Julie discusses the disproportionate amount of women involved in politics and the criticism of Sarah Palin as a working mother (originally aired 9/5/08).

Learn how to live and eat right with famed nutritionist and best-selling author Joy Bauer. It’s time to separate dieting fact from fiction in this informative interview.

Julie uncovers the best practices to your keep your mind sharp with author and neurosurgeon Dr. Katrina Firlik. Plus, the pros and cons of stem cell research.

Julie explores the topics of sexism in politics, pro-life in the Obama age, and the role of civil liberties in a recession with the president of NARAL Pro-Choice.

You may not be aware but your diligence in getting regular medical checkups, being proactive about visiting the doctor, and taking necessary prescription medications, may have cost you. According to a recent article in the New York Times, women are often charged 25 percent to 50 percent more than men for health insurance that in essence provides identical coverage. Why, you ask? Well because women are more likely to visit the doctor and take medications that have been proscribed to them, and therefore use more health care (particularly in childbearing years) costing health insurance companies more!  The good news is that no longer will women be penalized for their “good behavior.”

Recently, while testifying before the Senate Finance Committee, Karen M. Ignagni, president of the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, indicated that health insurance companies would end the practice of charging women more for premiums. Senator John Kerry also introduced legislation that prohibits insurance companies from considering gender as a factor in determining premiums. As Congress begins the Herculean task of overhauling the nation’s broken health care system, this is a welcome and long overdue step.

Much is being made of the historic opportunity for President Barack Obama to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court to replace Justice Souter. Articles are trumpeting the tremendous number of women judges and lawyers, without concomitantly questioning why we don’t see more women at the top echelons of law and politics. While the numbers are certainly significantly better than existed a decade or two ago, they are still woefully short of where they should be.

Recently the New York Times ran a front page article subtitled “Opportunities Rising for Women” which excitedly heralded the progress as if we should be mollified with that. Shouldn’t the storyline instead be that women are still vastly underrepresented to a truly astonishing degree? Yes, opportunities are rising but that’s not hard to do when in 1964 just 4 percent of law students were women! Now, almost half of all law students are women yet there are only 200 women federal district and appeal court judges which, according to the American Bar Association, constitutes 25 percent of the bench. We have only seven women governors, only 17 percent of Congress is comprised of women, and only 25 percent of all elected officials in the United Sates are women despite women comprising 52 percent of the population and despite 9 million more women than men voting in both the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections.

I was recently reminded of how far we still have to go when I thought back of my own legal career. In 1994, when I was an associate at a large Washington DC law firm, I had lunch with one of the few women partners at the firm. I had become friendly with her as we toiled away on a large case. I was soon to learn what a rarity that was at this particular firm–fraternization between the women partners and young female associates. There was such a paucity of women partners at the firm that these women stood out-you literally knew their names as it was hard not to. I asked her how challenging her rise to partner had been and she pointedly looked at me and she said “excruciating.” She recounted the trials and tribulations that many women face where she wasn’t given the best cases, had to work even longer hours, and had to do even more to prove herself. Now she wanted to help other women rise to the top. But she warned me that some of the other women partners at the firm didn’t share that sense of lending a helping hand. These women she said, her voice now almost a whisper, “clawed” their way to the top and didn’t necessarily want to encourage others to join them.

During the years I practiced law I certainly saw some of what she was talking about but frankly not much of that. On the contrary, I saw many women at the tops of their fields in law and politics who reached out to mentor younger women in their respective fields and encourage them. As the years went by, though, I saw other obstacles rising in the way of women. The tremendous challenges of raising kids while balancing a demanding and time consuming job, the lack of social networks that women have with golf games, baseball and football games always providing a ready opportunity for men to woo clients and build relationships, the demands that elder care still disproportionately place on women. Women of course can and should be able to play in sporting events and build those same array of contacts, but the reality is that often that is simply not the case. I was speaking recently to Betsey Gotbaum, the highest ranking elected women official in New York City, who told me that when she was first elected, she found out that Mayor Bloomberg had taken the other newly elected city officials, whom were men, to a Yankees game. She recounted that Mayor Bloomberg later told her about it and said “I didn’t think you’d want to come.”

So what does this mean for President Obama? He has a historic opportunity to do so much more than appointing a woman to the Supreme Court, which he absolutely should do. He can explicitly promote the rise of women to the top of the legal and political professions. He can encourage the various women that he has appointed to his Cabinet and senior positions to talk frankly about the challenges they faced along the way. He can establish a mentor program whereby the senior women in his Administration mentor younger women in government.
He can promulgate and publicly speak about flex-time policies in his office and various governmental agencies that allow women with children to have the more flexible schedule that allows them to work and rear their children. He can speak frankly about the challenges that still exist. He can create a commission that can better study why still so few women are on the federal bench and elected to political office and how we can combat that.

While I may generally not be a big fan of just appointing new blue ribbon commissions and panels, the very creation of such a commission will serve to bring more much needed exposure to these issues. In short, President Obama has a historic opportunity to do so much more than appointing Sotomayor, Kagan, Sears, Wood or any of the plethora of other qualified women to the Supreme Court–he can address head on the gender barriers, obstacles and biases that still exist in law and politics.

In what amounts to a historic first, a female chief executive has replaced another female chief executive at a Fortune 500 company, Xerox. Equally historic is the fact that the new CEO is Ursula Burns, the first African-American woman to run a company this big. Hopefully, there will be a time when these sorts of announcements are commonplace. At the moment, though, they are unfortunately the exception and certainly not the norm.

As I noted in “Women In Corporate Leadership: A Long Way to Go,” research conducted by the not-for-profit organization Catalyst, which works worldwide to expand opportunities for women in business, has shown that women only accounted for 15.2% of directorships at Fortune 500 companies in 2008 with almost no increase from the year before. Yet, a greater percentage of women 16 or older work in management, professional and related occupations than men overall (38% vs. 32%). Furthermore, even though women possess a strong presence in the workforce, comprising over 50%, we still earn only 77.5 cents for every $1 earned by men who work full time, year-round.

This is not just bad principle but bad business. Women have successfully helmed many large corporations. Geraldine Laybourne, the founder of Oxygen Media, for example, sold Oxygen to NBC Universal (GE) for close to $1 billion in 2007. At the Fortune 500 Forum last December, management guru Jim Collins named Anne Mulcahy, the Xerox CEO stepping down, as one of the best CEOs of the past 20 years. And Time magazine – part of Time Inc., also run by woman – Ann Moore – hailed Mulachy and Burns as “The Dynamic Duo,” who together saved Xerox from bankruptcy in 2001.

Women also steer smaller companies with noteworthy success. Between 1997 and 2006, businesses completely owned by women and majority-owned by women grew at nearly twice the rate of all U.S. firms (42.3% vs. 23.3%). So perhaps the key to turning this economy around is opening the lock on the door to the female leadership and handing us the purse strings.

There is one thing Governor Sanford, Senator Ensign and former Governors Spitzer and Blagojevich have in common beside a propensity toward moral indiscretion, and that is they are all middle-aged men. When we look back at some of the most flagrant sexual scandals of political officials, we cannot help but see that it is middle-aged married men who are the transgressors. Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Larry Craig, Gary Hart - the list is endless. For these men, one has to wonder, if they can so easily betray their families, how easily will they betray the public? The question that comes to mind for me is: where are the women on this list?

You might counter that this absence is due to the fact that there simply aren’t as many women elected officials. It is hard to imagine though that of the 6 women Governors and 17 women Senators presently in office, not to mention the fact that women comprise 25 percent of all elected officials nationwide, that the fewer number of women elected officials accounts for this discrepancy. Women in our society, who still bear a disproportionate role in terms of child care, elder care and other family responsibilities, have these added duties that they must always consider. They also have not been in power that long. It is hard to conceive of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi or Sarah Palin holding a news conference to say they had been conducting an affair, disappeared to another country to call off an affair or visited a male prostitute. I am not of course saying that all middle-aged male political officials are having affairs, but statistically we must ask why we are seeing an unequal number of cases among men and women. Is it because men who have been in power for so long are acting more boldly and feel they are above the rest of society?

Biological determinists would argue it is due to genetic factors about male sexuality. Others would argue that it is the very potent lure of power that distorts one’s moral compass. Yet, others may argue that this is what we see in society anyway and these men are no different from others conducting themselves in similar fashion. Whatever the answer, I hope that one of the outcomes that emerges from the constant string of male politicians embroiled in sexual scandals is that we will escape the stranglehold that men in this country still have on positions of leadership.

Yes women have made great strides in running for office and winning, but they still lag behind men in positions of political power. Women comprise 52 percent of the population yet only hold 25 percent of elected office in the US. Furthermore, women are voting in much greater numbers than men in presidential elections (9 million more women than men voted in the last 2 elections).

When we start to overcome the hurdles that prevent many women from running (the fund raising disadvantage women have as they don’t always have the same network of donors as men, the unique child care demands that may prevent them from running for office, the fear of negative personal attacks on themselves and their families), we will finally start to see more women in office. And only then may we finally see less of the sleazy, moralizing hypocrisy of some of these men who on the one hand hold up their superior morality, and on the other hand think they are above the law and canon of familial ethics.

(vwintyag28)

Despite an overall increase in the number of young females participating in competitive sports, there is still a great inequality in the athletic options available for young women in many of our public schools. Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting gender discrimination in federally funded school programs has been a constant source of debate from elementary school to college level athletics, as the argument that females have less interest and therefore less need for involvement sports persists.

Yet, studies show that both sexes who participate in after-school sports programs have better grades, better conflict resolution skills, and better overall relations with their peers. There is ample evidence to support the idea that if young men and women are kept busy with structured activities outside of school, they are more likely to continue their education and stay out of trouble. In the last thirty years, girls’ sports programs have expanded in size and scope, with many schools reporting nearly equal numbers of female and male athletes.

However, as a recent New York Times article illustrated, these reforms have largely bypassed lower income, urban communities. Katie Thomas follows a day in the life of a middle school’s girls’ basketball team in the Bronx that is sustained through the sheer persistence of a coach and his players. Despite a lack of school funding, unforgiving schedules and parents who don’t always manage to provide the necessary support, these young ladies manage to keep their team alive, validating the fact that females have just as much need for sports programs as males.

With the current economic crisis affecting federal, state and city budgets across the board, funding for public school sports programs has been one of the first things to be cut. The meager resources that schools and parents retain are usually directed to boy’s teams, as there are far more scholarships and back channels for getting into college as a male athlete. Rebecca Lobo, Mia Hamm and the Williams Sisters may be celebrated role models but unless their daughters are well over six feet tall or preternaturally gifted with a soccer ball or tennis racket, it is unlikely that struggling parents will see the practical benefit of investing time and money in after school and weekend sports. The problem of lack of financing is compounded by the fact that traditional roles that may seem antiquated to modern scholars are still very much in place in immigrant and lower income households.

This means young ladies are expected to help with the childcare and domestic upkeep for their extended families, while young men are free to pursue athletics with their greater free time. As private and public efforts are made to shore up our public schools, this particular issue is often placed at the bottom of the list. Yes, math and reading are fundamental but athletics are also an essential component of the developmental process. As we fight for academic resources and better nutrition in our public schools, let’s not lose sight of this vital aspect of our educational system.

CNBC & MSNBC anchor Melissa Francis shares her insight into the world of business news and her opinion on the longer term implications of the stimulus package.

New York has become the first state to allow public money (in this case up to $10,000) to be offered to women who donate their eggs for stem cell research. While the move was heralded by many scientists and advocates, some proponents of stem cell research along with a few bioethicists are siding with conservative groups in questioning the measure.  The decision was made by the Empire State Stem Cell Board, which was granted $600,000 million by the state legislature in 2007 to devise an 11 year stem cell research plan for New York.  Until now, researchers have had to rely on unwanted donor eggs from fertility clinics, which are often of poor quality and have yielded few results.  As Douglas A. Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute in Boston, explained to the Washington Post: “The lack of compensation has meant it’s been nearly impossible to get enough eggs.”

A conversation with Self magazine’s Editor-in-Chief about online media success, the publishing industry and her keys to having a “five star day”.

Two leading women sit down for an in-depth discussion about the women of Afghanistan.

A conversation with Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, currently Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. Ms. Sims became the first African-American Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, where she remained for a quarter century.

A conversation with Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims, currently Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design. Ms. Sims became the first African-American Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1972, where she remained for a quarter century.

The economic recession is having an unintended effect that many people did not predict-the re-entry of many women, who previously chose not to work, into the workplace. “According to some economists, these women, once part of a privileged minority that could afford not to work, are now collateral damage of the recession - not forced out of work, but back into it.”

According to a recent NY Times article, highly educated women who once held positions as lawyers, doctors and bankers are returning to or looking for work because “their husbands were laid off, fear being laid off or had their salaries cut or because their family’s investments plunged in value.”

Preliminary statistics from the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the proportion of married, college-educated women aged 25-44 years old working or looking for work has increased in the past two years. The proportion of men under the same criteria has, however, slightly decreased. While it is too early to predict whether these statistics will result in long-term growth of women’s participation and re-entry back in the work force, it is an important trend to watch. Indeed, “(w)omen are on the verge of outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time, a historic reversal caused by long-term changes in women’s roles and massive job losses for men during this recession.”

It wasn’t that long ago, in fact just six years ago, that a New York Times magazine article trumpeted the so called “opt out” generation of women- professional women who were opting out of careers once they have children.

Whether this new surge of women remains in the workforce once the economy improves, is not clear. But what is evident is that these shifting demographic labor trends of women in the workforce may lead to additional numbers of women reaching higher echelons of leadership positions in corporate America. As a recent 2008 study of women in business by Catalyst notes women accounted for 46.3 percent of the U.S. labor force and held 50.6 percent of management and professional jobs. However, the numbers significantly dropped from here: Women only comprised 15.7 percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies, held 15.2 percent of those companies’ board seats, and were among 6.2 percent of top earners.

One hopes that an unintended benefit of increased women in the workforce may be a breakthrough in these numbers.

A continued discussion with UNICEF  Executive Director, Ann Veneman.

HLN Prime Time Host Jane Velez-Mitchell, author of her bestselling autobiography “I Want,” discusses the challenges of living with addiction.

HLN Prime Time Host Jane Velez-Mitchell, author of her bestselling autobiography “I Want,” discussing the challenges of living with addiction.

Mediaite.com’s Editor-at-Large Rachel Sklar discusses healthcare and abortion coverage.

A conversation with Jory Des Jardins, Co-Founder of BlogHer.com

A Conversation with Noa Meyer, Program Director for Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program.

A conversation with Ayo Megbope, a Graduate of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women program.