We’re in a slick tour bus heading down Interstate 87 towards the sisters’ next stop in Morristown, and we’re pulling out of Kingston, where they held a rally outside the offices of Republican Congressman John J. Faso. The bus is basically a giant, rolling billboard. Across the side it bears the words “Tax Justice Truth Tour.” On the back, a message from Pope Francis: “A good Catholic meddles in politics.” The “Nuns on the Bus” tour was created by Sister Simone Campbell, a lawyer, lobbyist, and Sister of Social Service. Campbell is the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, a lobby group founded in 1971 by a group of Catholic nuns in response to the Vatican II reforms. It’s her sixth time out in the tour bus; the first tour, in the summer of 2012, was launched to challenge Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. This year, the trip is a rebuke of the Republican tax bill of 2017. The nuns advocate for “reasonable revenue for responsible programs,” which means taxing top earners at a higher rate and spending the money on safety-net programs, accessible health care, and public infrastructure rather than the military. The money is there, the nuns believe; we’re just spending it in the wrong place.

In the summer of 2016, Adam Merberg was offered a job as a data scientist at AbleTo, a behavioral health care company based in New York City. After he verbally accepted the job offer, a corporate recruiter sent him an email letting him know the company would be running a routine background check. “Also attached is a confidentiality agreement,” the recruiter wrote. “Please review, complete, sign, and return to me as soon as possible.” The agreement included a non-compete clause prohibiting Merberg from working at any of the company’s competitors for twelve months after leaving. Merberg, who had recently completed a Ph.D. in mathematics, didn’t consider how this might later affect him.

Kamee Verdrager was an associate at Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris & Popeo when she sued the firm on claims of gender bias in 2009. Her career has never been the same since then, she said. “There are people who were at my wedding who do not speak to me,” Verdrager told Big Law Business.

When the news of Harvey Weinstein’s serial sexual predation broke in early October, part of what was so shocking was that many of the women harassed by Weinstein had privately come forward with their claims, only to be paid off by his company in exchange for their silence. To address the harms that confidentiality requirements impose, lawmakers in a handful of states have floated bills to bar nondisclosure provisions in employment contracts and in settlements relating to claims of discrimination, retaliation, and harassment. But some advocates warn that barring confidentiality provisions may hurt victims in the process.

When Paolo Gaudiano's daughter, who's now 26, was in junior high school, she was "incredibly bright" in math and physics. But her father noticed she seemed to shy away from technical fields, instead favoring the liberal arts, because she "didn't see herself fitting in." "She would look around and see the role models were not there," he told Motherboard during a recent interview at his Manhattan co-working space. Gaudiano, CTO of the predictive analytics firm Icosystem, has spent decades developing software to simulate and test the everyday operations of organizations like the US Navy, the French shipping company La Poste, and the insurance company Humana. His daughter's experience got him thinking about a new aspect of a company's operations: gender balance.

According to Travis Wiseman, director of the International Business program at Mississippi State University, and Nabamita Dutta of the University of Wisconsin, researchers have largely ignored the cultural factors that shape gender roles in the workplace. As the two researchers note in a recent working paper, there has been little attention given to one cultural factor in particular: religiosity.

Many Big Law firms promote generous paid parental leave policies in order to woo young lawyers hoping to start a family, but those benefits often don’t apply at the same levels to staff providing support work, an analysis by Big Law Business has found. The numbers show that law firm staff do better than their counterparts in similarly paid jobs, but that law firm paid leave policies still lag behind some of the biggest U.S. companies.

Peggy McCausland was tired of her firm’s networking events.The potential clientele she wanted to woo — business women — weren’t showing up, she said. So McCausland conceived her own networking event that would draw them — golf lessons, catered meals and shop talk — and asked for the necessary marketing funds. She was a partner at the firm, Blank Rome, after all. “The response I got from [a senior partner] was, ‘Where are you going to find a golf course that’s gonna let a bunch of amateur women come hack it to bits?’” McCausland recalled ten years later.

When associate Nilab Rahyar Tolton left Jones Day in early 2018, she was still reeling from the effects of what she called implicit and explicit biases against women at the firm. She said male partners commented on her appearance and assigned her secretarial-type work. After two pregnancies, Tolton said leadership paid lip service to the challenges of returning from maternity leave but then criticized her for not working enough, eventually suggesting she exit the firm. “I thought I was going to try to process or find closure for myself or move on,” she said. But several months later, she read a story about former Jones Day partner Wendy Moore, who was suing the firm for gender discrimination. Moore is represented by national plaintiffs’ firm Sanford Heisler Sharp. “It became sort of a question of moral responsibility for me,” Tolton said of her decision to reach out to Sanford Heisler with her own story.

Legal departments are no longer just asking firms to field diverse groups of attorneys — they’re asking those firms to put attorneys in leadership positions, and they’re asking for data to back it up. The changes have coincided with corporate demands on in-house legal teams to track their spending with greater precision, indicating that the use of data to hold law firms accountable for diversity initiatives will only increase.

A new book argues that algorithmic biases are the result of an insular, mostly-white, tech industry that has built its own biases into the foundations of the technology we use and depend on. I interviewed the author, web consultant Sara Wachter-Boettcher.

Ask a woman in litigation if she’s ever been mistaken for a court reporter, and there’s a good chance she’ll say yes. Teri Drew, who specializes in the defense of commercial liability claims, said it happened to her just a few months ago. “I went to a plaintiffs’ firm for a deposition, and the receptionist said, ‘OK you’re going to be in the conference room. You can go in because I know you need to set up.’” Drew recounted to Big Law Business.

Virginia Koday stopped breast-feeding her 3-month-old baby after the Marines Corps sent her to a rifle-training course. She was required on the range for long hours with few breaks, and wasn’t able to pump. The only "upside," she said sarcastically, was that, once she stopped breast-feeding, she could go on a crash SlimFast diet to meet the Marines' strict weight standards.

Justin Williams has long been working to combine his interests in storytelling with activism for social justice. At the production company Kartemquin Films, for example, he coached emerging filmmakers of color through their first full-length documentaries. So when he was offered the chance to work as a facilitator for StoryCorps, the nonprofit media and cultural-heritage company dedicated to “preserving people’s stories,” Williams jumped at it. He was drawn to StoryCorps because of its simplicity (stories are recorded as 40-minute conversations between two people who know each other), its wide audience (stories are regularly broadcast via NPR), and its commitment to the representation of marginalized populations who would not otherwise have access to public media. And yet, when a group of employees told management of their intention to unionize in late May, the organization declined to voluntarily recognize the union.

When Sheila Hobson and three co-workers together sued their company for lost wages, they were told they had signed away that right when they started their jobs. Hobson’s job contract included a provision that any lawsuit brought over her employment needed to go through arbitration, and individually. The Supreme Court is poised to make that legal.

Most Americans believe the Equal Rights Amendment already exists, that it’s ancient history. But if anything, the resurgence of the #MeToo movement, by spotlighting the continued second-class treatment of women in our society, shows us that the ERA is more important than ever.

Elena Deutsch spent seven years as a career coach and leadership consultant hired by law firms to advise rising associates. During that time, most of the associates she coached one-on-one were women.“When I would ask them about their partnership goals, whether they wanted to make partner, many would look over their shoulders, and kind of lean in and ask if they could really talk to me about this,” Deutsch said. “And when I assured them of confidentiality, they would share that they weren’t sure.”

To participate in on-campus summer recruiting, law firms will soon need to say if incoming associates will be subject to mandatory arbitration for employment-related disputes, and if so, if those agreements also include non-disclosure provisions. The initiative is the result of grassroots campaigns mounted by students at top U.S. law schools, who believe mandatory arbitration agreements effectively force employees to sign away their rights to go to court if they ever experience illegal treatment in the workplace.

Gorsuch’s decision ignores all power imbalances between employers and employees. “Should employees and employers be allowed to agree that any disputes between them will be resolved through one-on-one arbitration?” he writes. “Or should employees always be permitted to bring their claims in class or collective actions, no matter what they agreed with their employers?” The problem with this argument is that it presumes these contracts are drafted up by two teams of lawyers representing parties of equal power, not legal documents created by corporate law departments and shoved under the noses of unwitting employees on their first day of work. Later on, Gorsuch writes of “the parties,” plural, who “proceeded to specify the rules that would govern their arbitrations,” as if every low-wage worker consults a contract lawyer before signing off on their HR paperwork.