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February 3, 2010
By Ruth Marcus

My husband and I were away last week -- working, but away. My mother was watching the kids, but she also works. So it was particularly important, I told my new but already somewhat spotty babysitter, that she turn up on time, every day. Monday, she came. Tuesday, there was trouble with her own child care; she is a single mom of a 2-year-old. Wednesday, her car broke down. Thursday, the car wasn't fixed. Friday, she came but had to leave early; child-care issues, again.

January 29, 2010
Julie Anna Potts ’91 has been named chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who chairs the committee, announced Potts’ appointment in December.

Potts, an Alabama native who majored in English at Bryn Mawr, earned her law degree from George Washington University Law School. Before her appointment, she served as general counsel to the American Farm Bureau Federation. She sits on the advisory board of the National Agricultural Law Center.

January 27, 2010
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT
When Sallie Krawcheck was hired six months ago as president of global wealth and investment management at Bank of America, she was besieged with e-mail messages from current and former Wall Street women celebrating her return to the fray. Ms. Krawcheck had been forced out as head of a comparable unit at Citigroup in August 2008, a highly publicized departure. Hers has been the only comeback among the three highest-ranking Wall Street women removed during the financial crisis.

January 22, 2010
By TARA PARKER-POPE
EVER since Betty Friedan urged women to leave the house and pursue careers, people have argued over whether women’s marriages and romantic prospects would suffer for it. Was a financially successful woman a threat to her husband or a relief?

Last week, a report from the Pew Research Center about what it called “the rise of wives” revived the debate. Based on a study of Census data, Pew found that in nearly a third of marriages, the wife is better educated than her husband. And though men, over all, still earn more than women, wives are now the primary breadwinner in 22 percent of couples, up from 7 percent in 1970

January 12, 2010
-Tiffany O'Callaghan

E.Coli in the fountain soda supply?
Soda fountains may dispense more than Diet Coke and Dr. Pepper, according to new research to be published this month in the International Journal of Food Microbiology. In an analysis of 90 soda and water samples taken from fountains in 30 different fast food restaurants in the Roanoke Valley region of Virginia, researchers from Hollins University found that 48% tested positive for coliform bacteria, or bacteria found in human and animal feces, 11% tested positive for Escherichia coli, and more than 17% tested positive for Chryseobacterium meningosepticum, which has been shown to cause pneumonia and even meningitis in people with compromised immune systems. So, how are these microbes ending up in our cokes? And, what does it mean for public health?

December 30, 2009

Across the rich world more women are working than ever before. Coping with this change will be one of the great challenges of the coming decades.

by Aimee Lee Ball for Oprah.com
After her son's diagnosis, Gretchen Holt Witt had a sweet idea: a cookie business that raises funds for pediatric cancer.
For Gretchen Holt Witt, life is divided neatly into before and after February 2007. That's when her 2-year-old son, Liam, was diagnosed with stage IV neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system. "It's like a bomb went off in my life," she says. "As a parent, the last thing you want to hear is that your child has the C word."

December 13, 2009
By SYLVIA ANN HEWLETT
THIS fall, I spoke at Women on Wall Street, an annual event in New York that attracts some 2,000 women, most of them executives in the financial sector. As a wrap-up to the program, the moderator threw me a softball question: What do women like me do to unwind?

December 10, 2009
by JENNIFER EPSTEIN
WEST HARTFORD, Conn. – The dozen or so buildings that make up the core of the small, tree-dotted campus of Saint Joseph College create the ideal environs to get lost in a world of books, art and ideas. But while the women’s college’s grassy quad and brown brick Georgian architecture may seem distant from reality, one of its newest academic offerings is firmly rooted in the here-and-now: helping teachers and parents understand autism spectrum disorders as diagnoses, if not the rate of incidence, continue to rise.

With Incidents Doubling In Five Years, It's Fair To Question Effect On Culture
By JEFFREY M. MCCALL
November 29, 2009
You might think any community would be outraged to discover that violence against its women had more than doubled during a five-year period. Our nation has seen such an increase in the on-air television community, but no outrage has yet materialized.

Mount Holyoke College (22%), Wellesley College (9%), Smith College (8%) and the College of Saint Benedict (7%)
November 16, 2009
By Karin Fischer
The number of foreign students attending American colleges hit an all-time high in 2008, capping three consecutive years of vigorous growth, according to new data from the Institute of International Education. Some 671,616 international students attended U.S. institutions in 2008-9, an increase of almost 8 percent from a year earlier. First-time-student enrollments grew even more robustly, by nearly 16 percent.

October 24, 2009
By JOANNE LIPMAN
FINALLY! I hear we’re all living in a women’s world now. For the first time, women make up half the work force. The Shriver Report, out just last week, found that mothers are the major breadwinners in 40 percent of families. We have a female speaker of the House and a female secretary of state. Thirty-two women have served as governors. Thirty-eight have served as senators. Four out of eight Ivy League presidents are women.

September / October 2009
by the Editors

In the space of a little more than a week this past June, two university presidents revealed just how cynical they’re willing to be.

First, Clemson University President James F. Barker admitted to rating Clemson as the single greatest university in America—better than Harvard, Yale, or any other—when he filled out the reputational survey that drives the annual U.S. News & World Report college rankings. Soon after, a newspaper investigation uncovered similar shenanigans at the University of Florida, where President Bernie Machen ranked his institution as equal to the Ivies while downgrading all other public institutions in Florida as mediocre at best.

October 14, 2009
By RUTH MARCUS
My initial reaction to the news that a woman had won the Nobel Prize in economics for the first time was simple: Great! My second reaction was a bit more churlish: What took so long? Why aren't we done with these "firsts" yet? I'm 50 -- okay, 51 -- so the course of my lifetime tracks the biggest transformation in history of the role of women. Barrier after outmoded barrier has gone the way of the girdle, and thank goodness.

Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2009
By Nancy Gibbs
If you were a woman reading this magazine 40 years ago, the odds were good that your husband provided the money to buy it. That you voted the same way he did. That if you got breast cancer, he might be asked to sign the form authorizing a mastectomy. That your son was heading to college but not your daughter. That your boss, if you had a job, could explain that he was paying you less because, after all, you were probably working just for pocket money.

By JESSE LEAVENWORTH
October 12, 2009
From the fossilized teeth of ancient giraffes, antelopes and horses, scientist Gina Semprebon can begin to draw a prehistoric landscape. Tooth wear tells Semprebon what the animals of a region ate — whether they tore leaves from trees or chomped on grass. With the types of plants revealed and other evidence from fossils and soil, Semprebon and her fellow scientists can unfold a panorama of long-ago forests and fields, rivers that flowed and the climate that ruled a region's seasonal changes.

This is paleoecology, the study of ancient ecosystems. Semprebon, a biology professor at Bay Path College in Longmeadow, Mass., is widely known in the emerging field and was part of a recent study that changed the book on human evolution.

October 14, 2009
Robin Chase , Meadow Networks CEO and Zipcar co-founder

On the car of the future
The cost of owning and operating a car today is about 18% of the average American's income — about $8,500 a year. That doesn't include what we are going to see over the next five years, which is increased fossil-fuel prices, increased congestion taxes, increased parking costs in cities. So the car of the future will be a shared car that's fully used, because I won't be paying for the parking space and I will be driving it very little.

October 4, 2009
By LISA BELKIN
At first blush, the history of women in the workplace seems a trajectory of success. From the assumption that they would be secretaries to the expectation that they can be C.E.O.’s, they have crashed through ceilings (though not enough of them), made workplaces more flexible (not completely, but significantly) and transformed the face of work. They have gone from holding 34.9 percent of all jobs 40 years ago to 49.8 percent today. They are on track to hold more than half of them any moment now; it might have happened while you were reading this.

September 28, 2009
By HARRIET L. SCHWARTZ

A neighbor is busy, a colleague is tired, a long-lost friend wants to know which 80s band best describes me. A few of my students are stressed about their forthcoming internships, and another is working on her research. I know this because their Facebook postings tell me so.

September 27, 2009
Wartime Soldier, Conflicted Mom
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
When Specialist Jaymie Holschlag returned home after 12 months in Iraq, a new set of children awaited her. Her son, Seth, 10, who had moved in with his grandfather, switching towns and schools, was angry and depressed. His grades had plummeted and his weight had ballooned by 60 pounds. Her 4-year-old daughter, Celeste, scarcely knew her. And in Specialist Holschlag’s absence, new rules had taken hold — chocolate syrup on waffles, Mountain Dew with dinner. Any hint of a return to the old order met with tirades and tantrums.

2009

September 26, 2009
Baltimore Maryland
Diane Anci – Dean of Admission at Mount Holyoke College, Jenn Desjarlais – Dean of Admission at Wellesley College, Heidi Fletcher – Vice President for Enrollment Management at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland, Susan Lennon – President of the Women’s College, and Dana Weekes – Wellesley ’03 spoke at the national conference of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

September 24, 2009
Wellesley College’s Class of 1959 grows up and out.
By Judith Martin
Fifty years ago this summer, I left Wellesley College with a sense of superiority that would have startled anyone who had seen my grades. The pleasure I now get from attending reunions does not arise from the traditional rewards of discovering old rivals who have aged badly or old beaux who have not. (Anyway, at a women’s college, the old beaux would only be there if they had married one’s classmates.)

September 15, 2009

In 1998 when the Most Powerful Women in Business list premiered, just two of our honorees ran Fortune 500 companies. This year 13 do.

September 13, 2009
Would Wall Street have crashed as badly a year ago if women were in charge? Maybe not, says Barnard College president Debora Spar. She tells host Guy Raz about research that suggests higher levels of testosterone may lead to riskier financial decisions.

By Lynn O'Shaughnessy
August 31, 2009
If someone asked me to name the 10 most amazing experiences of my life, this would be No. 4 on my list: Attending an all girls’ school.

Spending four years at a girls’ high school was life changing. I not only received a first-class education, but I regained the confidence that slipped away during my middle-schools years and I discovered that boys aren’t the only ones who can be leaders.