Legislation at the federal level designed to improve women’s economic opportunities appears stalled, including, most recently, the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. But some states are taking matters into their own hands and working on similar laws in their legislatures. They could serve as models for what needs to be done at the federal level.

On Tuesday, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin (D) signed an equal pay bill into law. The new law will require employers to prove they have legitimate business reasons for paying workers unequal wages, protect workers who discuss pay with each other, provide protections for employees who request flexible work arrangements, give mothers who need to express breast milk at work protection, and improve the process that ensures state government contracts pay equal wages. It also establishes a study committee to look at instituting a paid family leave law.

New York may soon follow in Vermont’s footsteps. In his 2013 State of the State address, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced a Women’s Equality Agenda that is currently winding its way through the state legislature, and many of the provisions relate to women’s economic opportunities.

One would amend state law to make it explicit that pregnant workers are entitled to reasonable accommodations related to pregnancy and childbirth unless they would create a hardship for the employer. Women are often pushed out of their jobs or fired when they request accommodations like a stool, the ability to drink water on the job, or be given light lifting duties. On a recent conference call about the proposal, Dina Bakst, co-founder and co-president of A Better Balance, recounted the stories of New York women who experienced these responses, including a worker who was pushed out of her job at 17 weeks pregnant because her employer refused to modify a lifting requirement. She ended up in a homeless shelter thanks to the loss of income.

Another provision would prohibit employers from retaliating against employees who share wage information with each other and redefine what exceptions employers can cite for pay differentials so that they can only relate to job performance or business necessity. Yet another would amend New York State’s human rights law to provide explicit protections for workers who have children.

New York goes even further, though, by taking an intersectional approach to women’s equality. While statehouses across the country continue to consider a record number of bills that seek to limit women’s reproductive access, New York’s bill is the only current one that would expand it. The state’s existing laws regulate abortion in the criminal code and only allows for abortion care later in a pregnancy when a women’s life is at risk, not when her health is at risk. If the national precedent of Roe v. Wade were to be struck down, abortion care could be hampered, so the agenda seeks fixes to clarify women’s rights.

While it may seem unrelated to women’s economic opportunities, access to abortion care plays a big financial role in women’s lives. Women who aren’t able to get an abortion when they seek to terminate a pregnancy are three times more likely to fall below the poverty line within two years. Controlling fertility allows women to hold jobs and invest in their education.

New York and Vermont are following other state-level successes for equal pay laws. Texas passed its own Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to reform the constitution to allow workers more time to file a charge of discriminatory pay. New Mexico passed the Fair Pay For Women Act this year, which also eases the ability to bring cases alleging pay discrimination.

These bills are popular with both the general public as well as the business community. In New York, 84 percent want to enact equal pay legislation and 80 percent want to update the state’s abortion laws. The state’s chamber of commerce has also come out in support. Federal lawmakers may want to take note of the success of these efforts at the state level.

Following the London Whale trading scandal that cost JP Morgan at least $6 billion, Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon is facing pressure from shareholders, who will hold a vote at the annual general meeting on May 21 to potentially split his roles. The failed trade originated from a trading desk that was meant to help the company reduce risk. It sparked a Senate investigation that ultimately concluded that the company misled regulators by mislabeling the portfolio of trades.

But rather than bring the hammer down on the head of the company, some are now potentially moving to vote against other shareholders who serve on the risk committee – Ellen Futter in particular, who is president of the American Museum of Natural History and a former director of AIG. At last year’s meeting, before the full effect of the London Whale trade was known, 14 percent of the vote was cast against her re-election.

While some shareholders may feel it is better to hold the risk management committee accountable and oust those who don’t have as much experience at financial institutions, Flutter’s expulsion would follow a disconcerting trend of laying the blame with women when things go wrong in the financial industry.

When the failed trade first surfaced, the first head to roll was not the London Whale himself, and Jamie Dimon managed to stay mostly insulated. Rather, the first person to step down was a woman: Ina R. Drew, JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Officer who was in charge of the division in which the trades were made. Drew was among the highest paid women in finance, being one of the top paid officials at JP Morgan. She has since been replaced by two men.

Similar resignations or firings happened during the chaos of the financial crisis. Erin Callan of Lehman Brothers and Zoe Cruz of Morgan Stanley were both high-ranking executives who may have been scapegoated when their companies faltered. This is what Michelle Ryan, an associate professor at Exeter University, has dubbed the “glass cliff”: “women often tend to occupy these dangerous leadership positions in dangerous times, when things are getting hairy,” she says. When things do go south, then, the women take the hit.

There were likely valid reasons for each of these women to be let go when they were. Drew, after all, oversaw the division making risky trades, although the risks of those bets were conveyed to top executives and dismissed. But they fit a trend in which female executives were three times as likely to lose their jobs in the recession.

Women already make up a small share of leadership positions in the United States, and in finance in particular. They hold 8.6 percent of executive officer roles in the finance and insurance industries and less than 20 percent of board director positions. If they are more likely to get ousted when a company hits troubled times, those numbers will continue to be depressed.

A new report from GMI Ratings on the percent of corporate boards that have women members shows that global progress is moving at a crawl. The Women on Boards 2013 survey looked at 5,977 companies in 45 countries and found that women hold 11 percent of board seats, up a mere 0.5 percent from a year ago and just 1.7 percent over the last five.

But the report did find a bright spot: Europe leads the trend, with far higher percentages of women on boards. In fact, Europe accounts for more than half of the female directors added to boards between 2009 and 2013. The report chalks this up to legal mandates requiring diversity:

Leading the globe on gender-diverse boards is Europe, where legal requirements for women’s representation exist or are being considered at both the EU level and in various countries. Norway, Sweden and Finland continue to lead the developed world in their percentage of female directors, with 36.1%, 27.0%, and 26.8%, respectively. Significant increases in women’s representation are also happening in Italy and France, following the passage of recent laws on board diversity. France now ranks 4th in the world, with 18.3% female directors. (In Spain, however, where a law exists but enforcement mechanisms are weak, much less change has occurred.)

Europe also leads in having at least three women on companies’ boards, a level at which research suggests women’s influence comes to a critical mass.

The United States, on the other hand, lags pretty far behind. While the percentage of women on boards has risen 3.3 percentage points in Nordic countries and 4 points in the rest of developed Europe since 2009, it has only risen by 1.9 points in the U.S. Rather than mandating quotas for the inclusion of women on boards as has been done in Europe, the U.S. relies more on “investor pressure and voluntary change over legislative mandates,” the report noted.

The impact of diversity goes beyond inclusion. Research has shown that companies with gender diversity on their boards significantly outperform those that don’t. Diversity overall has been a boon for the economy: As much as 20 percent of U.S. growth in productivity over the past half century can be attributed to the inclusion of women and other marginalized groups in the labor force. But there is still a lot of room to grow. One report found that if women’s employment levels were raised to match those of men, it would boost U.S. GDP by 5 percent.

While progress was steadily made to integrate women into traditionally male jobs for many decades, in recent years the rate has slowed considerably. There are many factors that lead men and women to end up in different occupations, but a new study has found that one big reason, particularly when it comes to women with children, is overwork. Youngjoo Cha of Indiana University has found that mothers are much more likely to leave male-dominated occupations if they work more than 50 hours a week, but that the same doesn’t hold true for childless women or men:

While overwork is an expected norm in many male-dominated occupations, women, especially mothers, are structurally less able to meet this expectation because their time is subject to family demands more than is men’s time. […]

Using longitudinal data drawn from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, I show that mothers are more likely to leave male-dominated occupations when they work 50 hours or more per week, but the same effect is not found for men or childless women. Results also show that overworking mothers are more likely to exit the labor force entirely, and this pattern is specific to male-dominated occupations. These findings demonstrate that the norm of overwork in male-dominated workplaces and the gender beliefs operating in the family combine to reinforce gender segregation of the labor market.

The numbers are striking: being a mother increases an overworked woman’s odds of leaving a male-dominated occupation by 52 percent compared to her childless peers. Meanwhile, long hours don’t have any impact on fathers or women without children.

The conclusion is that work/family conflicts drive workers out of male-dominated jobs, which tend to have a higher expectation of working long hours. This problem is landing hard on women in particular, however, because they still do the majority of care work. Today’s mothers spend about twice as much time with children as fathers do and even more time than they did in the 1960s before so many entered the workforce.

The length of the working day has been growing over recent years. Between 1979 and 2000, the study reports, the proportion of workers putting in 50 hours or more per week increased by six percentage points for both genders. The U.S. stands out in this regard: Americans put in more hours than many other developed countries. Out of 33, the U.S. is in the top 14 for the number of hours worked. Norway, the Netherlands, and Germany, all of which put in fewer hours, rank among the top countries in the world for work/life balance. The U.S. ranks eighth-to-last.

Meanwhile, the country has made little progress in enacting improved work/family policies. A new report from the Center for American Progress’s Judith Warner points to the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, as well as some state policies for paid sick leave, paid parental leave, and increased preschool access, as important but rare victories for working parents. But as the report notes, better policies can help businesses, boost the economy, and pay off for politicians who promote them.

The new report from Pew on modern parenthood is filled with important data about how Americans are handling a variety of work and family issues. Reading through the report, the most glaring conclusion for progressives is that unmarried mothers are in dire financial straits, facing much worse economic conditions than most other people in America.   Look at this table:

A full 61 percent of unmarried mothers report income of less than $30,000 per year.  In contrast, a roughly similar proportion (62 percent) of married mothers report family incomes of $50,000 or more annually.   What does this mean for single mothers? As this chart highlights, it means the recession really crushed them and they need decent-paying, full-time jobs:

Nearly half of unmarried mothers in 2012 said that their ideal situation would be to work full time (49 percent) — almost double the percentage from 2007 (26 percent).  The percentage of married mothers reporting a desire for full time work also increased but at a much lower rate (23 percent in 2012 vs. 17 percent in 2007).  Pew also finds that among working moms, “there is a significant gap between those who are married and unmarried in terms of the value they place on having a high-paying job. Only 26 percent of those who are married say this is extremely important to them personally, while 39 percent of those who are unmarried say having a high paying job is extremely important.”

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