It had been 18 years since Donna Kassman had looked for a job, and the search wasn’t going well for the veteran attorney. Eventually she would abandon her search and start her own business in her Bedford home. Kassman is a University of Michigan graduate who also has a law degree from Hofstra University. For nearly two decades she worked…
Ever since I was in high school, I’ve spent a significant amount of my free time reading. I read in a range of subjects, including novels, history, and cultural criticism, but my favorite category is biography. This lifelong hobby made Chloe Angyal’s recent article, “Why Don’t Men Read Books By Women,” all the more unsettling. Angyal begins her piece by describing…
On April 15, thousands of workers and their allies rallied for better wages. The Fight for $15 has expanded from a small group of fast food workers to thousands of retail employees, child care workers, home care providers, and adjunct professors. Indeed, news outlets are now reporting on how presidential campaigns will respond to the movement. On this blog, both Inayat Hemani and Jenn Siegel have described the…
With Tax Day looming, it’s easy to overlook another important mid-April date: Equal Pay Day. Today marks the twentieth time Americans will celebrate Equal Pay Day, which was originated by the National Committee on Equal Pay as a date to raise awareness about the gender wage gap. The date falls in April because it symbolizes how far into the following…
The media is currently saturated with news about the Ellen Pao trial (which my colleagues have written about here and here) and Rolling Stone Magazine’s journalistic errors in its November article about a gang rape at UVA. In different ways, both of these topics highlight one common problem: the unfortunate amount of weight placed on sensationalized stories. Ellen Pao’s claims centered on “soft discrimination,”…
Last month was big for those interested in the fight for gender equity in the workplace, as two largely publicized cases reached important turning points. On Wednesday, March 25, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of Peggy Young in her pregnancy discrimination case against her employer, UPS. On Friday, March 27, 2015, a jury found against Ellen Pao in her gender…
Sometimes lost in the discussion about the wage gap between male and female workers is the role of race. Though white women earn a mere 78% of what their male counterparts earn in America, the gap is far greater for women of color. African American women earn 64%, American Indian women earn 59%, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders earn 65%, and Latina women…
As you may have seen, Google’s homepage. Referred to by Albert Einstein as the “most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced” by intuitions educating women, Noether’s Theorem, and her other contributions, proved foundational to theoretical physics. Reading about the remarkable accomplishments of Emmy Noether, I was stuck that I had never heard of her. It does not seem a far…
My colleague Jennifer Siegel wrote about the Fast Food Forward, or Fight for $15, campaign a few months ago. The campaign calls for fast food restaurants to raise their employees’ wages to $15 an hour. At the time, Jennifer noted some of the victories the movement had achieved in the form of state legislation raising minimum wages. This week, the movement…
Recently, the California Supreme Court posthumously granted Hong Yen Chang admission to the California Bar – reversing a 125-year-old decision that denied his application because of his race and national origin. (Read the Court’s decision here; read more about the case here, here, and here.) Chang was born in China and immigrated to the United States in 1872. He graduated from Andover, Yale, and…