Bald eagles? Meh. Apple pie? You can get that at McDonalds in Europe. Jingoism? Ever seen the Olympics? Everyone's into that. If you're looking for the most quintessentially American trait, look no further than the way this country expects new mothers to pull themselves up by the umbilical cords.
Over at The Atlantic this week, there is a daily discussion of paternity leave and a father's role in the home.
In a move that many aficionados of American capitalism are already lauding as really, really smart, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, the boss who loves her employees so much she wants to see them in the office all the time, has expanded the amount of paid maternity and paternity leave Yahoo employees receive.
We get it, Internet: Marissa Mayer is doing it wrong. As the CEO of Yahoo and only one of a handful of women to whom men have been willing to hand over the keys to the empire (albeit a crumbling one) she's an important woman and it's obvious she doesn't get what that means to all the rest of us, or else she would do…
Fortune released its annual list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business today, and, as one might predict, the list features an impressive group of ladies who could probably buy your entire family with their end-of-year bonuses. And while the professional achievements of women from Oprah to Marissa Mayer are…
America, the land of the free and the home of the Super Size bucket o' fries, is supposed to be a place of opportunity, where everyone has a fair shot at one day growing up to be the Monopoly Man. But, as many women are finding out, the way we treat working women who dare choose to get pregnant is anything but…
When Yahoo! invited the perilously pregnant Marissa Mayer to captain its rudderless, waterlogged ship (hooray for nautical metaphors!), everybody collectively scrunched their brows and wondered why Mayer would want to give up a sweet Google gig to get in a time machine and go run 1999's search engine. Actually, what…
When newly-coronated Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced that she and her husband were expecting their first baby in October, people who are not Marissa Mayer or Marissa Mayer's doctor immediately began speculating that having a baby would be a detriment to her ability to do her job. Some even went so far as to suggest…
Last night, news broke that Yahoo's new CEO — former Google fixture Marissa Mayer — is six months pregnant. Her new employer was fully aware of the pregnancy when they brought her on, and did it anyway. They didn't care. Zero fucks given. Congratulations and "atta girl"'s echoed through the Twitter echo chamber. But you…
Conservative Americans demand their politicians spout sepia pleasantries about how America needs to experience a resurrection of "traditional family values." But when it comes down to setting policy, the US's most conservative states are actually the most hostile to the families to whom they so adamantly pay lip service. …
Forget about paid maternity leave — at the Insurance Australia Group, one of the country's biggest companies after Outback Steakhouse, the Steve Irwin Estate, and Paul Hogan, new mothers receive double their original paycheck during their first six weeks back on the job. Double. As in, twice as much as before, a sharp…
An unmarried woman who was fired by her Christian school employer after discovering she was pregnant would like to set the record straight about herself. She's a good, Christian woman. Unlike those other, wild partying slutty single mothers.
Being pregnant is hard enough without having to worry about being fired for asking for extra bathroom breaks. But, right now, there's no law on the books to stop that from happening. Good God. We're still talking about this? This is a thing we're debating? In 2012?
Fox News anchor and professional mom Megyn Kelly has made a name for herself not only for demonstrating how alternate spellings of common first names are terrible, but also for breaking step with her conservative pundit colleagues to defend paid maternity leave and upper mobility for people born into the middle class. …
The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a report on employment and parental leave for first-time mothers, showing how little time women now take off when they have kids. The data also show that the least-educated women in America have the least access to paid leave.
As the economy continues to run frantically around the house looking for its wallet, keys, and cell phone even though it's already half an hour late, employers are trying to cut corners in order to stay afloat. One of the easiest corners to cut, it turns out, has been in providing maternity benefits to female…
Has this week left you feeling like the government is on a campaign to do you and your lady bits wrong? Well unfortunately, this won't make you feel any better. A Human Rights Watch report released today says that of the 190 countries studied, the United States is one of only three that doesn't guarantee paid maternity …
The British government is planning a new parental leave system that would allow dads as well as moms to take significant time off. Businesses, predictably, are up in arms.
Nevada's Republican candidate has said, "How about maternity leave? I'm not going to have anymore babies, but I sure get to pay for it on my insurance. Those are the kinds of things that we want to get rid of."
Yes, that's right, our friends across the pond have a head of state who just took time off to spend time with his newborn. Cue American lefty social-welfare envy. But how is the habitually obnoxious British press taking this?
