Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo! offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices.

Employees at Yahoo! are upset, and feel like Ms. Meyer is changing employment terms that Yahoo! has previously agreed to. Many employees who work from home apparently would not have taken the job at Yahoo! had they not been allowed to work from home. According to the HR email, this is a new policy across the board for all employees. Period.

I get that Marissa has a tough job ahead of her. She is the 6th CEO in 5 years at Yahoo! The company is faltering and losing ground. The future of Yahoo! is anything but secure. Marissa has been seen by many to be Yahoo!’s last ditch effort to turn it around. Some people think that she may actually be the scapegoat for Yahoo!, a company well on its way down a death spiral. She has to act quickly. She needs to make some big changes. People are expecting her to get in and start moving the needle immediately.

Couple that with a few more facts to really understand the pressure she is facing:…

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The latest Time Magazine cover is just too alluring not to write something about it. As a mother of 3 little boys, and a mother who breastfed all 3 of them until they were 18 months old, I can’t help but be drawn to the cover and at the same time be annoyed by it. The article surrounding the cover is all about Dr. Sears and his theories of attachment parenting. What bothers me though is that the mainstream thought is that only women who stay home can practice attachment parenting. Just recently I wrote an article rebutting  Elisabeth Badinter and her book about how modern motherhood undermines the status of women. The Time magazine cover bothers me in the same way.

The staff writer at TIME behind the cover article, Kate Pickert, is interviewed about her article,  and in her opinion the idea that  working moms can practice attachment parenting is not valid. Apparently Dr. Sears himself talks about how attachment parenting can be great for working moms because it allows them to be very physically close to their babies when they do come home from work. Pickert comments that working moms who try to co-sleep and breastfeed all through the night won’t be able to work the next day and won’t be able to actually perform their job duties.

I object. In the same way that I object to Elisabeth Badinter saying that this sort of “liberal” motherhood is anti-feminist  and is working against women seeking equality in their public lives.  For me attachment parenting (in my way of practicing it) has been wonderful. I brought my 3 boys into the office for the first 4 months of their lives. I wore them in a baby sling, and breastfed them on demand.

Read the rest of my article on ForbesWoman

Read the rest of the article, and see the infographic on ForbesWoman

The good news:

• Women are founding businesses at 1.5x the national average
• Women-operated, venture-backed companies have 12% higher revenues
• Companies with more equalized gender distribution in the upper echelons garnered 30% better results from IPOS

The bad news:

• Only 3-5% of all women owned businesses receive venture capital funding
• Only 16.5% of US companies have women on their boards
• Only 25% of the tech industry is women

Read the rest and see the infographic at ForbesWoman

I hate that women can’t just stand up and be on the same team. We have fought so hard to be able to be where we are today, and then we attack each other. I feel like I’m back in middle school battling the “mean girls” syndrome. Why is it that stay-at-home moms and working moms have to discuss who has made the better choice? Why is it that when Rosen says something about stay-at-home moms not working, rather than being able to clarify and say “working outside the home,” it has to turn into a huge battle about respecting mothers? The fact is that most stay-at-home moms can NOT relate to Ann Romney. Because most women can’t relate to her. She and her husband are fabulously rich, and have had financial privileges  most families in the United States can’t even imagine. The issue at hand was whether Romney should help represent economic issues as they relate to women. Clearly the answer is no. It would be very hard for anyone to debate otherwise — yet that is not the debate which is happening. Instead, all working moms feel the heat for a working mom who mis-spoke.

Read the rest at ForbesWoman

Elisabeth Badinter has for decades been in the vanguard of the European fight for women’s equality. Now, in an explosive new book, she points her finger at a most unlikely force undermining the status of women: liberal motherhood, in thrall to all that is “natural.” Attachment parenting, co-sleeping, baby-wearing, and especially breast-feeding—these hallmarks of contemporary motherhood have succeeded in tethering women to the home and family to an extent not seen since the 1950s. Badinter argues that the taboos now surrounding epidurals, formula, disposable diapers, cribs—and anything that distracts a mother’s attention from her offspring—have turned childrearing into a singularly regressive force.

Just reading the description of the book fills me with anger. I am annoyed that Badinter is implying that the only way to be a “liberal” mother, and not only believe, but implement theories of attachment parenting, is if you are tethered to your home. Held back from actually perusing anything besides motherhood. I object. I am a working mother of 3 boys. I am the CEO of a tech company, so as a woman I am already the “odd man out” so to speak. I work extremely hard, but also believe in many of the theories of attachment parenting. And I don’t think that attachment parenting is tethering women. I think women are tethering women. In all my 8 years as a mother, and 3 kids later, the guilt I feel about being a working mother is 9 times out of 10 inflicted by another woman. I understand that there are some careers that make it difficult for any parent. But I think this is also a function of parents being afraid to speak out and ask for the flexibility that they need.

Read the rest at ForbesWoman

There are many things that were amazing in the movie:

1. The casting was spectacular. Woody Harrelson, and Lenny Kravitz shined in their roles. Jennifer Lawrence was amazing. Rue, played by Amandla Stengberg was perfect. Stanley Tucci was delectably unlikable. Donald Sutherland played his character perfectly.  Elizabeth Banks couldn’t be more unappealingly and shallow playing Effie; a terrific performance.
2. The costumes were divine.  They were vulgar and amusing and perfectly depicting the out-of-control world of the “haves” vs. the grim, drab, and bleak costumes from the people in the districts.
3. The story and the cinematography are incredibly engrossing. You don’t want to leave your seat. You are not thinking of anything else except what is in front of you. You care about the characters and you are pained throughout the story.

Read the rest at ForbesWoman

1. Twitter reached 500k users 1 year and a half after launching
2. Twitter reached 1 billion tweets shortly after 3 years.
3. Today Twitter easily has more than 250 million tweets per day.

What I also find fascinating about Twitter, and internet technology in general is just how quickly new technologies change the way we communicate, find interesting and relevant information, and market our businesses. Even more interesting to me is how women use Twitter, and why many people say more women are using Twitter than men. Check out this excerpt from a fascinating Twitter infographic:

See the infographic and read the rest on ForbesWoman

In a world where we constantly position women and girls as sex objects and expose girls to a plethora of inappropriate sexual images way too early in their lives, is this the kind of “fun” poll that a smart magazine like Vanity Fair should be supporting? I realize that they appeal to an adult audience. I also realize that this is not the first time they have content I think crosses the line between cool, fun, appropriate, and vulgar and inappropriate. I distinctly remember this cover because my six-year old asked me all kinds of questions I didn’t think should even be in his little six-year old mind when he saw it:

Read the rest at Forbeswoman

As someone very involved through what my company does,  in helping entrepreneurs and small businesses succeed, I have immersed myself in the start-up world here in Oregon where my company is based. Oregon has five major business plan competitions across the state. Throughout the year (most of them in the Spring) these competitions put together an LLC group made up of individual investors to create business plan competitions where the winner gets an investment (usually a convertible note) of anywhere from $150,000 to $350,000. The first angel competitions in Oregon were theBend Venture Conference in 2003, followed by Angel Oregon in 2005, then the Oregon Angel Fund (OAF) in 2007,  the Willamette Angel Conference in 2009, Southern Oregon Angel Investment Conference in 2010, and most recently the Gorge Angel Conference started in 2011.  All told in 2012 these conferences and the OAF (not a conference but an Angel group funded by the Oregon Government, with 1.5 million dollars in matching funds every year) will invest just under four  million dollars in to 9-10 companies. For the most part, all the companies will be Oregon companies (some conferences have official rules about where companies are located, some don’t).

Here is how the Angel Conferences and business plan  competitions work:

Read the rest at Forbeswoman