The Atlantic: Sexes

In October 2013, Pinterest became one of the first tech companies to share hard data on the demographic breakdown of its employees. In a Medium post, the engineer Tracy Chou revealed that 11 of Pinterest’s 89 engineers (12 percent) were women, before pressing other companies to publicize the same information about their workforces.

Online dating behemoth OkCupid is adding a feature tailor-made for polyamorous people. The new setting, which became available for some beta users in December, allows users who are listed as “seeing someone,” “married,” or “in an open relationship” on the platform to link their profiles and search for other people to join their relationship.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

America is going through something of a reckoning, struggling—loudly, publicly, constructively—with the concept of gender. Giant retailers such as Target, for example, are knocking down the artificial distinctions between so-called boys’ and girls’ toys.

RIO DE JANEIRO—Two dozen women formed a circle and linked hands on a stretch of concrete near the Carioca metro station here Wednesday, dancing and chanting. They called for the fall of Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of congress, because of a new law he’s proposed that would make abortions much harder to obtain in a country where they are already all but illegal.

How people think and talk about an issue matters. Every time people say “working mother” but don’t say “working father,” every time people talk about parental issues (or caregiving issues generally) as “women’s issues,”—together these small failures continually reinforce the assumption that it is up to women to raise children and care for elders, even though most people now accept that it is up to both women and men to earn a living.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Christine White was a preteen when she went on her first diet. At school, she was bubbly and sociable, an honors student immersed in social causes. But at home, she would carefully ration her food.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

BALTIMORE—On a typical morning, the first to wake is 6-month-old Nathaniel. He doesn’t always sleep through the night, so by the time his mother, Cierra Thomas, sits up in the twin bed she shares with her husband, Tony Gardner, she’s already dreading the day.More | Talk | Read It Later | Share

Tech industry leaders are constantly talking about the so-called “pipeline problem.” On corporate stages and at academic conferences, CEOs and activists pledge their commitment to “fixing the pipeline for STEM”—the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and math—by which they mean they want to get more young women and people of color into the coursework (and, ideally, the internships) that will eventually turn them into attractive job candidates for tech companies.

Americans are, compared with populations of other countries, particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meritocracy, a system that rewards merit (ability + effort) with success.

While women have made significant headway when it comes professional equality, a shift of a similar magnitude hasn’t happened on the home front: Traditional gender roles persist at home, despite many couples’ best efforts to divide the work more equally.