In a Washington Post article thick with both historical references and wonky policy recommendations, Dorothy Sue Cobble writes that women played a key role in the labor reform of the New Deal, and that they are placed to do so again. "New Deal feminists," she says, and those who took up their work-focused advocacy, spearheaded the Equal Pay Act and pushed through a child-care expenses tax reduction. They also successfully campaigned to expand health insurance. Now, says Cobble, feminists could take a cue from their forebears and focus their efforts on greater labor justice across class and gender. She writes,

We need a movement to raise income, to close the gender leisure gap as well as the gender pay gap — still stuck at 23 percent — to redesign careers for modern families and to expand health coverage. [...] But for the movement to grow, it will need to take another page from New Deal feminism: join with others concerned with economic justice and workplace transformation and pay attention to updating and strengthening labor laws. With the rise of managerial, supervisory and contingent work, the FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act, which set up a minimum wage] and the National Labor Relations Act barely cover half of the private-sector labor force. At the same time, programs such as the child tax credit and support for early education should be extended to the middle class. As New Deal feminists knew, any women's movement that wants to remain relevant needs to advocate for the majority of women — waitress moms as well as soccer moms, corporate executives as well as the immigrant women who clean their homes and care for their children.

Cobble's argument has some troubling elements — she seems to think feminists should stop paying so much attention to abortion because "it is painfully clear that consensus in this country on the issue of abortion rights is impossible at this moment." But she's made one of the most specific and convincing cases yet for the ever-more-urgent need to reform the American workplace. And she points out that such reform should be a broad-based, including not only equal pay and improved health insurance but also flexible hours and protections for all types of jobs.

In fact, the new face of labor reform needs to be about more than labor. The recession has shown that the old model in which employees relied on companies for their health insurance and retirement benefits, and in return often signed away their family lives, doesn't really work anymore. Maybe it never did. What we need now are social programs that decouple a person's basic security from the vagaries of the job market, and a job market that takes into account the need for a balanced life. Women, who both pay more in health care expenses and spend more time caring for family members, are well-placed to advocate for both these goals. And Cobble isn't the only one chronicling their role in labor reform throughout history — David Woolner has a piece on The Huffington Post about women and workplace issues from Eleanor Roosevelt to now — and NOW.

Unfortunately, not everyone got the memo. Shaun Rein has a Forbes article titled "Why Men Don't Promote Women More," and bearing the linkbaity subhead, "Because women aren't pushy enough." He writes,

In my career, I have tended to promote more men than women. I have even generally given men higher salaries. Why? Am I sexist? Do men do a better job? The answer is a resounding no to both.

Actually, it is mostly women's fault. They simply don't ask for raises or promotions as often as men do.

Women, he says, are afraid "they could be fired if they appeared too pushy," but they just need to follow his simple tips to get ahead. One of these, of course, is not dressing too sexy. The other is to ask for a raise or promotion. His pointers for doing the latter aren't bad ones, but the reality is that women are often perceived as pushy where men would be seen as assertive. And they can face negative consequences for this perception. Is part of the answer for all women to be more assertive so that no one stands out? Maybe — but another is for people like Rein, business writers with lots of powerful readers, to examine why women might not ask for promotions rather than just telling them to do so.

Rein writes that many men "said they'd prefer a female boss, because of the greater likelihood she'd understand the need for work-life balance." And having more women in positions of power would be a great step towards the kind of "New Deal feminism" Cobble's talking about. But that's not going to happen as long as male bosses sit back and wait for women to come to them — something that's really just as passive as the behavior Rein accuses female employees of. Part of being a great boss is spotting talent throughout your organization, not just when it's yelling in your face. One day maybe women will yell as loud as men. But until that happens, male and female supervisors can advance the cause of New Deal feminism by actively looking for outstanding women, and by creating the kind of work environment where these women can shine.

It's Time For New Deal Feminism [Washington Post]
Why Men Don't Promote Women More [Forbes]

"I think an eating disorder is way more than a girl looking at a magazine and seeing a picture of a skinny model. I think maybe that's one tiny piece of the puzzle, but I think it's a lot more about self-esteem."

When asked if she considers herself a feminist, Crawford says, "I guess, in some ways. But I also feel like people in my generation, we didn't — I didn't grow up thinking I had to prove I was equal with boys, I just assumed I was. Because of feminists before me. I never felt like I had to do that. Do I feel like women should earn the same amount as men, for the same jobs? Absolutely."

Question Time: Cindy Crawford [Guardian]

The new Forbes list is actually called "World's Most Powerful Women," but it puts the cards on the table in the first two paragraphs:

Forbes' Power Women list isn't about celebrity or popularity; it's about influence. Queen Rania of Jordan (No. 75), for instance, is perhaps the most listened-to woman in the Middle East; her Twitter feed has 600,000 followers.

In assembling the list, Forbes looked for women who run countries, big companies or influential nonprofits. Their rankings are a combination of two scores: visibility—by press mentions—and the size of the organization or country these women lead.

Interesting. In almost every other list, power is measured in dollars and cents. Yet, when it comes to women, the financial component is glossed over entirely.

The women selected are certainly interesting - Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, heads the list for the fourth consecutive year, and Queen Raina of Jordan (above) was given special acknowledgment for her social media savvy. Other high profile women like Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are also given nods on the list. And certainly, there are things in this world more important than someone's financial status. But Forbes exists to disclose numbers, so the omission nagged at me the entire article.

Joan Smith, writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free, argues that the list still places money as the top indicator of success:

Indeed, what's striking about the Forbes top ten is its reverence for money. Ten women holding the title of prime minister, chancellor or president make it into the top 100, but Merkel is the sole politician in the top ten. The list has been published only for the last six years, so it's impossible to know what it would have looked like 25 years ago, but it's hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi being overlooked in favour of Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive of Kraft Foods. I'm sure Rosenfeld is a big player in the business world, but is she really the sixth most powerful woman in the world? More influential, better-known and more of a role model than J K Rowling? [...]

At first sight, the Forbes list looks like bad news for women who aspire to other forms of power: cultural, social and political. But what it really tells us isn't about powerful women but how power itself is perceived in a country where commerce trumps everything else. Despite the recession, and whether you're male or female, the US remains a country where money talks louder than anything else.

But I disagree. What is striking to me about the list is how the amount of wealth or assets controlled was not counted with the women on the list - and that reveals more about the wage and wealth gaps between men and women than Forbes may care to admit.

What would it look like if the headlines about the Forbes list blared something like "World's Wealthiest Women is Six Billion Dollars Short of Last Ranked Wealthiest Man?" instead of focusing on who was ranked?

And I don't think my theory is too far off. Take another feature on the Forbes site, "The Top Earning Jobs for Women." I started browsing the slide show, and noticed and interesting little statistic bundled in with the standard job facts: percentage of men's earnings.

As explained in the article:

An unlikely No. 1 emerged. Much to our surprise, pharmacy topped the list, where women pharmacists earn a median wage of $1,647 per week or about $86,000 a year. Women currently account for slightly less than half of all pharmacists in the U.S. and earn about 85% as much as their male colleagues. It's a much smaller pay gap than that of medical doctors, however, where women make 59% as much as men. And pharmacy requires less education.

Ouch.

And female executives illustrate the classic percentage of the wage gap:

The only job where women were compensated on par with men is Speech-language Pathologists.

So it should come as no surprise that the wage gap costs women anywhere from $700,000 to $2 million over the course of their working life.

So how do we start fighting the wage gap? Perhaps we can begin by asking Forbes and other publications marketing sections aimed at women in the workplace to write articles about this issue, and to stop filling their sections with ladymag knockoff articles like these:

Lists [Forbes]
The World's Billionaires [Forbes]
Top Earning CEO's [Forbes]
Top-Earning Dead Celebrities [Forbes]
World's Most Powerful Women [Forbes]
What Forbes reveals about women and power [Guardian]
Top-Paying Jobs For Women [Forbes]
Fighting the Wage Gap [Women Work]

• One of Annie Leibovitz's Louis Vuitton ads with astronauts Sally Ride, Buzz Aldrin, and Jim Lovell is out. (Gorby was busy that weekend.) [WWD]
• Karl Lagerfeld: "Ballet is an extraordinary art: this torture of the body to make something so graceful. All this hard work, to look effortless."

• "Swans, they are the meanest animals in the world, you know. I had problems with them as a child. They hate children. I was caught by one, so I know. The idea of swans is lovely, and they have a beautiful shape, but they seem more romantic than they in fact are. I don't think really they die like this. They just drop dead, hmm? But who wants to see that?"[Guardian]
• Christian Lacroix has vowed to keep his 22-year-old label alive even as it has declared bankruptcy, but its July couture presentation is in doubt. [WWD]
• Miranda Kerr is nude on the cover of the June Rolling Stone — in Australia. Because she cares about the environment. [News.com.au]
• Whichever "fellow student" told the Daily Mail "The end of year exams are a big deal at Cambridge University and we've all spent weeks revising. I don't know how she has managed to fit any revision into her busy social life," is certainly no "friend" to model/student Lily Cole. But then, if Lily Cole didn't want tabloid attention, she might not walk around London with her boyfriend wearing a gold ring on the ring finger of her left hand. [Daily Mail]
• Everybody you might care slightly about is getting a new fragrance this year. Kate Moss is naming hers "Vintage." [WWD]
• Kind of like the departed Mr. Blackwell — or Republican trickster Roger Stone — but only for hats, Luton, England milliner Philip Wright releases an annual list of the best celebrity hat-wearers. This year, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy topped it, for her "neat, chic, pill box hat" which "was a supreme example of classic simplicity at its best - a stylish understatement which captured the attention of the world's media." She beat the Queen. [Times of London]
• I've always thought that custom-made clothing, at the right price point, could and should be a bigger part of the apparel market than it is. Because all of us have issues with the fit of standardized sizes — who doesn't have a wardrobe half full of shirts that are tight in the shoulders but loose at the waist, pants with the wrong crotch depth, and skirts that don't move quite right when you walk. But all I want to know about this Ryan Taylor, aka "Taylor the Tailor", of Los Angeles, who supposedly takes his clients' measurements and turns out custom-fitted clothing in a couple days at prices "competitive with brand name department stores" is: where does he manufacture? (A question which, funnily enough, CNN seems to have no interest in.) Because everything I know about fashion leads me to suspect that level of service is only possible if you're e-mailing those customer measurements to a guy in Malaysia. Or Hong Kong. [CNN]
• A lone man pulled off an $8.5 million jewelry heist at Chopard in the Place Vendôme in Paris. [CBS]
• A study in the U.K. found that while women make up 52% of the fashion industry's workforce, they are paid 15% less than their male counterparts, and have only 37% of the top jobs. In New York, anecdotally, I've heard from many a design assistant toiling in the trenches of a major brand that, even though here as there the industry is largely female, things like on-site daycare are nonexistent. [Independent]
• Gilt Groupe, the members-only sample sale site, sponsored Zac Posen's resort show, which is happening tonight. Interesting. [WWD]
• Shares in the national mall chain Wet Seal fell 17% in Friday's trading, following the announcement of poor first quarterly results. Same-store sales fell by 7.3%, and even though it beat analysts' expectations by turning a $5 million profit during the quarter, news that the company does not expect to meet profit forecasts in the next quarter was enough to set the stock price sliding. [The Street]
• Lord & Taylor is closing one of its 47 stores nationwide. The Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Virginia, will no longer boast a Lord & Taylor as an anchor tenant after July 12. Both Landmark Mall and its parent company, General Growth Properties, have filed for bankruptcy protection. [WSJ]
• The U.S. division of Dutch brand Oilily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and closed its Madison Avenue store. This follows the bankruptcy of its parent company in Hollard nearly two months ago. [Crain's]
• A statement from Wells Fargo, the principal creditor of the bankrupt Hartmarx company, which owns the menswear brands Hickey Freeman and Hart Schaffner Marx, has put Hartmarx's potential deal with private equity firm Emerisque in doubt. Emerisque's bid of $119 million for the business had been accepted by Hartmarx last week, but Wells Fargo, which is owed $114 million, said that with only $70 million of the bid being cash it "fails to provide adequate value to Hartmarx lenders." Wells Fargo also objects to the bid on the grounds that the offer "does not even ensure that Emerisque will continue running Hartmarx's business operations after the acquisition," something which Emerisque had pledged to do. The bankruptcy court is scheduled to hear objections to the bid today. [Chicago Tribune]
• Mango might do most of its business in Spain, but that won't prevent it from opening a store this September in Irbil, the capital of the Kurdish region of Iraq and the country's third-largest city. [Times of London]
• Benetton's seven stores in Georgia closed in protest and Georgian politicians voiced thunderous objections to the chain's decision to open an outpost in Sukhumi, the capital of the disputed Black Sea region of Abkhazia. Tbilisi regards Abkhazia as a breakaway province; the EU and NATO concur; Russia recognizes its independence; 1.5 million Russian tourists visit Sukhumi every year. No doubt lured as much by the thought of all those rubles as by the international goodwill it advertises, Benetton has nonetheless been forced to abandon its plans to open the store. [WSJ]

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that men who said they believe in more traditional gender roles earned $11,930 more per year than men with more modern views. Women who held more traditional views made an average of $1,500 less than women with more equal views. Researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing data collected by a Labor Department survey that has tracked the changing attitudes of 12,000 people since 1979. Participants were polled four times from their late teens on and asked questions such as whether they believe a woman' place is in the home, or whether the employment of women is likely to lead to higher rates of juvenile delinquency.

Critics of the gender-gap theory usually say that the difference between what men and women earn is due to men choosing higher paying professions in law or business while more women go into education or social work...or men working longer hours. But researchers say their conclusions in this study were based on men and women with similar jobs, education, and hours per week.

Though the study was designed to prove a link between gender attitudes and pay, not to explain why or how those attitudes come about, researchers have suggested two possible explanations: Men with traditional beliefs may negotiate harder for pay raises, and/or employers may discriminate against employees who see gender roles more equally. The good news is that if this study is correct that the wage gap is partly a result of attitudes about gender roles, as more Americans adopt more progressive attitudes about women in the workplace, the differences in income may disappear.

Study: Traditional Men Earn the Most [MSNBC]
Men With Sexist Views Earn More [BBC]

By and large, the first thing you have to understand about getting a job or a raise or the salary that you deserve is that no one is going to give it to you. Like everything else in life, unless you're already filthy rich or well-connected, if you want something badly, you can't just wait or ask nicely, you have to take it. All that shit you learned in grade school about sharing and waiting your turn? Fuck that shit. Your turn is now, and that is your job and they need to give you your money.

1. Never name a number When you're looking for a job, most employers will ask you really early in the process how much money you want. This number gives them several pieces of information, including where you sit in regards to other candidates' salary expectations, whether your current salary fits their idea of experience, and how little they can offer you. However, the number gives you nothing. Never be the first one to mention salary. If they ask for it in a cover letter, say "I consider my salary fully negotiable based on the requirements of the position and the other benefits available." If they ask you to fill out an application and it includes a box in which to delineate your salary history, conveniently forget to add that in. If they ask you outright in the interview to give a number, smile politely and repeat that you consider it negotiable based on the other benefits and how much were they thinking to start. Do not give in. Be inflexible.
2. Always have a back-up plan Yes, it's ironic given my recent job history that I say this, but do not rely on one job. Have your résumé ready if you have a job, and don't stop applying for jobs (or going to interviews) until a contract is signed and you have filled out your health insurance and emergency contact paperwork. Always be looking. Knowing what else is out there — and how much those jobs are paying — will put you in a better negotiating position. You might not get what you want at first, but at least if you've got more than one ball in the air you're not constantly re-starting
3. Always know more than your opponent In a negotiation, you preferably want to know more than the other person about what you need salary-wise, your market value, what they can afford to pay you and why they should pay you more. Know these things, or figure them out before the person on the other side of the table does. This is not a conversation between equals or a time for you to wheedle because you want the job, this is a competition and you have to treat it as such.
4. Be completely willing to walk away In this day and age, few companies are going to be loyal to you, but they will try to indoctrinate you with loyalty to them. Resist. Don't take less that you deserve out of loyalty because 99% of the time in the business world that loyalty is misplaced. If you've been applying for other jobs, going to other interviews, looking at the job market, you know what is out there and what else you can get. If you know going in that you'll walk away if you don't get what you want, it shows in your face. The one salary negotiation (for a raise) that I ever lost was because it was done through a third person and the boss didn't see the whites of my eyes, so he didn't know I'd been interviewing for months and would be gone in 2 if he didn't capitulate. I was. I made 45% more in the new job than they were paying me when I left and 40% more than I'd even been asking to stay.
5. Make them understand why you are worth it When it comes to asking for a raise, build a case. Don't just ask for more money because you're cool. Take the position description you started with and show how you've excelled at that, built the position into something bigger than asked for, taken on more responsibilities, etc. Write it down. If you can't do that — if you can't even bullshit it — seriously question the wisdom of asking for a significant raise. Go in with facts at your disposal, take your performance evaluations and present it in a short (2 pages or less) memo form. In most cases, your boss (assuming you're persuasive) is going to have to advocate with his or her boss as to why you should get more money and to why s/he'll be screwed if you don't. Make that case before s/he has to.

This all sounds really easy and obvious and, for some people, it probably is. Those people, sadly, are mostly men. Negotiating is about being assertive to the point of being aggressive, it's about confrontation and competition, it's about blatant self-promotion and narcissism run amok and many people aren't good at that. But if you are trying to squeeze blood from a stone, you can't worry about getting your hands dirty.

Median Weekly Earnings Of Full-Time Wage And Salary Workers By Detailed Occupation And Sex [Bureau of Labor Statistics]
Interesting Statistics [Women Don't Ask]