by Laura Sillerman | bio Steve Martin is gone. The last of the Sensitive Men We Want to Rescue not only got married last weekend, he married a younger woman — a much younger woman. Where did we go wrong? Diane Keaton was there. Couldn’t she have done something? Why didn’t he marry her, for [...]

In her study of human rights, Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard, an author and resident scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center Scholars Program, has discovered that time and time again, it is poetry that breaks the silence around human rights abuses, injustice and suffering. Today she writes about two women poets of prominence who have [...]

To understand how gender affects differences in starting salaries and pay raises, Linda C. Babcock, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, constructed a very simple but very revealing experiment. Shankar Vedantam of The Washington Post reports: Babcock brought 74 volunteers into a laboratory to play a word game called Boggle. The volunteers were told [...]

Catalyst, the nonprofit research organization that works to expand opportunities for women and business, has released a new study on gender stereotyping at work and the "double-bind dilemmas" for women. (Full study, PDF) The findings "strongly suggest that gender stereotypes lead organizations to routinely underestimate and underutilize women’s leadership talent. The 2006 Catalyst Census shows [...]

"If you take The Ice Storm and The Crucible and Nixon – and even Pleasantville, to an extent – you have the wife and mother who is holding things together while also holding herself together. At the time that I was doing each one of them, I found them to be great experiences because of [...]

A weekly look at menopause and related issues in the news … From the L.A. Times: "Patient treatment records from a large HMO show that the recent decline in breast cancer rates is linked to a sharp drop in use of hormone replacement therapy and not to reductions in the percentage of women getting mammograms, [...]

Before the steam iron, before the vacuum cleaner, we had vibrators. They debuted in the early 1880s as a medical treatment for "hysteria." They were subsequently introduced as a home medical appliance in 1899 and appeared in magazine advertisements as early as 1904. A $5.95 model had made the Sears catalog by 1918. This fascinating [...]

by Faith Childs Conventional wisdom holds that we take to the lake house, beach or mountains with a pile of summer reading — light fare designed to entertain, to provide an escape from our normal existence. Beach reading, it’s called. The summer months are perfect for indulging in the guilty pleasure of plunging headlong into [...]

by Liz Smith Hooray for the good doctor, who yesterday got it right in her critique of the audience that attended Wagner’s "Der Ring des Nibelungen" at Lincoln Center wearing shorts and flip-flops, belittling the grandeur of the occasion. This audience isn’t poor and uninformed. They’re rich or relatively well off, or they couldn’t afford [...]

"I think it’s terrific we’re up here arguing about who’s going to be better for women, because isn’t that a nice change for everybody to hear" — Sen. Hillary Clinton on who’s a better advocate for women when  it comes to issues of human rights, poverty and healthcare. Last night’s CNN/YouTube Democratic presidential debate was [...]