Last month, Manhattan district court judge Loretta Preska threw out a class-action lawsuit by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Bloomberg L.P., the financial and media services company founded by New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. The defendants insisted that the company ,had routinely discriminated against pregnant women and employees who were returning from maternity leave by reducing their pay and their work responsibilities. But the judge disagreed.

Though there was proof of “several isolated instances of individual discrimination,” she noted, there wasn’t enough evidence to show that the discrimination was “Bloomberg’s standard operating procedure.”

“The law does not mandate ‘work-life balance’,” she wrote. “In a company like Bloomberg, which explicitly makes all-out dedication its expectation, making a decision that preferences family over work comes with consequences.”

I want to say she’s wrong, but she’s absolutely right. The law does not mandate work-life balance, and employers are well within their rights to demand what they want from their employees.
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Earlier this week, the internet was on fire about a T-shirt sold by JC Penny that read: “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.”

Opinions were divided about the shirt, which was marketed to girls age 7 to 16 and which the retailer pulled off of its website early Wednesday. Was the shirt demeaning or degrading? Or do parents just need to get a sense of humor and lighten up?
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After packing snacks and lunches every day all summer (and after years of packing camp-friendly gluten-free lunches for my step kids) you’d think I have this school lunch thing down. But even a veteran lunch-packer—indeed, especially a veteran one—can get stuck in a rut. And the beginning of the school year is a bad time to be languishing in rutsville.

It would probably be easier if I didn’t try to work around my kids’ food foibles (my youngest daughter doesn’t like sandwiches, for the most part, and if I pack an insulated container of soup or stew for her or for my pre-schooler, it’s guaranteed to come home uneaten). And I do kind of sort of long for the days when peanut butter and jelly was allowed at school. But here are 10 options that work for my family—and I’d love it if you could take a minute to share some of your ideas in the comments!
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Most of the time, I work from my home office, a little yellow room filled with a cluttered desk and stacks of books and product samples. But this week, I was in New York City, where most of my team is based. I had a series of meetings to attend and people to meet, and most of my usual workload to finish.

It made for a long and hectic day, but what really struck me wasn’t just the 400-plus-mile round-trip commute or the working printers or the free coffee. It wasn’t just the face-to-face conversations with the actual people I work with, to whom I talk at least twice a day, every day, even when I’m in my home office. It wasn’t just the make-up and nail polish I put on or the fact that I was wearing a suit instead of looking like the insomniac workaholic that I am.

The oddest thing was the way that I packed up my computer, gathered up my stuff, and left the office at the end of the day.
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I always look over my bills when they arrive, keeping an eye out for bizarre charges or extra fees. That means that, over the years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the phone with customer service representatives, asking for explanations or requesting refunds.

Here are a few tips to consider if you’re about to make a call:
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My summer schedule kicks into gear next week, and while it’s much less hectic in some ways, it’s more hectic in others.

My step kids are older now, and most teens who are old enough to be contemplating college are not that keen on spending 8 or 9 weeks away from their BFFs—which means that, unlike in years past, I won’t have a full house for the summer.

On the flip side, though, I work from home now, and while this job is far more demanding than the one I had before, being at home means that most of the chauffeuring and kid care falls to me (my husband still has a crazy-long commute). And the easiest way to trim expenses is to avoid enrolling my little kids in the extended day program offered by their camp—which means that I have a lot more to do and less time in which to do it.

Which means that I really need to figure out when I’m most productive, and maximize that time.

So I’m turning to you, fellow working moms. Are you an early riser who can knock off a to-do item or two before your kids are even up? Or are you a night-owl, who gets the most done while the rest of the household is asleep? Somewhere in between?

School is out in my town, and on her last day of Kindergarten my girl had a backpack full of precious papers. Not just her own drawings and worksheets and notebooks, but stuff her entire class had created together: Wall-size poems with six-inch-tall letters, spiral-bound storybooks illustrated by everyone. It’s a genius way to declutter the classroom at the end of the year, I grant you that. But as she proudly pulled paper after laminated paper out of her backpack, I began to wonder: What am I supposed to do with all this stuff?

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I will be the first to admit that I am a perfectionist. But there’s a qualifier: I’m a lazy perfectionist. I want everything to be perfect right off the bat, the first time, without having to spend (waste) more time re-doing anything.

It’s totally unrealistic, and I know it. But there it is.

According to research by Becky Beaupre Gillespie and Hollee Schwartz Temple, authors of “Good Enough Is the New Perfect,” that makes me a “Never Enough.” Their survey of 905 working mothers, all Generations Xers (born between 1965 and 1980), found that perfectionism was “the single greatest roadblock to juggling work and family” and the “constant need to be the best at everything” outweighed everything else, including financial pressures, bad bosses, and husbands who didn’t help out enough around the house.
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Once upon a time, I had a desk in an office outside of my home. And it was always messy.

No matter how pristine it was when I first sat down at it, within a few weeks it was cluttered with papers and strewn with pens. When I first started doing layout for a large, metropolitan newspaper, the company was still using actual pieces of paper and pens to sketch out the pages, so my ability to generate clutter was on overdrive. But even when we switched to those new-fangled computer things—with massive tube-filled monitors that took up most of the desk space—I merely transferred my clutter to the walls and called it “decor.”
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When my now 6-year-old daughter was a baby, my mom gave her a fuzzy cream-colored toy Easter bunny that my daughter, for whatever reason, named Minno.

Minno quickly became a permanent fixture in our lives, traveling with us to and from that hectic early-evening childcare hand-off my husband and I had, snuggling with our daughter at bedtime, even occupying the high chair with her.  I quickly realized that all hell would probably break loose when (not if) the bunny got lost, and decided to get a couple of identical backups. Which is when I discovered that the bunny had been discontinued a couple of years earlier.
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