September 2017

So last week I posted about the problem of buyer/customer discrimination; we have laws to deal with discrimination by employers, by businesses that sell to the public, by landlords – but there isn’t much to address discrimination that runs in the other direction.

It was timely, then, that this article has been making the internet rounds:

When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer decided to start their own online marketplace for weird art, they didn’t expect it to be easy. After all, the L.A.-based duo of artists were bootstrapping the project with a few thousand dollars of their own money and minimal tech skills. But it wasn’t just a tight budget that added friction to the slow crawl toward launching; the pair also faced their share of doubt from outsiders, spanning from the condescending to the outright sexist.

…  After setting out to build Witchsy, it didn’t take long for them to notice a pattern: In many cases, the outside developers and graphic designers they enlisted to help often took a condescending tone over email. These collaborators, who were almost always male, were often short, slow to respond, and vaguely disrespectful in correspondence. In response to one request, a developer

There has been quite a lot written about the relative lack of women on boards of directors (and their impact on boards of directors). See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Women hold slightly less than 20% of the board of director seats at major U.S. companies, depending on what group of companies you consider. See here, here, and here.

In this post, I am not going to discuss the vast literature on the topic of women in the boardroom or the quotas that some countries have established, but I do want to point out the curious lack of fathers at playgrounds in Nashville this summer. I am including this post in the Law & Wellness series because I think men and women would both benefit if we saw more fathers at playgrounds during the week.

During ten trips to our popular neighborhood playground, during weekday working hours, I saw 6 men and 72 women. Now, it is probable that some of the people I saw were nannies or grandparents, but I excluded the obvious ones and quite a large percentage seemed like parents anyway.

This