Workplace Buzz: Today’s Headlines

Workplace Buzz on November 23, 2007 7:45 AM

Anita Hill’s Question
Today, the most immediate question the letters raise is whether the workplace has improved over the last 16 years. Working women regularly share with me their personal stories of how blatant harassment and discrimination, once the norm, has been eliminated. I also hear personal stories from women who have complained and prevailed, using policies set up since the hearings. But I still hear from women and girls and their lawyers about outrageous cases of abuse.Despite high-profile suits, a woman's chance of winning a valid sexual harassment case is by no means certain. My letters confirm that most women can't afford or don't care to file a lawsuit. Boston.com

Traveling with Your Office
One challenge of the work-anywhere lifestyle is that not everywhere is designed for people who need to do work. That is why you see women in skirts sitting awkwardly on the carpet at an airport gate, balancing laptops plugged in to precious few outlets. Or hear about grown men building the adult equivalent of a pillow fort to fashion a makeshift desk on a hotel bed. But hotels and airports are gradually catching on to the fact that mobile workers need more help getting their jobs done on the road. Hotels that cater to laptop-toting travelers are scrambling to add electrical outlets in easy-to-reach places, install better task lighting and design chairs with flat armrests that can double as desks. International Herald Tribune

Choices for Working Women
While undergraduate ratios of women to men continue at about 60 to 40 and close to half or more of the students in professional graduate programs (medicine, law, business) are women, less than 20 percent of partners in law firms are women. The same representation exists in other professional arenas — tenure-track professors, heads of medical practices, members of Congress, corporate executives and CEOs of businesses. In spite of attempts by second-wave feminists to eliminate gender discrimination, there remain significant disparities that are the subject of attention by the nation’s major newspapers and journals. TownHall.com

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