What War on Women?

Thousands of people in 46 states rallied this past Saturday against the ‘War on Women.’ Though the marches received relatively little coverage from the so-called ‘liberal media’ (ha!), the issue of the GOP attacks on women are not going away.

Speaker Boehner will have you believe that the ‘War on Women’ is feminist hysterics. He’ll even throw a temper tantrum on the House floor to prove how upset it makes him. Steven Benen would like him to know that he could make the whole issue go away pretty simply: change your anti-woman policies.

Boehner can shout, point, and pound the podium to his heart’s content, but if he doesn’t want to be criticized for Republican measures that undermine women’s health, he should change his party’s agenda, not whine about Democrats shining a light on that agenda.

Rachel Maddow also recognizes that the GOP attacks on women is about policy. She put together a great segment highlighting the attacks and Republicans’ subsequent denial here: Maddow: GOP Denies War on Women. I encourage you to watch the whole thing.

Where I think Maddow really hits the nail on the head is when she points out that conservatives and progressives seem to be working from different facts. Just as the Republicans are currently denying they are waging a war on women, the same days/weeks that they are passing anti-woman legislation or taking money from women’s health programs, they seem to be clueless as to why they are being accused of this ‘war.’

As Maddow attempted to make a point about Equal Pay on yesterday’s Meet the Press, she was interrupted and treated condescendingly by GOP strategist and well-known sexist Alex Castellanos. He insisted that women don’t earn less than men by cherry-picking a small data point about single women ages 40-64. But he flat-out denied that women earn less than men, which is a well-documented fact.

Because the GOP is unwilling to change their policies that hurt women, they have to deny that any problem exists. They need women’s votes, as we are the demographic that elects the president. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see if they choose to lighten up on the attacks in recognition of the political toll they are taking, or if they will double down and alienate the most important voter block at the risk of losing their jobs.

It’s time to stop talking about women and start listening to women. Or you can laugh at us and interrupt us like Alex Castellanos. It may be good television, but it’s bad politics.

 

Support Equal Pay!

It turns my stomach to think that I have had to work  nearly four months this year to equal my husband’s wages from last year. We have the same education and qualifications, but our work is not valued the same.

Why April 28? The typical woman worker had to toil all of 2008 and through April 28, 2009 to earn the equivalent of her male counterpart’s earnings in 2008 alone. (Center for American Progress)

Check out several great posts from the National Women’s Law Center’s Blog for Fair Pay Day 2009 here.  For a great Equal Pay primer, check out “Why Arent’ We There Yet?”

As RobinNWLC points out, women often have no way of knowing if we are being paid fairly. That’s why we need the Paycheck Fairness Act.

The Act would deter wage discrimination by closing loopholes in the EPA and barring retaliation against workers who disclose their wages. The bill also allows women to receive the same remedies for sex-based pay discrimination that are currently available to those subject to discrimination based on race and national origin. (NWLC)

Click here to urge your senators to support the Paycheck Fairness Act!

 

Yay for Fair Pay!

Today President Obama signed his first piece of major legislation…

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act!

He reminds us that we’re all created equal, and each of us deserves a chance to pursue our own version of happiness.

Thank you, Mr. President. This is long overdue. And it is not lost on the world of feminism that this was the first (major) bill you have chosen to sign.

 

On The Way to Fair Pay

Hooray!

Today the House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Now it’s on to the Senate, where it stalled last time. They vote next week. Please urge your senators to support fair pay here!

This bill could be one of the first that President-elect Obama signs into law; an excellent first step.

 

Out of the Way of Fair Pay

MomsRising has a campaign going on in support of Fair Pay. They are gathering signatures to get the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act moving forward again.

Sign the petition here.

Also, check out new research on the pay gap between men and women. You can calculate the average pay gap (over a career) for women in your state by occupation and education.

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Act now!

 

The Candidates’ Priorities

In last night’s debate I found it interesting how John McCain attempted to attack Barack Obama’s tax plan with his Joe the Plumber (at least it’s not Joe Sixpack, but we’re still not talking about Josephine the Waitress) example.

Check out the following chart put together by Viveka Weiley at Chartjunk.

It’s clear to me where the candidates’ priorities lie. Notice the inverse shapes of these two tax plans. Find yourself on the chart and see whose plan benefits you more.

If John McCain was attempting to invoke Joe the Plumber as a reference to middle class Americans, he’s greatly mistaken. Look at where a person making over $250,000 (as Joe said he would be) falls on the chart. He’ll be in the top 0.9% of wage earners! Coming from a man who doesn’t define people as rich until they make $5 million, what do we expect!

 

McCain Opposes Equal Pay for Women

New Obama ad features Lilly Ledbetter. If you don’t know about this remarkable woman, please read:

Of all the appalling decisions the Roberts Court issued last year, one of the worst was the 5-4 ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which gutted the equal-pay provisions of the Civil Rights Act and overturned a decades-old employment-law precedent.

The plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, worked for nearly two decades at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Alabama. She brought an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint against Goodyear after she discovered that for years she had been paid less than male co-workers with the same job. The justices ruled that employees can only file a wage-discrimination complaint within 180 days of when the payroll decision was made.

Continue reading here. (TAP)

In April, John McCain skipped the vote on the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, claiming that had he bothered to show up he would have opposed it. He said women need more “education and training,” and that the lawsuit “opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems.”

In his most recent change of heart, this week McCain claimed he supported equal pay for women, going as far as to say that he would take people to court who discriminated against women. Sorry, John, those women don’t have the right to pursue fair pay in court thanks to you and your colleagues. Guess who they’ll be voting for.

 

The Wrong Kind of Equality

Ellen Goodman has an interesting piece in the Boston Globe about a new kind of equality — in unemployment.

This is not the kind of equality we were hoping for, however, as Goodman points out, it shatters the myth that women are ‘opting out’ of the workplace for full-time motherhood.

A report shepherded through Congress by Democratic Representative Carolyn Maloney of New York shows that since the 2001 recession, women have lost jobs and withdrawn from the workplace at the same rate as men. More to the point, they’ve remained out for the same reasons as men: layoffs, downsizing, outsourcing, and wage stagnation.

Needless to say, this is not the sort of equality we were looking for. But if there is any good news, it’s that this report may finally debunk the idea that droves of women are “opting out” of the workplace for a very different reason: full-time motherhood.

The “opt-out revolution” has been one of the most tenacious story lines of the new century. It arrived full-born with the New York Times Magazine article of 2003 declaring: “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.” The idea was that the best and brightest daughters of the women’s movement were choosing home and hearth over “having it all.”

This was the idea that women had an ‘ambition gap,’ a convenient theory that coincided with the traditional notion that women’s ‘place’ is at home. Many women were more likely to accept the idea of ‘opting out,’ because at least that implied a choice in the matter.

Goodman points out how ‘opting out’ is a much too simple interpretation for explaining why women aren’t running the world.

he downside, the subtraction lesson, if you will, is that the “choice” frame makes it far too easy to reduce the problems of work and family to the lowest common denominator of one: one woman, one family, one personal decision. “If it’s true that women don’t want to work,” says one economist, “think of all the problems that disappear overnight. We don’t have to think about family leave or after-school or the day-to-day grind or the tough challenges of work and family.”

Now along comes the congressional report on the equality we didn’t want. “When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” said congressional economist Heather Boushey. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” That’s what math does to you.

Turns out, it’s the economy, stupid.

We are getting a fuller picture of the real troubles women and families face these days in what we aren’t supposed to call a recession. When men are downsized, outsourced, and discouraged, we say they’re unemployed. But when women get pushed out of the economy, we like to say they “opted out.”

But now we know that women too have the math gene. And this just doesn’t add up.

 

Bush Threatens to Veto Equal Pay for Women

In a policy statement today, the White House said that if the Equal Pay Act is submitted to the President, his senior advisers are recommending that he veto it.

In the statement, the administration claims to support anti-discrimination laws and equal pay for equal work. They claim that this bill would “invite a surge of litigation.”

How dare women think that they have the right to sue when faced with wage discrimination? Especially if it takes them more than a few months to realize it’s happening. Like we can go around asking our male colleagues how much they’re making during our first few months on the job.

Ever heard of Lilly Ledbetter? Bush and Co. refuse justice for women in her situation, placing the blame on them rather than the employers. Pssst…if we were being paid fairly in the first place, you wouldn’t have to worry about this “surge of litigation.” Don’t put this on us.

PS. John McCain is against Equal Pay for women. He, like Bush, thinks we should shoulder the blame.

 

Gender Equity in Sports – 3 Big Payouts

Fresno State University (in California) thought it could get away with discriminating against three female coaches based on their genders and sexual orientations. It happens all the time without recourse, so why would this time be any different? Turns out they were wrong in a big way, to the tune of several million dollars.

There have been many victories under Title IX — the 1972 legislation that commanded federally funded educational institutions not to sex-discriminate in any area, including sports — but the three cases that rocked Fresno State University’s sports department last year stand out for their enormity.

Read more from Michele Kort’s article here.