It was Saturday and thus my day to be at the nursing home.  My mother was thrilled, eager to spend the morning watching “Press Your Luck” with me and telling me about her week so I struggled to hide my impatience, all the while thinking about how much I had to do at home and the board meeting the following week, scheduled to deliver my year end projections.  I should be ashamed of myself.  Glenn, my husband, visits her every day as the nursing staff never fail to remind me. I am not the caregiver in her life because I have an important job.  I am a bad daughter. Women are the caregivers.  My husband and I talked long and hard…

I’ve been doing some reading on unconscious gender bias and a few paragraphs leaped out at me from an article entitled,  “The Confidence Gap,” by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman; The Atlantic, May 2014. Even as our understanding of confidence expanded, however, we found that our original suspicion was dead-on: there is a particular crisis for women—a vast confidence gap that separates the sexes. Compared with men, women don’t consider themselves as ready for promotions, they predict they’ll do worse on tests, and they generally underestimate their abilities. This disparity stems from factors ranging from upbringing to biology. A growing body of evidence shows just how devastating this lack of confidence can be. Success, it turns out, correlates just as closely with confidence…

I am a mother (and, yes, I do know that some employees over the years have used a hybrid of that term to describe me less than flatteringly).  I’m talking about literal mother.  I have two sons, who are now grown men and have their own careers to worry about.  I have loved every moment of being a mother and I strongly feel that the skills I learned in that role led me to more success in the corporate world. The world has changed dramatically for working mothers over the past decades.  There are more of us but that hasn’t translated into strength in numbers or changed the stereotypes around a pregnant colleague.  Research from the Pew Research Center indicates that…