You can learn more about what I’m doing by listening to a podcast of a session I just did with the inestimable Lisa Witter. The Daily Gumboot did a nice write-up of our “She Spot” session.

“life is a community.” For women, everything on the web leads back to these words.”

Pretty much…

As Dr. Len writes, the American Cancer Society “stands by its guidelines of recommending that women 40 and over at average risk for the disease continue to receive an annual mammogram and clinical breast exam every year. For more details on our position, please see the statement from the Society’s Chief Medical Officer Dr. Otis Brawley and read my blog entry. I look forward to hearing from you during the chat. If you are not able to join us live, a transcript of the chat will be available” on the blog.

Our Pledge

Driving while distracted can be more dangerous than driving drunk.

As moms, we want safer roads.

We know the time has come for us all to recognize the risks of distracted driving, to be more responsible and to mind the wheel.

Here is what we pledge:

We pledge to model safe behavior when we drive.

We pledge to set firm house rules on texting and phoning while driving.

We pledge to help spread the word on the dangers of distracted driving.

Here is what we ask for:

We ask for the dangers of distracted driving to be included in drivers’ education classes.

We ask for innovations in technology to help solve the problem.

We ask for laws to make it illegal to text and drive.

We ask for enforcement of existing distracted driving laws and consequences when the laws are broken.

By working together we will make everyone safer.

And in Huffington Post, Joan Blades asks the right question (I’m paraphrasing) — why can’t our “leaders” in Washington lead us to better health care?

Also, City Mama here has a great overview.

For those who say online community doesn’t measure up to offline groups, what’s the explanation for this feeling? And I know I’m not alone.
There are a fair amount of posts under the topic, “I’m sad I’m not going to BlogHer.”

Anyway, I’m going to try to distract myself from feeling left out. I’m going to:

- Make a healthier red velvet cake (courtesy of my amazing client, the American Cancer Society. The recipe is here if you’re interested.

- Organize the baby’s clothes

- Fill in entries in the baby book!!

- Stay off the internet, because it will make me feel sad

Anyone else? What are you doing when you’re not at BlogHer?

Catherine Connors, Queen of Spain and Renee Ross, Lindsay Ferrier and others. Awesome.

Catherine Connors: it “was the most awesome experience of my life. It was the most terrifying experience of my life, and it all started while I was eating a fajita.”

Maria Shriver announced that we now live in what she calls “A Woman’s Nation.” She wrote on the Huffington Post last week:

“For the first time in our nation’s history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before. These two facts have far reaching consequences to government, business, faith communities, women and even men. “

The “mancession” means women are gaining economic responsibility for families across income and professional levels.

“For the first time in economic history, the male unemployment rate has surpassed the female unemployment rate. The December 2008 unemployment rate for men was 7.9 percent, versus 6.4 percent for women. The U.S. economy lost 2.956 million jobs in the last year, and a full 82 percent of pink slips have been handed to male workers.”

As Heather Boushey, economist at Center for American Progress put it, “Families will increasingly rely on women’s earnings, which are typically lower than men’s and are less likely to come with health insurance.”

My question is: what impact will the new labor force shift have on women’s ability to negotiate roles at work that allow them to be caregivers? Women in power often have to contend with the “ideal worker” stereotype. We’ve always idealized the hard-striving, dominant man with a wife at home to take care of matters outside the office. Now, as many of those ideal workers are losing their jobs, women have an opportunity to redefine what an ideal worker is. But we have to play it carefully.

A new survey from Cali Yost at Work+Life Fit finds 94% of employees are willing to change their schedule or cut their salary to avoid layoffs, but 47 percent of workers are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce for a period of time. Women (56%) were significantly more likely than men (40%) to say they are less likely to voluntarily leave the workforce to take care of a child or elder, for example. Does this mean, if women hold the majority of jobs, but are less likely to leave to assume the child and elder care responsibilities they traditionally hold, they’re forced to negotiate with employers to make it work?

Yost’s survey finds that employees are willing to work more flexibly (in the guise of reduced hours) to save their jobs and help their employers reduce costs. She found “nearly 8 in 10 employees would be willing to work a compressed work week, while nearly 60 percent would take additional unpaid vacation days or furloughs (several weeks off without pay). Nearly half would share their jobs with colleagues (48%), or take a cut in both pay and hours (47%). A little more than 4 in 10 would take a pay cut but work the same amount of hours or switch to a project-based contractor employment status (41%). Just under a third say they would take a month or more unpaid sabbatical.”

I wondered, is this desperation under the guise of flexibility, or is it employees being willing to sacrifice money for extra time and flexibility and using the recession as an opportunity to do so? Why do I feel like women would be the first to consider flexible options and a pay cut, and this may not be a great thing for women at work? But I asked Yost about this, and she said,

“For the past twenty years, flexibility such as reduced schedules, sabbaticals, job sharing has primarily been driven by employee-need. What this survey says is employees understand that these same flexible ways of working can also be led by business-need….

“After studying and writing about this issue for over a year, I believe the willingness of both men and women to sacrifice pay and schedule to manage through the recession with their jobs intact is less desperation than pragmatism and shared sacrifice. I see this as an opportunity for flexibility to finally come in from the “nice thing to do, perk and benefit” wilderness and become part of the way the business operates, and the way people manage their work and life in up and down cycles. “

I asked Yost, if she worried flexibility is coming at the expense of opportunity for advancement for women, or is this not a gender issue?

She said, “I think this finding will have ramifications on the advancement of women and will, ultimately require an even more effective use of flexibility in the future… More women will remain employed for longer more consistent periods of time, but the inevitable reality will arise—yes, they are working BUT they need flexibility to continue to care for their families. They aren’t leaving as they might have in the past, so how to we make flexibility really work for everyone.”

Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel part: as more women become breadwinners, our visibility increases and so does our collective bargaining power. Is now the time the ideal worker model becomes less important than the flexible, practical worker?

I don’t know the answer. Would you propose a reduced or flex schedule to your employer right now? Does feel less, or more risky than before?

Rosin spends pages parsing the medical literature (with online links to all the original studies) and then goes on to examine the downside to breast-feeding; not for all women, but for many. Using an analogy that is already generating sparks in the blogosphere, she wonders if “it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound.”

The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

One IBM executive I spoke with spends and hour updating her schedule every Sunday night. She then sends it to her husband, team, sister, kids, and other family helpers.