I sometimes use my experiences as PunditGirl’s mother as a lens through which to view issues that are important to me.  But PunditGirl isn’t the only daughter in my life.  I also have two adult step-daughters.  They don’t need me much at this stage of the game — they’re women with their own professional lives and relationships and, yes, one of them is married with a toddler of her own — another girl.

The presence of three different generations of girls in my life colors how I view this day — Women’s Equality Day — that many are celebrating.  And it’s not a happy color.  I was tempted not to write anything about Women’s Equality Day because, in all honesty, I can’t think about it without laughing and crying at the same time.

Equality?  We’re not even close.

Sure, we’ve come a long way, as the saying goes, but that doesn’t acknowledge just how far we still have to go for anything resembling true equality for women in America.  President Obama issued a proclamation yesterday stating that although women have achieved a lot in terms of gaining the vote and participating in politics that “disparities remain.”

So how does he explain to his daughters and mine why more isn’t being done to fix that once and for all?

Nothing close to equal pay for equal work exists for women.  While the president did sign the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, he and his administration have dragged their feet on making the Paycheck Fairness Act — one that would mandate equal pay — a priority, notwithstanding their continued promises to do so.  Ledbetter only gives women (and men) additional rights to sue for back pay and benefits after they find out they’ve been discriminated against.  Various commissions and committees established to promote, study or advance the idea of paying people fairly and equally for the same work only delay real change.

Women are still fighting to be treated equally and fairly in the workplace when it comes to getting paid sick days and paid family leave for the birth or adoption of a child or to care for other family members.  In order to have flexibility in some jobs to manage the work/life balance dance, there are women who agree to be paid only 80 percent of full wages, even though they’re really working 120 percent, putting in time at home once the kids are in bed, just to get the scheduling flexibility they need without the fear of losing their job.

Women are still fighting for fair treatment when it comes to health care — some men on Capitol Hill still believe that health insurance shouldn’t have to cover maternity benefits, and coverage for injuries from domestic violence incidents can still be denied under some policies pre-existing condition language.

Women are still less than 20 percent of Congress, women publish less than 20 percent of op-eds in major newspapers, and women are still significantly less than half of governors, as well as law firm and accounting firm partners.  Women might make up close to 50 percent of the workforce these days, but that is hardly the equality we’ve been looking for or deserve.

So how do I explain all that to my daughters and, yes, to my granddaughter when she’s old enough to understand?  My stepdaughters are adults and know that things are the way they are.  But PunditGirl, as she enters middle school, still believes the story we tell all our kids — that boys and girls can do the exact same things if they want.  Which is true in a limited way.  We as parents don’t have the nerve to tell our daughters that they’ll only get paid three-quarters of what the boys make.  We conveniently leave out the part that as girls they will face obstacles, barriers and ceilings, both glass and cement, that I had assumed in my girlhood we wouldn’t have to worry about anymore in the 21st century.

In his proclamation, President Obama stated:

Women’s rights are ultimately human rights, and the march for equality will not end until full parity and equal opportunity are attained in every State and workplace across our Nation.  It remains our responsibility to ensure that the principles of justice and equality apply to all Americans, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, or socioeconomic status.  If we stay true to our founding ideals and the example of those who insisted upon nothing less than full equality, we can and will perpetuate the line of progress that runs throughout our Nation’s history for generations to come.

I agree with all of that and to have the President of the United States acknowledge that women’s rights are human rights is crucial to making any strides for true equality.  But it’s time for the President and others who use these words to take actions that make them a reality.

So forgive for not inviting you all over for a Women’s Equality Day celebration.  I’ll save my party for the day when the idea of a governmental commemoration devoted to women’s equality is as ridiculously outdated as those 1980′s power suits with the big shoulder pads they said I had to wear to be viewed as “equal” to my male colleagues.

Image by Joanne Bamberger.  All rights reserved.

That was the practical upshot of the ruling in the highly-watched case Dukes v. Wal-mart.

I used a similar phrase a short time ago when SCOTUS declined to hear the appeal of the Texas cheerleader who was dismissed from her high school squad for refusing to cheer for the student who had allegedly raped her.  The denial of SCOTUS upheld the message sent by the lower courts — as a cheerleader, you’re a hand-picked mouthpiece for the school’s message, so you have to say what they tell you to say (even about your attacker) or get out.

Now, in the most activist judicial move I’ve seen in a long time, the Supreme Court dismissed the class action suit Dukes v. Wal-mart sending that same message to the women of Wal-mart by ruling that a class of 1.5 million plaintiffs was just too big for evidence of gender discrimination to be  “common” to all of them — one of the basic requirements in a class action lawsuit.   Few legal watchers, including this one, were surprised at that outcome.  But digging deeper into the 5-4 opinion penned by Antonin “the Constitution doesn’t protect women against discrimination” Scalia, you’ll find that Scalia turned a procedural case into the latest substantive attack on women.

Scalia exercised his judicial activism, which he claims to hate when it comes to his right-wing sensibilities, and actually changed the standard for what potential class action plaintiffs have to show before they can make it to trial.  Before yesterday, plaintiffs needed to allege certain common facts or issues among members of the class to get past the potential dismissal stage.  Now, thanks to Justice Scalia, the ante has been upped and plaintiffs must actually prove a common harm, not just allege facts that would support it, before they can move past the pleading stage.   Scalia’s opinion addressed the procedural questions it had to and then swiftly and deftly in just a few pages, made it clear, yet again, that blind justice isn’t blind at all and, apparently, is on the side of big corporate political donors and the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Of course, not wanting to disappoint, Scalia took it even further in an amazingly laughable paragraph, claiming that there were no facts under which the women of Wal-mart could have been discriminated against in the first place because Wal-mart had a written policy banning gender discrimination:

“… [managers] left to their own devices in any corporation — and surely most managers in a corporation that forbids sex discrimination  — would select sex-neutral, performance-based criteria for hiring and promotion that produce no actionable disparity at all.”

Let me know when you’re done rolling on the floor laughing.  See what happens to one’s view of the real world when you’re holed up in those judicial ivory towers for so long?  Soon, the facts of real life play no part in judicial rulings that impact, oh, pretty much everyone’s real lives.

In the dissent, the three women justices — Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — were joined by Justice Stephen Breyer in pointing out all the legal flaws and holes in Scalia’s opinion.  I had held out some hope that that the female bloc of justices would prevail on their male colleagues, as Ginsberg did in the strip search case of a middle school girl a few years ago, that a male-oriented lens doesn’t always provide the most accurate view of the facts before them.  Or that an “official” corporate policy against gender discrimination doesn’t mean that discriminatory practices aren’t being allowed — or encouraged — to happen.  Ginsberg recounted in her dissenting opinion, as she has in the past, that one of the best examples of how gender issues play out even when there is an anti-discrimination policy involved a case about symphony orchestra hiring practices.  Orchestras didn’t think they were discriminating against women musicians until they were required to hold all auditions with candidates behind a screen.  And guess what — more women were hired because they could only be judged by their performance and not any other factors, like gender.

Long-held, and faulty, societal views that men are more reliable, that women will quit a job when they have babies, that once women have children they’re not as committed as men, and that men are the chief support of families so they should get paid more, enable men who still run the show in corporate America to keep practices in place that allow them to be surrounded by others like them.  And those things, my friends, are often impossible to prove.  Look how long it took Lilly Ledbetter to show she had been discriminated against.    But that’s what the Supreme Court majority, Wal-mart and the corporate world want — to deal with these issues on a case by case basis because they know that few employees can afford to hire an attorney on their own meager salaries to fight an employer or a corporate giant for what’s right.

Those in the politically conservative world will pound the drum claiming this was merely a procedural case and direct attention to the portion of the Wal-mart decision that was unanimous, which only addressed whether the plaintiffs had plead their case correctly on damages.  The 5-4 decision that is at the heart of this national employment crisis is the over-stepping of the right wing of the court to stretch a procedural case to change substantive law in a way that adversely impacts today’s majority of breadwinners — women.

I’ve never been a believer in reincarnation, but today I’ve got my fingers crossed that, if it exists, Scalia and the others in the Wal-mart majority come back in their next lives as Wal-mart women.  Now that would be justice.

Image via National Women’s Law Center.

Sure, I get to leave the dishes in the sink and the dirty laundry in the hamper today. And it’s great that “some people” (you know who you are!) are going to make me dinner tonight, but on the tenth anniversary of being able to celebrate Mother’s Day as a mother myself, I’ve been thinking of some things about babies and children and motherhood for which I am eternally grateful:

1. The Pill. It’s the 50th anniversary of this amazing medical feat and, in many ways, my life as it is today is a direct result of that miracle. Yes, I think The Pill was a miracle. For me, it wasn’t about being a wild teen or crazy college co-ed who was sowing wild oats and didn’t want to be bothered with responsibility. Ask anyone who knew me in my teen years and they would roll on the floor laughing (their A’s off) at the thought that my name would be used in a sentence with either the word “wild” or “crazy.” Unless I was talking about Steve Martin. But I digress.

The word “dating” didn’t get a lot of use when it came to describing my life then, either. But I did start dating in college and, though I don’t know how I’m ever going to explain this to PunditGirl, I got married the first time when I was 19. Not a good choice for many reasons. But I am thankful every day that in that short, two-year marriage I did not get pregnant. If I’d had a baby at that point in my life, I can only imagine how much harder it would have been to get out of a truly bad situation and what that would have meant for my life — and my child’s life going forward.

2. Roe v. Wade. I came of age in the era just after the Supreme Court ruled that women had a Constitutional right to have an abortion. Don’t think that I wasn’t also grateful for that knowledge every day during my first marriage, even when I was on The Pill, that if I had still gotten pregnant (hey, no birth control works 100 percent of the time), that I had the right not to bring a child into the world when I was in the midst of an abusive relationship. Today, as a woman of a certain age (as I was called recently on Twitter!) looking back, I’m not sure if I ever would have exercised my right to end a pregnancy, but I certainly felt much more in control of my destiny knowing that I had that right.

3. The Women of Newsweek (and so many like them). When some brave, young women filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against Newsweek for not allowing women to be reporters, I was an impressionable 12-year-old (not so much older than PunditGirl is now. YIKES!) I was reminded about their brave act recently when I was asked to moderate a panel with some current Newsweek journalists who wrote about that lawsuit. Without those “women’s libbers” forging the way for me while I was still pondering pre-algebra and just how long I was going to have to wear those darn braces (trust me, they weren’t the fashion statement then as they are today), my ability to major in political science and dream of taking over Tom Brokaw’s job one day wouldn’t even have been on the table. While not directly related to motherhood, their desire for professional lives and their commitment to fight for that was all the proof I needed that it was okay to think about motherhood later. Which was a very good thing for me.

4. Women online. My sisters on Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and group blogs were there for me after I became what CNN recently called an “older mother.” Being in the ‘burbs with a baby, I felt pretty alone. I’d been in the workplace for over 20 years as a reporter then as a lawyer before I became PunditGirl’s mom. Most of the women I knew were still in the office 60 hours a week. I found myself without a job shortly after we returned from China with our new daughter and I didn’t know any other moms of young children. And I was woefully unschooled then in the ways of play groups and Gymboree. When I started my mom journey, I was unprepared for a lot of things and there were plenty of times when I wished that there was a Xanax in the house, especially when our three-year-old screamed with night terrors and I was afraid someone would hear her and call the police, thinking that only a child who was being beaten could make noises like that.

Thank goodness for the wonderful, amazing women I’ve met online who became my lifeline. All of a sudden, just by reading their stories, I knew I wasn’t the only one. And then I met some. And then I met some more. And they became my friends and they helped me in many ways. (I purposely left out site links to my amazing sisters in social media because inevitably I would have forgotten someone and would not want to hurt anyone’s feelings, especially on Mother’s Day).

Aside from being grateful for these things, I will continue to fight to keep access to effective birth control, abortion and equal pay for equal work so that one ten-year-old girl I know won’t have to worry about them quite as much as I did. I’m hoping she’ll find her own way in the world of women and friendship!

5. And, of course, last, but not least, I’m grateful for “some people.”

Because without them, well, I can’t even imagine that life.

Photo by PunditMom, all rights reserved.

Welcome the latest installment Mothers of Intention!  Pleas welcome Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple, the authors of the new book, Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood.  While I haven’t had a chance to dig into this book yet, I’m looking forward to it because I’ve been following Becky and Hollee for a long time in their role as advocates for finding a better way to manage work and family in their writing for the ABA Journal.  I know they’re going to have some awesome insights into the path so many of us are trying to navigate — how to keep our sanity in our family and professional lives.

One day last summer, Hollee pulled out of an Ohio campground, excited to be on her way to Chicago.

She’d been enjoying a family reunion at Lake Hope State Park, but she was ready for a bug-free wireless connection and some quality urban time with Becky. The ride took longer than the 1 hour and 27 minutes promised, but Hollee had given herself plenty of time. She parked in the extended lot and shuttled her way to the gate.

That’s when she punched in her confirmation code and got this message: “Sorry, but you can’t check in until 24 hours before your flight.” She knew she was early, but she thought it was more like two hours. Turns out that she’d driven to the airport on the wrong day.

When she returned to camp — having soothed her embarrassment with a stop at Starbucks — her eight-year-old son greeted her with a bear hug.

“Can you believe I made such a big mistake?” Hollee asked him.

That was her redemption moment. The chance to show Gideon that it’s OK to screw up.

When we aim for perfection as parents, we do our children — and ourselves — a disservice. It’s not good for them, and it’s not good for us. And, yet, ours is a generation that often treats motherhood like a competitive sport — aiming to be perfect moms who create perfect children.

The quest for perfection is our generation’s single greatest obstacle to juggling work and family — and, often, it keeps us from achieving the dreams that mean the most to us. That’s one of the biggest findings from the nationwide survey of working moms we conducted for Good Enough Is the New Perfect: Finding Happiness and Success in Modern Motherhood.

In fact, the respondents who took a “good enough” approach at work and home were more likely to be satisfied with their choices, less likely to feel they’d sacrificed too much, and less likely to describe their marriages as a “disaster” or “not very good.” And — this is the best part — they’d given up surprisingly little professional ground to achieve this state of contentment. These women hadn’t settled for second best — they’d simply stopped beating themselves up and scrambling to meet other people’s definitions of success.

We do not need to be perfect to be successful. And nor do our children.

Ellen Galinsky, the president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute and the author of Mind in the Making, makes a good point about this. When we model perfection, she told us, we teach our kids a heartbreaking and dangerous lesson: Mistakes are unacceptable.

Children who wither when confronted with challenges view their abilities as fixed — once they fall short, it’s very hard for them to rebound. On the other hand, kids who develop a “growth” mindset believe they can improve (in ability and intelligence) over time and with practice. They view new challenges as fun and exciting.

So when Gideon asked Hollee last summer whether the airport mix-up was her first mistake (insert laughter here), she reminded him of several others and told him how she’d overcome them.

She laughed about her three-hour detour through the woods and back and talked about the upside: The Temple family got to spend the rest of the evening together and Hollee brought back some Silly Bandz. And when she headed back to the airport the next day, she felt like he was a step closer to that growth mindset she’s trying to foster.

Which, as far as we’re concerned, is perfect.

You can read more Mothers of Intention voices in just a few weeks, and you won’t need a computer to do it!

Technically, the only issue to be determined by the Supreme Court is whether a class of plaintiffs can be this big.  That’s some good, wonky procedural stuff for recovering lawyers like me!  But as SCOTUS watchers know, that fact that a relatively narrow question is before them hasn’t always stopped the the highest court in the land from crafting decisions that go beyond the stated issue, so the question of gender discrimination is likely to have an impact on the final outcome.

And that’s where the personal experiences of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan come in — three women who, undoubtedly, have experienced gender discrimination in their professional lives and can use that lens through which to persuade the testosterone side of the bench to see things differently.

Justice Ginsburg, as the only woman on the bench in 2006, wasn’t able to persuade her male colleagues that Lilly Ledbetter was owed $365,000 in back pay and benefits that were denied her by her longtime employer, Goodyear. But in a later case, Ginsburg was successful in convincing her eight male colleagues that there is a serious difference between being a teen boy dealing with school locker room antics and a teen girl who’s been asked to strip for a drug search in her principal’s office in Safford Unified School District vs. Savana Redding. Following the oral arguments in the case about whether Redding’s constitutional rights had been violated, Ginsburg lamented:

“They have never been a 13-year-old girl . . . It’s a very sensitive age for a girl. I didn’t think that my colleagues, some of them, quite understood.”

When it comes to the upcoming Wal-Mart case, it’s probably safe to say that the men on the Supreme Court can’t quite understand the subtle realities of gender discrimination in the workplace because they’ve never been a target, though I’d be interested in hearing what their wives and daughters have to say about their experiences.  But Ginsburg has been very open about her experiences having to hide her pregnancies for fear losing her job. While Justices Sotomayor and Kagan have been more circumspect about how the legacy of gender discrimination may have impacted their careers, there’s no question that having three women on the Supreme Court for the first time ever will play a significant role in the behind-the-scenes judicial discussions that take place on the Wal-mart case, just as having an outraged Ginsburg did for Savana Redding.

Reports of the oral arguments indicate that even the women justices have concerns about how to manage this case as a class action.  But the menfolk asked questions suggesting that maybe the merits of the case should just be viewed through the lens of a few “bad apples.”  After all, one justice said, even if Wal-mart has policies against gender discrimination in place, that doesn’t mean a handful of supervisors won’t discriminate from time to time.

Except that was the argument that the world of symphony orchestras made when women musicians contended they were being discriminated against in favor of men.  Those doing the hiring said, “NONSENSE! We’re merely applying the same criteria to everyone and you ladies are falling short.”  Then, women were successful in advocating for “blind” auditions – those hiring musicians would not be able to see the performer while they played and would only be able to assess the applicant on the music they heard.  And you know what happened?  Increasing numbers of women were hired and those making the decisions were shocked that they were, whether on purpose or not, favoring the men applicants.  Their purportedly objective standards were tainted by subjective attitudes.

We all know how that goes in the real world.

Since we know that the uber-conservatives on the court have taken liberties in the recent past about broadening the legal questions to be addressed, it would come as no surprise if any opinion issued also tries to slap down existing law on gender discrimination suits.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the three women justices can at least keep any decisions focused on the procedural question about whether a class of plaintiffs can be this big — whether they can, in fact, share the common injuries and similar situations that are required to meet the test.  Because then we can move on to the real issue — how to explain away the facts that women, as a general matter, get paid less and promoted less than the men of Wal-mart.

What do you say — Judi Dench in 2012?

And I think Daniel Craig might look better as a redhead.

So when labor statistics suggest that moves to weaken unions at the state and local level would impact women more than men, it’s tough not to judge Gov. Scott Walker’s (R-Wis.) apparent union-busting crusade as anything other than the latest swipe at American women.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 61 percent of local government workers and 52 percent of state government employees are women. Broken down further, the information gathered by the IWPR from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that public sector employees who are teachers, nurses, administrative assistants, secretaries and teacher’s assistants — jobs that are primarily held by women — have the highest rate of union membership.

When those statistics are viewed in conjunction with Walker’s statements that Wisconsin union members who are police and firefighters — professions that are still heavily male-dominated — would be exempt from his plan, it seems clear that efforts to cut union wages and benefits, as well as collective bargaining rights, would put women at the back of the economic line more so than men.

So what happens next?  That’s what I’m pondering today over at Politics Daily.

The good news is that it’s the first comprehensive report in about 50 years that presents an overall picture of how women are faring in a variety of areas, including economic well-being, education, family status, employment, health, and crime and violence. The bad news is that, according to Rebecca Blank, the acting deputy secretary for the Commerce Department, the report contains no truly new data, but rather is a compilation and statistical analysis of already existing information.

I’m sure it was a herculean effort to compile and analyze the massive amounts of information from a spectrum of government departments and agencies to produce this report that Valerie Jarrett, Senior Advisor to President Obama and the Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, called a “guidepost” for moving forward on initiatives to advance the cause of women and girls. But after a 30-minute conference call to discuss the report and its impact, it’s still unclear exactly what the Obama administration will use this 97-page report for.

Jarrett repeatedly mentioned that the White House knows the importance of having “hard evidence” to back up any proposals it intends to move forward with and hoped this report would provide that. Yet, when pressed about whether any new initiatives were on the horizon that would address the issues laid out in the report, such as the number of women and children who still in live poverty, women still earning less even though more women have college degrees than men, or that female-headed households still report the lowest family incomes in the United States, Jarrett was a little cagey, repeatedly circling back to the President’s statements about his ongoing commitment to issues that impact women and girls.

One clue about what might be on the horizon came from references to what Jarrett called the President’s interest in “STEM” careers — science, technology, engineering and math — which are often higher paid professions than others more traditionally chosen by women, such as teaching or nursing. While the “Women in America” report shows that women do lead men at the moment in studying biological sciences, as well as business and management, a look at President Obama’s recent agenda suggests his interest in these STEM professions — increased math and science education for American students was the focus of a recent weekly Presidential address, a $250 million public/private initiative to increase the number of science and math teachers was announced in January, and in February, the President honored a variety of noteworthy math and science programs around the country.

I never made it through on the conference call queue to ask my question which was this — how will the findings of the report be used to advance the case for passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act? Yes, President Obama made the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act the first bill he signed into law when he took office, but that only broadened the rights of employees — both men and women — to pursue cases for back pay. While the “Women in America” report is chock full of information about the wage gap that still exists between men and women in the same jobs, it lacks guidance on how women can close that gap, other than to tell them to think about higher paying professions.

Update:  It seems that Republicans aren’t so fond of the whole STEM idea.  In the budget continuing resolution that was passed to keep the government running for another two weeks (yippee!!), funding for some STEM programs was cut.

In terms of our stalled economy, of course it makes sense for the president to reach out to business leaders. I get it that there has to be the whole working-together, kumbaya thing to kick this recession’s butt. However, does President Obama really think that making nice to an organization that actively lobbies against the interests of working women is going to revive our economy, especially when his own advisers have told him that women are increasingly the ones putting bread on the table?

Jokes about bringing a gift of fruitcake aside, I am sure that the president is aware that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has:

– opposed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,

– opposed the Family and Medical Leave Act, calling it a “dangerous precedent,”

– opposed the Paycheck Fairness Act,

– said it would “wage war” against paid sick leave because it would cost money and people would actually use it,

– said it’s not necessary for businesses to accommodate women employees with children because pregnancy is a voluntary choice, and

– stated that if women workers want more money, they should worry less about equal pay and focus more on choosing the right husband.

Excuse me for a minute until my head stops spinning.

Barack Obama claimed at the beginning of his presidency that he was committed to leveling the playing field for American women in the workplace. He signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act with great flourish as one of his first presidential acts, though contrary to its name, it doesn’t guarantee fair pay for anyone. It only gives employees — men and women alike — a longer period of time within which to bring a case for pay discrimination. Then, Obama created the The White House Council on Women and Girls, supposedly with the goal of producing equality where inequality existed. And while it didn’t go anywhere in 2010, Obama said he would advocate for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act.

I’m not sure how those positions square with his new friendship with an organization stuck in a 1950′s June Cleaver world that’s dedicated millions upon millions of dollars working against the concept of equal pay for equal work. While the president — the father of girls, the husband of a professional woman, and the son of a woman who struggled to earn her Ph.D. — had the ear of so many business leaders, where was the reminder about the importance of fair pay and paid sick and maternity leave as ways to strengthen, not diminish, American businesses?

My guess is that someone left that part of the speech back in the Oval Office for one reason. I hate to say it, but with the unofficial campaign season upon us, he’s looking out for No. 1 — Obama in 2012.

Obama and his team, including the Chamber-favored White House Chief of Staff Richard Daley, clearly are aware that the Chamber of Commerce spent tens of millions of dollars against the Democrats in the 2010 mid-term elections. Many of those contributions came from large corporations that are still ticked off about efforts at Wall Street reform and that prefer it when the president mentions things like rolling back “burdensome” regulations. Money talks in Washington, no matter which side of the aisle you’re on. And while women are the majority of voters, they don’t contribute a lot of money to political campaigns.

If women who are interested in fair pay and paid-leave issues want the White House to pay more attention, it’s time to open up their political pursestrings. Sure, the president invited some women to the White House a couple of weeks ago to talk with them about the First Lady’s initiatives, health care and small business opportunities. But women voters will still have a hard time competing with one of the largest lobbyists on Capitol Hill when it comes to the big agenda items. But if women want to wield anywhere near the type of influence the Chamber of Commerce has, it’s probably time to rethink the strategy of political giving for the issues they care about.

I’m still working on cutting the state a little slack on their whole love of Michele Bachmann, but that’s going to take me a while.

As for the equal pay thing, there’s an effort afoot to tell some of the women in Minnesota “nevermind” when it comes to equal pay.  According to some lawmakers and business leaders, the notion of a law prohibiting gender discrimination is quaint and so 1970s.

Try explaining that to the women there who still make significantly less than their male counterparts.  So what’s going on in the Land of 10,000 Lakes?  That’s what’s on my mind today over at Politics Daily.