a number of stories this week have considered women’s employment and earning patterns.  Katrin Bennhold’s piece in the New York Timeson employed  mothers, “In Germany, A Tradition Falls, and Women Rise,” is the first of a series in the Times and the International Herald Tribune  examining “the female factor,” or “where women stand in the early 21st century.”    One answer to that question comes in a study just released by the Pew Research Center on “

Scheduled for April 8-10 at the University of Cambridge: the 4th Conference of the Commission on European Family Law on The Future of Family Property in Europe.  Information is here; early registration closes at the end of January.  The conference is organized by Jo Miles and Jens Scherpe at Cambridge; speakers include Lord Justice Thorpe, Head of International Family Justice for England and Wales; Walter Pintens, University of Leuven; Maarit Jänterä-Jareborg, University of Uppsala; Katharina Boele-Woelki, Univer

I enjoyed this piece by Choe Sang-Hun in the New York Times, called “Questioning a Korean Wedding Tradition,” which considers recent debate about the practice of making large cash gifts at the time of weddings and funerals.  As a point of (loose) comparison, I recommend this story from the Times in July 2003 called “For

In Sunday’s New York Times, a story by Marc Lacey, “Money Trickles North as Mexicans Help Relatives,” considers the effects of the economic slow-down on the cross-border financial relationships of Mexican families.  Remittances from the United States were $16.4 billion in the first nine months of 2009 — but that figure represents a 13.4 percent decrease from the same period in 2008.