — you know you’re getting […]

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What’s A Woman To Do? Avoid the Rush.

One of the problems with decisions is we sometimes make them before we’re ready. Sometimes we’ve forced ourselves into a box. Sometimes we entered that box with a skip and a smile. Sometimes it’s been a full-court press to please the iconic self. But as the saying goes: Decide in haste, repent in leisure. Quite […]

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Let’s Talk About Sex

Everyone else seems to be. They’re talking about women and sex and “Girls” and sex and feminism and sex and HBO and sex and the sexual revolution as failure and the sexual revolution as success. It feels a little weird to be writing this, honestly, being that it’s 2012 and all. But with whom and […]

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Why Women Are Worth (Less)

Recently, I came across a post on Daily Worth, a financial blog for women, written by a young woman who had just been offered a promotion at her daily newspaper: social media editor.  She was currently making $32,000, but after doing some research, realized that her new job was  worth $40,000. So she screwed up […]

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Four Years of College For, Um, This?

You bet your mortarboard. Stick with us, you’ll find out why. But first, backstory: Last month, New York Times writer David Leonhardt slapped the debate about the value of our American college-for-all ethos smack-dab on our collective kitchen table. Ever since, knickers have been in a bundle all across the interwebs as readers, reporters, students, […]

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The Treadmill, Redux: Good-bye, Adolescence

If developmental psychologists have it right, that adolescence is the time we lay the groundwork for the grown-up we will someday become, and if they also have it right that adolescence now extends well into the twenty-somethings, what’s up with the new plan to usher kids out of high school in two years? Well, not […]

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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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Feminista: Undecided Talks Feminism, Choices, and Having It All with Author Erica Kennedy

Readers, we’ve missed you, but we promise we’re back — and we’ve returned bearing gifts, in the form of a Q&A with the sharp, funny, honest, and slightly potty-mouthed author Erica Kennedy, whose first novel, Bling, is a New York Times Bestseller. But we bring her to you because Sydney, the main character in her […]

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