Mother’s Day is Over – But Pregnancy Discrimination Isn’t
Stories of discrimination against pregnant women in the workplace are all too common, and that’s why we need the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), which was introduced in Congress today.
Despite the passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act over 30 years ago, which prohibits discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, some employers continue to deny pregnant women the minor job modifications that could protect not only a woman’s pregnancy but also a family’s economic security, forcing pregnant women out of their jobs.
The PWFA would make it crystal clear to employers that they can’t treat pregnant women worse than other workers who have certain job limitations and instead must make reasonable accommodations if doing so doesn’t pose an undue hardship on the business.
...read moreOkay, lay off Beyonce, already.
So we know that Beyonce’s numerous sins include dressing sexy, being married, and saying that girls run the world when that isn’t technically true. But did you also know she’s singlehandedly responsible for luring young girls into sexual exploitation?
...read moreStates Fight Back Against Pregnancy Discrimination
This is a guest post by Lenora M. Lapidus, Director, ACLU Women’s Rights Project, and Ariela Migdal, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU Women’s Rights Project. The ACLU Women’s Rights Project (WRP) is dedicated to ensuring that all women can lead lives of dignity free from violence and discrimination, including discrimination based on gender stereotypes.
...read moreYou know what? Go for it. Do it! Compliment women!
So last week, President Obama delivered an inappropriate compliment to California Attorney General Kamala Harris — inappropriate not because it was insulting or prurient but because, well, it concerned her appearance, and they were at a political event, and that’s not the place you talk about a woman’s appearance. He said:
She’s brilliant and she’s dedicated, she’s tough. She also happens to be, by far, the best-looking attorney general. … It’s true! C’mon.
he apologized for it.
But some people don’t like to hear important men apologize for stuff. At Jezebel, Lindy West responds to Washington Times columnist Jack Engelhard, who is pissed that Obama apologized because just for a moment, just for one shining moment, it seemed okay for Engelhard to do any damn thing he wanted without taking any time out to consider the feelings of women. Luckily, West provides for us a handy list of times when it’s appropriate to compliment a woman so you don’t have to go to jail over it.
...read moreHow to write about lady-scientists (e.g., stuff they cook that ISN’T dinner)
Yvonne Brill was a genius of rocket propulsion, a “pioneering spirit,” and — above all — a monster with some beef and noodles.
...read moreWelcome to Neverland, Inc.
Losse rightly calls out Sandberg’s vision as a kind of business feminism that doesn’t look much different from regular boys’ business for girls; as she says, Lean In “teaches women more about how to serve their companies than it teaches companies about how to be fairer places for women to work.” Losse seems to be holding out for something closer to a feminist business. But there may be an even bigger problem than this, since Silicon Valley’s tech industry isn’t just Neverland–it’s Neverland, Inc., a place where Peter Pan CEOs carry out corporate-centered policies and politics that are bad for all workers.
...read moreAdria Richards, Sexual Assault and Victim-Blaming
Over at the Guardian, I’m writing about Adria Richards, and how victim-blaming for cyber harassment parallels victim-blaming in rape cases:
...read moreOf course it’s possible to disagree with Richards’ actions while still focusing on the real problem: misogyny online and in tech spaces. But it’s really not possible to pontificate at length on what Richards should have done without obscuring the fact that when women speak out, we’re met with rape threats.
Surrogacy, paying for pregnancy and whose rights end where
This entire story about a surrogate mother, Chrystal Kelley, pregnant with a fetus with severe abnormalities, is disturbing and heartbreaking. A low-income woman, desperate for money, agreed to be a surrogate for a wealthier family, something she had done before. Everyone was excited. Then, an ultrasound showed the fetus had several abnormalities — heart problems, organ problems. The parents, who had given birth to two premature babies before and knew the difficulties of raising children with health issues, wanted to terminate the pregnancy. Kelley did not.
...read moreCentering Sex Worker Voices
Unsurprisingly, the two recent threads on sex work are… active. There’s a lot of push-back (especially to mine) in the comments, so I want to address a few things. First, I stand by what I wrote in the post. But second, I did an inadequate job of focusing on the more important issue: Making life safer, here and now, for sex workers.
...read moreTip your servers
Laura Beck is right — if you’re budgeting to go out to eat, you need to include a tip in that. And you need to tip even if your waitress isn’t as pleasant as you’d like, and even if the service is imperfect. It is a gender issue, and servers (who are disproportionately female) need tips to make a living wage. I also suspect that female servers are more often on the receiving end of a bad tip for not adequately stroking a diner’s ego — not laughing enough at his jokes, not flirting back, not smiling. So tip! Yes, 20%, even if the service was mediocre.
...read moreDivorcing ourselves from traditional marriage
My latest column in the Guardian is about the latest move from a group of conservatives to call a truce on gay marriage and get back to blaming single moms and poor people for destroying marriage itself. They say that poor and middle-class people aren’t getting married, and that’s hurting them financially and socially, keeping them poor. I say that working-class and middle-class people are marrying less often precisely because of economic insecurity: Outdated views of men as breadwinners mean that men who aren’t making enough to support a family may be less enthusiastic about marriage; increases in gender equality mean that working women no longer need to get married for social status and may not want to take on a husband who doesn’t pull his own weight inside the home and out; and with divorce being financially ruinous for women in particular, it’s probably a good idea to avoid marriage if you aren’t reasonably sure you’re hitching yourself to a good horse. If conservatives actually care about the things they say are the purpose of marriage — a good environment for children, family stability, accumulation of personal wealth — then they should support policies that directly promote those things instead of claiming marriage is the one and only solution, because it’s clearly not. A taste:
...read more
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