Last week, the Gates Foundation told employees it was cutting paid parental leave by half, to six months, because yearlong leaves were impairing the work of the foundation. It will add a $20,000 stipend for new parents to spend on child care costs and family needs when they return to work.

The proposal would be the most generous state policy in the nation, at a time when federal paid leave proposals have stalled. Yet it does not include a plan to finance it, and there is no guarantee that the Legislature would approve raising the money.

EQO37 Published by Allison B. Clark · 9 hrs · To teach children to think in a more equal way takes effort, and children’s books are a way in. They have the power to teach values and to expand children’s sense of what’s possible. When children read books that break gender stereotypes, research has found, they reach for less stereotypical toys and broaden their future goals

Women are moving into these male-dominated fields, as well as a few others. The question, though, is whether this is actually a boon for these new female employees. In the long run, it may not be. While some male-dominated fields have a promising growth outlook, that is not true for all of them — female-dominated occupations like health care are predicted to grow fastest in the long term.

Many politicians have considered the word “feminist” toxic. But that might be changing. In 11 battleground districts nationwide, including Kentucky’s Sixth, about half of voters said they supported electing feminists, compared with roughly a third who opposed it, according to Upshot/Siena House polls this fall. About a fifth said they didn’t know.

Girls have been told they can be anything they want to be, and it shows. They are seizing opportunities closed to previous generations — in science, math, sports and leadership. Boys seem to have been largely left out of the conversation about gender equality. Even as girls’ options have opened up, boys’ lives are still constricted by traditional gender norms: being strong, athletic and stoic.

One recent analysis found that boys ages 15 to 19 do about half an hour of housework a day, and girls about 45 minutes. Although girls spend a little less time on chores than they did a decade ago, the time that boys spend hasn’t significantly changed. Shouldering more responsibilities at home is a big reason women are paid less than men and fall behind men in their careers, researchers say. Achieving equality, they argue, will require not just preparing girls for paid work, but also teaching boys to do unpaid work.

Becoming a mother used to be seen as a unifying milestone for women in the United States. But a new analysis of four decades of births shows that the age that women become mothers varies significantly by geography and education. The result is that children are born into very different family lives, heading for diverging economic futures.