Posts Tagged ‘family leave’
Women Are the Labor Force, Where is Our Political Force?
By WCF Fellow Trish
A study released today, The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything, focuses on a national landmark: for the first time in the history of the United States, half of all paid workers are women.
Yet we’re still only 17% of Congress and 24% of State Legislatures? What gives?
Queen of the Women’s Movement, Gloria Steinem, says the report exposes the truth that though women are better educated than men, it still hasn’t afforded them equal advancement in society.
Steinem explains that the study’s underlying assumption is that government and business will have to adjust policies to meet women’s needs as parents and workers in order to keep the economy going.
But Steinem goes on the pose the question:
“Will this $250,000 poll and estimated $2 million project succeed in creating real change where so many others have failed?”
The report itself headlines such warnings as “Plenty of study, few results: Real family friendly workplace reform is long overdue.”
“Now that women are half of all workers with incomes that are necessary to 80 percent of families—indeed, 40 percent of babies are now born to single mothers—childcare is still nowhere on the list of priorities in Congress, and we have also become the only industrialized country without any requirement of paid family leave.”
As we saw in the sexual assault vote, the unfortunate truth is that it takes women legislators to create change around important issues such as rape and family leave—issues too commonly thought of as “women’s issues,” which really affect our society as a whole.
The only way that we can ensure our nation’s laws and public policy meet the needs of half of our workforce, of half its population, is to get more women in public office.
