NPR

When June Carbone was growing up, she wanted to do all sorts of things. She wanted to play sports, she wanted to go to college, and become a lawyer. But as a child of the 1950s, I was told I couldn't do all these things when I was a kid.

You know, maybe I could go to college and then get married.

And getting married was the important part.

But as June grew up, things began to change.

The doors flung open.

Not only did June go to college and become a lawyer,

she became a law professor who's written multiple books on the law.

And so when June and her law professor friends,

Naomi Khan and Nancy Lovett,

got together to write a book about women in the workforce,

they initially thought the arc of it would be like June's, a story of women's march towards

workplace equality.

We knew women's educational achievements were outpacing men.

We saw women breaking into all kinds of areas from which they

had previously been barred. We saw all this progress and then we started looking at

the numbers. And to their surprise, those numbers told a different story

of the ways in which women's push towards workplace equality

has actually been stalled for years.

And we were looking at this and saying, what?

Understanding why this was happening became the new focus of their book,

Fair Shake, women in the fight to build a just economy,

...