Charlotte Cowles, writing for the New York Times and who is about to take maternity leave as a freelance worker, asks “how to take family leave if you’re a freelance worker.” This question is of particular interest to me as a self-employed worker for more than thirty years (also known as an independent worker, contract worker, or gig worker). Cowles points out that this question is more important than ever because

• About 35 percent of American workers freelanced in some capacity in 2019.
• One-third of them freelanced full-time.
• Research, yet to be conducted, will probably show that the pandemic reshaped…

I remember the Beijing World Conference on Women in 1995 when Hillary Clinton created a global scandal by declaring, “Women’s rights are human rights.” Her speech was considered so outrageous that the Chinese government cut off her microphone in the middle of her speech. Clinton was the first lady at the time, and the United States government asked her to “soften” her speech, which she refused to do. There had never been a global summit on women’s rights before, and I remember hanging on every word reported about the proceedings and wishing I could be there too. As noted by…

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among other Black Americans killed by police or white citizens in 2020 and captured on video, triggered an outpouring of public support for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the summer of 2020. The obvious injustice of the killing of unarmed Black people like Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery, witnessed over and over again on the daily newscasts from the video recordings of their deaths, tipped the scales of outrage in the American public. Mariel Padilla, writing for the 19th, reports, “ Corporate America responded on an unprecedented scale.” One-third…

Let’s take this time to mark another moment of “firsts” for women, adding to the others we have recently acknowledged. We should not take these breakthroughs for granted because as Claire Cain Miller points out,

• They are a long time coming.
• Representation in positions of influence can break down stereotypes about who can be a leader.
• Research from around the world has demonstrated that the role model effect, summarized as “if you can’t see it, you can’t be it,” is especially strong for young girls.
• The identities of leaders shape which issues they pay attention to and how they do…

In previous posts, I wrote about women leaders who have made a difference because they are women. In one post, seven women heads of state around the world demonstrated clear and measurable differences in effectiveness compared to men leaders at the beginning of the pandemic by

• Telling the truth to their people (Angela Merkel of Germany and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand)
• Being decisive (Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan)
• Using technology (Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland)
• Showing empathy and compassion (Mette Frederiksen of Denmark and Erna Solberg of Norway)

In another post, I wrote about calls by feminist lawmakers for a feminist…

A recent article written by Kweilin Ellingrud for the McKinsey & Company COVID Response Center provides valuable insight into some long-term effects for women who left the workforce during the pandemic and some influences of culture and diversity on the women who left. For this case study, Ellingrud interviewed two Latina mothers who left the workforce. Farida Mercedes was a human resources executive for seventeen years at a global company and Dr. Victoria DeFrancesco Soto was a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin when they left their jobs to care for their children during the pandemic.

Ellingrud…

Much has been written about the lasting negative impact of the pandemic on women’s employment. In a previous post, I summarized several studies on the potential long-term impact of the pandemic on working mothers. Alisha Haridasani Gupta, writing for the New York Times, notes that “by February [2021], almost two million women had dropped out of the work force, bringing the female labor participation rate to its lowest level since the 1980s.” …

I was truly surprised to read about efforts by the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, to expand the rights of women in his country. Alisha Haridasani Gupta and Daniel Politi, writing for the New York Times, explain that President Fernández fulfilled a campaign promise by legalizing abortion at the end of 2020 and vows to “help mothers get back to work [after the pandemic] by building more preschools” and to fight against gender violence. …