President Obama & Obama Administration

Well, you don’t see a picture like this every day.  So it’s worth taking a minute to celebrate it – and read the article. And there’s one more. Since women have made up about half of law school classes for nearly twenty years, pictures like these are rarer than they should be.  Law firm partners? Courts? Law school faculty?  Whose picture will be next? Read more »

As we’ve mentioned before, President Obama’s nominees to the federal bench demonstrate his concerted effort to increase the diversity of the federal judiciary.  As a number of articles today highlight, almost half of the nominees are women, and significant percentages are African-American or Latino, such that 70 percent of the President’s nominees are “nontraditional”.  In addition, there have been a number of openly gay nominees. Read more »

The story goes that the recession ended in June 2009, meaning that we have been in recovery for over two years. The reality for women has felt like anything but a recovery. NWLC research shows that while job growth has begun – albeit slowly, with only 639,000 jobs added between June 2009 and August 2011 – women have actually lost 345,000 jobs since the start of the recovery. Women’s unemployment has been on the rise (increasing from 7.7 percent in June 2009 to 8.0 percent in August 2011), and nearly half of all jobless women are among the long-term unemployed who have been seeking work for more than six months.

Recognizing some of these realities, the President included provisions to ensure that women share in the benefits of the job creation plan he unveiled last night. Read more »