Battle of the Sexes

Young, educated women are fleeing eastern Germany—and Neo-Nazi parties are flourishing in the vacuum  they leave behind. One-and-a-half million people, two-thirds of them women, have left left the economically stagnant east since the mid-1990s, a new study shows. More »

The Supreme Court severely limited the right of women to sue employers over pay discrimination in a stormy 5-4 decision yesterday. A lone woman employee at a tire factory sued because she was paid less than male coworkers over her long career; the court held that such charges must be filed within the 180-day window proscribed by the Civil Rights Act. More »

Violent, sexualized threats against female bloggers are forcing some of them out of the online community, reports the Washington Post . The problem, highlighted by the harassment that caused Kathy Sierra to suspend her popular technology blog, is frustrating at best; at worst, it causes women to fear for their safety and abandon the medium. More »

Men dominate business in South Korea, and the country has just 250 golf courses. Yet in the nine years since Se Ri Pak won four tournaments as an LPGA rookie, South Koreans have come to dominate the world's top women's tour, the Journal reports.  Ambitious parents even pull their daughters out of school to train. More »

Men and women work about the same number of hours—if you count labor at home as well as on the job, a new study claims. Despite the popular wisdom that women do more heavy lifting, a broad survey of 25 countries, spanning the economic spectrum,  found that both sexes toil about 7.9 hours a day, Slate reports. More »

The feminist generation gap gets a sharp appraisal in "The Feminine Mistake," the new book by Leslie Bennetts that questions why so many upscale young women are abandoning careers for children. Joan Walsh finds it a refreshing rebuttal to recent paens to motherhood, especially since Bennetts recognizes that   status seeking is behind at least some of the so-called "opt-out revolution." More »

Salon Editor-in-chief Joan Walsh admits that sexist web trolls are a serious problem, despite her own longtime dismissal of the issue. Her mea culpa follows the implosion of programming instructor and game developer Kathy Sierra's blog after Sierra was assaulted, on her site and others, by crude sexual insults and finally death threats. More »

The Equal Rights Amendment is making a comeback, with Democrats reintroducing it in both houses of Congress yesterday, and five state legislatures putting it on the docket since January. The measure banning sex discrimination passed the House and Senate in 1972, but it went down to defeat when only 35 states ratified it—just two short of the requirement. More »