Out with flex-time! In with face time!

These are the messages two of the highest profile working mothers in America are sending to the rest of us. If  Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, and Marissa Mayer, Yahoo!’s Chief Executive Officer, have their way, women in the workplace will remake themselves in their C-Suite images which, sadly, is looking like something from the 1980′s movie Working Girl.

The funny thing about their recent messages to working women is this –  some of their sentiments sound an awful lot like what I heard as a young journalist and then as a new attorney in a large law firm decades ago.

What’s old is new again?

Whether it’s fair or not, I expect more of high-powered women leaders who also happen to be mothers when it comes to understanding what’s realistic for most women in the workforce — especially when the online community of women has rallied around them in the past, as happened when Mayer announced shortly after becoming Yahoo!’s CEO, that she was pregnant and would only be taking a couple of weeks off for maternity leave.

As for Sandberg, her new book, Lean In: Women Work and the Will to Lead, (which I read after borrowing an advance review copy) makes some good points about women needing to take charge of their careers, and not being afraid to “lean in” to the challenges of managing a professional life with family responsiblities, but it’s hard to focus on her positive points when, for most of the book, she tries really hard to portray herself as just another ordinary working mom who’s overcome the same problems the rest of us face. That’s a tough sell, as she shares anecdotes like the one about how happy she was that on a business trip with her kids she was on a private jet, and not a commercial flight, when she discovered her daughter had head lice (WHEW! Dodged a bullet on spreading those nits!).

As for Mayer, Yahoo! announced late last week that all flex-time and remote working arrangements would be rescinded, and if you want to keep your job at Yahoo!, you have to be in the office every day. Even though there is plenty of research that shows employers and employees benefit in productivity when certain flexible work arrangements are in place, in a lively Faecbook discussion, I questioned how many women must be feeling today who came to Mayer’s defense of her personal parenting/career choice when she said she was only taking two weeks off after having her baby.  Her baby, her decision.  Sure, we all knew she had a boat load of help, but whatever works for her, right?

As one friend who is been a working mother in the corporate world remarked about Mayer :

“While I do understand that this is first and foremost a business decision that Mayer has made for Yahoo!, impacts both men and women, and may be in the best long-term interests for the company, it is impossible to not also view it through a feminist lens that understands that working mothers and two-income families have been among the chief beneficiaries of flexible working arrangements. And it is a shame that we can’t incorporate these values into business success.”

Mayer, in making her corporate decision, and Sandberg, in trying to craft a new social movement by using her life as example, are both blithely ignoring the realities of life for the vast majority of working families today.

Pregnancies have complications. Babies might be easy in some senses (they are portable for a while), but kids have issues and problems and illnesses and conditions.  There are families who having double care-giving obligations — for young kids and for aging parents.  Yes, we should expect our spouses and partners to be involved in dealing with these things and all the other complications of life, but it is never as easy as it sounds. Both Mayer and Sandberg, at a time when they are trying to demonstrate their own leadership abilities,  have made their tone-deafness abundantly clear.

Mayer and Sandberg may be very well-intentioned — looking out for shareholders and encouraging women to aim for more — but the ways in which they are going about these two goals will only take us back to the time when women had to sneak out of the office if they needed to be home early (oh, wait, even Sandberg admits she did that) and bringing back that mom guilt I thought we’d all agreed wasn’t good for anybody.

Image via PhDinParenting

What’s going to happen to America’s global women’s and girls initiatives without Hillary Clinton?

Clinton was a champion for women and children around the world in a way no other Secretary of State before her.  She’s brought money, attention and the political gravitas and power of the United States to a spectrum of issues and programs to better the lives of women and girls around the globe, like The Equal Futures Partnership designed to get more women into government positions of power globally, The 100 Women Initiative which is working to find ways to economically empower women and girls around the globe,  and the Global Sports Mentoring Program, just to name a few.

Finding and creating ways to put the female half of the globe on more even footing with men has been a mission that Hillary’s held close to her heart for pretty much her whole life. Just read a few pages of any of her biographies and that’s evident. And Clinton reminded us shortly before the 2012 presidential election, knowing she wouldn’t be signing on for a second tour of duty at the State Department, that making women around the world equal partners in their fates was “one of the great pieces of unfinished business of the 21st century.”

Now that Hillary is out of the State Department, and is hopefully having a little “me” time, what happens to that “great piece of unfinished business?” Former U.S. Senator and former presidential candidate  John Kerry has quipped that, following Clinton and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice into the State Department, he has “big heels to fill.”  To fill those sensible pumps or seriously kick-ass boots, depending on which predecessor he’s referring to, Kerry needs a continued focus on the subset of human rights that specifically addresses the lives of women and girls around the world.

Kerry remarked recently that he will focus on “mak[ing] a difference in the lives of other people,” citing priorities of the USAID such as education, global health and HIV prevention programs, ending extreme poverty, and gender equality. But is that enough? Or if Hillary Clinton’s efforts are to be continued, does there have to be a separate commitment? And must that effort be headed by a woman?

Hillary had a lot of help in championing the cause of bettering the lives of women and girls  around the world from someone I will call her partner in crime (and I mean that in the most complimentary way) Melanne Verveer, the first ever U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues.

Just a few weeks ago, President Obama did issue a statement reiterating his support and commitment in coordinating America’s policies and programs to “promote equality and empower women and girls globally.”  How that goal is implemented totally depends on any particular Secretary of State’s agenda.

So where does Kerry stand? On domestic women’s issues, he’s received a 100 percent rating from the American Association of University Women and as Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,  he supported the International Violence Against Women Act. Those are good signs of things to come. But let’s see how he incorporates that into his style of running foreign policy. I hate to say it, but I’m not sure a male Secretary of State can carry the flag of global women’s issues as effectively as another woman.

When it comes to finding advice about how to help our kids with this rough time of their childhoods, with we often turn to our schools or psychologists or social experts — but often, the advice is a collective — That’s just how it is. Kids can be pretty nasty in the middle school years and we just have to knuckle down and get through it the best we can.

Slate Senior Editor Emily Bazelon completely disagrees. I was excited to interview her about her new book on all of this, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy.

I was especially curious about what prompted her to write this book. After all, bullying isn’t a new topic, and other popular books have addressed have analyzed have covered all that territory. But Bazelon, the mother of two sons, ages ten and 13, told me that there actually is new information we need to consider, especially in our age of living online and the way our kids communicate with each other today. For example, while boys tend to use their aggressive behavior in person, girls infamously use the tools of manipulation and exclusion — things that they can do effectively online. Consider that with the fact that teen girls send almost twice as many text messages in any given day as boys (girls average 90 texts per day while boys averaged 50) and it the world of middle school kids, 21st century technology and the fact that we increasingly live our lives online creates a toxic teen-age world, especially for those who are the targets of bullies.

Schools try to do their best to educate our children in the language of empathy and the pitfalls of online tools, in efforts to bring cyber-bullying under control. But parents we need to keep in mind that as today’s schools are asked to do increasing amounts of things with fewer resources, we, as parents, have to step up our accountability for our children’s social and emotional well-being. What becomes a real gray area is when children engage in cyber-bullying at home, but it has an impact on children’s well-being in school. Often, administrators and teachers throw up their hands and say there is nothing they can do if behavior happens outside of school. However, Bazelon points out that if there is actual disruption at school as a result of the online bullying, parents can ask schools to step in.

What was surprising to Bazelon, an admitted skeptic about whether we’re experiencing an epidemic of bullying, is she didn’t realize just how serious the problem is until she saw the research on the long-term psychological impact that the new world of bullying has on our kids.

Bazelon sees a need for a new national movement, one that’s not so different from the one launched decades ago that so many of us see as a completely logical thing today — Mothers Against Drunk Driving. We need concrete strategies and mass media involvement to make that change.

While I’m not quite finished reading Sticks and Stones, I was struck by a simple fact that many of us discount:

“The depersonalized featured of technology can exacerbate cruelty,” even though the roots are in the real world, not the virtual one.

Does any of this resonate for you and your family experience? While it’s hard to separate our own teen experiences from those of our kids today, Sticks and Stones serves as a very important reminder and call to action — for parents and schools — that we can’t cling to the theory that kids have survived bullying since the dawn of time, so there’s no need to do anything differently in 2013. There is a need for a sea change in how we sail through the cyber-world of our tweens and teens, and Bazelon gives the road map of how to do that.

Image via emilybazelon.com

Image via WhiteHouse.gov/Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

For years, I’ve had a pet peeve with President Obama. I knew he wasn’t as progressive as many Democrats thought he was in 2008. Don’t get me wrong — I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 ad 2012. But many people the first time around thought he was going to be the champion of so many progressive causes that had been swept under the rug during the George W. Bush era.

Maybe he would have been more willing to take on more social issues if he’d had a Congress that was a little less obstructionist, but I’m not convinced he would have taken on the issues that I hoped he would tackle — passing the Paycheck Fairness Act, increasing the minimum wage, doing something to bring people out of poverty and making sure all kids have the same educational start.

I know. I’m a dreamer.

But in the President’s latest State of the Union address, much of what he talked about was political music to my ears. Obama has received a lot of praise for signing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law as one of his first official acts. And that was a big deal, but I never appreciated how the administration touted the Ledbetter Act as creating a law that would ensure that women would get equal pay for equal work — it doesn’t, no matter how much the administration has tried to finesse it. And they have. But Ledbetter only gives employees — both men and women — an extended amount of time to sue for back pay and discrimination once it’s discovered; it’s not a guarantee that men and women doing the same job will get the same pay.

As for poverty, I’m sad that it’s taken the President this long to stand up for the importance of the minimum wage — not that $9 an hour is such a wonderful salary, but it’s significantly better than $7.25 that it is now, and has been since 2009. Anyone who knows anything about the story in the book Nickled and Dimed, knows that.

So what’s gotten into President Obama? One obvious factor is that he doesn’t have to worry about re-election anymore, so that frees him up to just put it all out there on the table. I don’t hold any notion that everything he proposed in #SOTU2013, as they called it on Twitter, will become legislation that can make its way though Congress without the Republican leadership throwing more roadblocks into the path of progress.

But as a girl who’s proudly and unabashedly liberal, who feels that the federal government does have some role to play in making sure that people are paid a fair and livable wage, President Obama’s remarks restored a little bit of the faith I had lost in him during his first term.

Realistically, I know some decisions will have to be made about which proposals live and which ones will die on Capitol Hill. But at least the President showed us a little of that liberal he kept in the political closet for the last four years.

Image via WhiteHouse.gov/Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

It had already been announced that the parents of Hadiya Pendleton, the teen who appeared in the recent presidential inauguration parade, and who was shot and killed in Chicago days later, would be seated with the First Lady. But see if you can figure out the Obama Administration’s priorities for his second term from the invitation list, that includes:

1. A lead instructor for the Female Engagement Team that has been deployed to Afghanistan for several years to connect female soldiers with Afghani women in hopes that women helping women could lead to a significant shift in progress, and ultimately withdrawl of armed services, from that part of the world.

2. The student winner of the Intel Intelligence Science and Engineering Fair who created a new method to detect pancreatic cancer.

3. The first Latina mayor of Avondale, Arizona.

4. The secretary at a grocery store chain who was the victim of pay and job discrimination, who was told that the job a salesperson for the company was too dangerous and that she would not be a good mother if she were traveling to meet with customers.

5. The first police officer to arrive at the Sikh temple shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin last August.

6. A first grade teachers from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

7. An Affordable Care Act beneficiary who would have lost health insurance coverage at age 21 due to a pre-existing chronic illness.

8. An early childhood educator from Oklahoma who has written curricula for Head Start programs and trained Head Start teachers.

There are others who will be joining Michelle Obama and Jill Biden for the President’s speech. But it doesn’t take a lot of analysis to see how the second term agenda will be focused — fair pay, gun control, early childhood education, STEM education, women in the military, the Latino community, and more.

Who do you think the Obamas should have invited to sit with the First Lady at the State of the Union as an indication of a presidential priority?

Image via WhiteHouse.gov/Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy

Image via EMILY's List

Hillary Clinton is now a retired woman. She has officially stepped down from her post as Secretary of State. She’s no longer a U.S. Senator or First Lady. She’s not waging a presidential campaign — yet. And those pesky Benghazi hearings are over!

What are we political women going to do without Hillary in our lives? She has been a presence on the national stage for over 20 years. Now she’s a lady of leisure.  Apart from her myriad “exit” interviews, like with 60 Minutes, what is Hillary going to do with her time?

Regardless of your political persuasion, I think we can all agree this is one woman who deserves a nice nap, a glass of Chardonnay and a nice spa visit. As I keep my fingers crossed about what is next for her on the political stage, I’ve been thinking about my favorite moments from her stint as Secretary of State (aside from the tongue-lasing she gave some people on Capitol Hill at the Benghazi hearings!

1. One of the best is reflected in the image at the top of this post, from her meetings with Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Su Kyi. For me, this is the photo that is the face of what women’s leadership increasingly looks like — one that is infused with common ideas, compassion, and, yes, friendship.

2. She understands the importance of connecting with powerful women in many arenas, including entertainment. One of those is Meryl Streep. I’m not assuming from this image taken at Kennedy Center Honors event in December that Hillary and Meryl are BFF’s, but they could be now that Hillary’s globetrotting is done for the moment.

Image via Huffington Post

3. She loved Texts from Hillary.

Image via Texts from Hillary

4. She traveled almost one million miles around the world to make it a better place for women and girls.

5. She’s confident enough in herself to talk about being a mom. Not all the time, but when she’s asked about Chelsea, she beams. And there’s nothing wrong with that — no matter what some feminists who are younger than me think about how being a mother informs our world view.

Image via The Telegraph

6. And she doesn’t let a little old concussion keep her down. I have new-found empathy for concussions after suffering a small one myself over the holidays (and, no, I did not hit my head just to be like her!). Regardless of what those Fox News conspiracy theorists said about her, a concussion is no laughing matter, but it didn’t keep her out of action for long.

Image via Department of State/Nick Merrill

What’s your favorite Hillary Clinton moment? Actually, now that I think about, my favorite Hillary moment will be the day she announces her 2016 presidential bid!

Image via The Newseum

Photo credit: U.S. Embassy Prague

I don’t know why I’m still surprised by the sexism that continues to exist at media outlets today, especially when it comes to anything Hillary Clinton does or says. Even with analysts and talking heads proclaiming that she is the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and that she is more beloved by Americans than at any point in her life, some “news” people still can’t quite help themselves if there’s an opportunity to get in a little dig at the current Secretary of State.

As Clinton was testifying at the hearings about the attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya last year, she understandably became a bit emotional when talking about the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens. After more than two hours of testifying before some not-so-friendly senators, those guys at CNN couldn’t help but focus on how “emotional” she was and that her less-than-stoic performance was clearly because she was still suffering from “exhaustion.”

She got emotional about having to call the families of those who died. She choked up as she recalled when the bodies of those murdered in Libya were returned to American soil. But the few emotions she displayed weren’t because she’s human, but because she’s tired and worn out? Funny, I don’t remember any cable TV talking heads saying anything similar about President Obama when he displayed his emotions as he talked about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. Wait, what did the media say about him? Oh, now I remember — he was taking the events  seriously and “mourning” those deaths.  He spoke “movingly through his “overwhelming grief.”

Clearly, Hillary was perceiving things correctly during her 2008 presidential campaign when she wondered whether she had to keep up a tough “yes I am strong enough to be Commander in Chief” exterior, because some of us haven’t gotten past what’s been ingrained in us societally — that if a man cries, it’s an honest show of emotion. If a woman even chokes up, she is a weak little girl who can’t be trusted in a position of power.

There really isn’t a whole lot more to say on this before I move to the banging my head on my desk stage. It’s the same song, 837th verse when it comes to this type of sexism in the media. It’s not blatant and it’s easy enough for the perpetrators to explain it away when confronted. But we know it’s there, in that certain tone of voice, the small gestures, and the looks that pass between male commentators on TV that tell the tale.

Clearly, Hillary Clinton can take care of herself, as evidenced in the Senate Benghazi hearings, though I have to take exception with the — yes, sexist — headline for this video, “Hillary Clinton Erupts at Ron Johnson Over Benghazi Attack”:

I would hardly call that “erupting.” I’d say it was more like speaking forcefully and with conviction while not backing down to a bully. Oh, wait — that’s how it would be described if it had been a man. And not to be outdone, one Atlanta Journal Constitution headline refers to Clinton in her testimony as “feisty.”

As long as the male cable TV power brokers continue to speak about powerful women in this way, the rest of us are held down and kept in “our place.”  Of course, it’s been clear for many years that Hillary has a special place when it comes to media disdain. If she hadn’t teared up or become emotional during her Benghazi testimony to the Senate, she would have been called a stone cold, disrespectful be-yotch, or worse.  But  finding something sexist to say about Hillary Clinton is always easier than actual, thoughtful analysis of the real news.

 Image via U.S. State Department website

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sadly, those rights have been chipped away at so much across America, that while states cannot ban abortions outright, they have instituted laws that make it virtually impossible for women to have access to the procedure (I’m looking at you Mississippi, Texas and Virgina).

Image via iStockphoto/Joel Carillet

Robin and Jessica have provided this exclusive excerpt as part of our commemoration of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling:

Wendy Long, the 2012 Republican challenger to New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, notoriously told local news outlet Capital New York that if Roe was overturned, it was highly unlikely anyone would even notice at this point. “[I]f Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, nobody would even notice, because the states are legislating their own laws about abortion, completely independent.”

Would anyone notice? Yes, of course they would, depending on the state that they lived in and their economic means. Access to abortion will always be a reality for women in certain states like California, New York, Washington and other places that value a woman’s right to control her body. But in states like Texas, Arizona and Kansas, it’s a different story. As The Center for Reproductive Rights reported in a 2004 study “If Roe Fell,” only twenty states (at the time) would have safe, legal abortion if Roe were overturned. The other thirty states would have limited access, and twenty-one of those would likely have no access at all based on their own trigger laws or previous state court verdicts.

If “nobody would even notice,” it would only be because in many states, restrictions prior to having an abortion have become so onerous that access has become a matter of where a woman lives or how much money she has. From laws that ban abortion at different points prior to viability such as in Nebraska and Ohio, to laws that ban certain types of abortions such in Wisconsin, legislators are inserting themselves as authorities on medical best practices and turning providers into criminals. In Indiana, they are seeking ways of criminalizing women for “endangering” their pregnancies, while in Idaho, prosecutors have taken steps towards jailing women for procuring their own abortions. Washington D.C., Texas and Kansas have all found different means to use funding as a way to cut off women’s access to reproductive health services, while South Dakota, Oklahoma and Mississippi use “informed consent” and “women’s safety” as a means to deny the right to choose. Arizona simply bans everything and hopes one of the laws will eventually make it to the Supreme Court.

With 40 years of judicial precedent that has incrementally rolled back abortion access to work with and a panel of Supreme Court justices who appear more willing than ever to re-open an issue that is considered settled law, women’s reproductive rights have never been more vulnerable. And thanks to a handful of state legislators determined to make their political names and reputations by advancing legislation meant to crumble those protections offered by Roe, we may fragment into a new Confederacy of pro- and anti-women’s health states sooner than anyone could have imagined. To prevent that from happening, we need to move away from just defending a woman’s right to choose and back to an aggressive stance where we once more demand that bodily autonomy belong to all woman, regardless of their race or class.

Anti-choice activists have set the battleground in states like Nebraska, Wisconsin, Idaho, Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Kansas, D.C., Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Mississippi. They have used the legislatures to create the laws that regulate abortion practically out of existence and padded the judiciary with abortion-hostile justices to control legal challenges. But by examining each individual prong in the attack on Roe it is clear that the assault is not simply on women, but on women who have the least means to fight back by themselves and for themselves. Together we can create a game plan to bring the fight back to these states and across the country as a whole in order to create an equitable health care system that offers reproductive justice for all.

Crow After Roe is available for pre-order at Amazon.

Image via iStockphoto/Gary Blakeley