Grantee Report Offers New View on Economic Security

A report [pdf] just released by Ms. Foundation grantee Wider Opportunities for Women takes a close look at what it takes to achieve real economic security in one region of America -- and the results show just how far short many Americans are falling when it comes to achieving that dream, thanks to ever widening gaps between the "haves" and "have-nots."

As a recent article in The Washington Post explains, WOW's "Basic Economic Security Tables" (BEST) for the Washington, DC Metro Area calculates the monthly income necessary for families to move beyond the poverty line and attain economic security -- covering a range of expenses like child care (which often ranked as families' largest expense), housing, health care, transportation, savings and retirement. The report is the first of its kind to factor savings into the mix (in the form of a small emergency fund) when calculating what it takes to achieve true economic security -- an effort to help policymakers understand what is required to get families beyond the point of "just scraping by."

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Upcoming Event: Single Mothers and the Wealth Gap

For those of you in the New York City area, the Women of Color Policy Network at NYU will be hosting a discussion this Wednesday night that's sure to be informative.

"More Than a Paycheck: Single Mothers and the Wealth Gap" will feature a moderated conversation between Mariko Change, PhD, author of the new book Shortchanged: Why Women Have Less Wealth and What Can be Done About It, and Ida Rademacher, PhD, Director of Research for the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) in Washington, D.C. The event will also celebrate the release of WOCPN's forthcoming report, "At Rope’s End: Single Women Mothers, Wealth and Asset Accumulation in the U.S."

The discussion will run from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm on Wednesday, October 6th, and will be held at 295 Lafayette Street in New York City.

For more details and to RSVP, visit: wagner.nyu.edu/events.

We Are One Nation: Join the March for Justice on October 2

Everyone in America deserves a just and fair chance to achieve the American Dream.

If that's a notion that gets your heart beating a little faster, then make some time this weekend to join more than 100,000 progressives as they march on Washington for equality, jobs and justice.

One Nation Working Together is a social movement of individuals and organizations "committed to putting America back to work and pulling America back together." On Saturday, October 2, 2010, individuals and organizations from across America will gather in Washington, DC, at the Lincoln Memorial, to demand that government take action and implement the changes they voted for in the 2008 election:

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Jobs Creation for Women: Join Us for an Important Conversation

"80% of all new jobs in this economic downturn are coming from microenterprises. Imagine the ripple effect when a low income woman starts a successful business in her neighborhood: she lifts her family up, creates jobs, her business can turn around the community."

Together with our friends at the New York Women's Foundation, the Ms. Foundation is pleased to offer you an exciting opportunity to learn how microenterprise is changing the lives of women across America.

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In US, Child Care Costs Outpace College Tuition

According to a report [pdf] just released by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies, in 39 states across America, a year of child care now costs more than the annual tuition at a public university. And for an increasing number of families, expenditures on child care now top the amount of money spent monthly on food.

As you'll see in the following video, which ran on Good Morning America earlier this week, the staggering cost of child care is putting more and more families in a terrible bind as the economy continues to flag: without child care, parents can't work or look for work -- but low wage jobs and lack of employment make it impossible for them to afford the child care they need.



Ms. Foundation grantee All Our Kin stands at the forefront of the fight to make child care safe and affordable. They are campaigning hard to ensure that Care4Kids, Connecticut's child care subsidy program, remains funded and functioning -- so that families like the ones profiled in this video are spared some of the impossible choices put before them. The group was recently able to secure ARRA funding from the Department of Social Services that will help them train up to 400 family child care providers across the state of Connecticut, providing education, employment and quality, collaborative child care to those who need it most.

Learn more about how the Ms. Foundation partners with grassroots groups to promote just economic policies that benefit women, families and communities.

Grantee 'Parent Voices' Organizes to Save Child Care in CA

One of the great things about working at the Ms. Foundation is that you get the chance to be utterly inspired by the work our grantees are doing, often on a daily basis. Today, that inspiration emanates from California, where our grantee Parent Voices is using remarkably creative methods to counter proposed budget cuts that would seriously threaten child care programs throughout the state.

Parent Voices is a parent-led grassroots organization fighting to make quality child care affordable and accessible to all families. Because they are based in California, they have a special interest in fighting Governor Schwarzenegger's proposal to eliminate nearly all state funding for child care. From subsidies to infrastructure -- you name it, and the Governator is looking to do away with it.

Along with using traditional measures to challenge these proposed cuts (partnering with legislative leaders; building coalitions), the leaders at PV also came up with an ingenious tactic for raising awareness of the issue and encouraging more folks to speak out against the cuts.

Timed to coincide with the opening of the California State Fair in mid-July, PV created an event called the "California State UN-Fair," which drew an audience of more than 250 parents, children and child care providers from around the state. The event's goal was to spread the word that cuts to child care are only likely to result in further job losses, and to urge the state legislature to protect programs that keep parents and child care providers working. The carnival-themed event featured games like:

• "The Wheel of Misfortune" -- where, however you spin the wheel, a proposed child care cut or welfare cut results in families suffering and the loss of a job
  
• "Funding Tug O' War" -- to show how proposed cuts to health and human services impact both children and their parents
  
• "The Child Care Gamble" -- where a toy landing on either rent, utilities, gas, and car insurance determined which bill would not be paid if cuts to child care went through

The event leaders also created a soup line, where they gave out free Cup-o-Noodles to attendees. And participants were given the opportunity to take direct action on the issue of the day by calling US Representative Barbara Lee and voicing their concerns about the need for federal child care funding as states continue to falter.

Not only did the event draw a crowd in the hundreds, but more than 25 media outlets picked up the story and ran with it. Legislators and other local organizations had nothing but great feedback to share -- and most importantly, just one day later, the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Education, Labor and HHS (which Barbara Lee sits on), approved a $700 million increase to the Child Care and Development Block Grant. Two weeks later, the Senate Appropriations Committee increased federal child care funding by $1 billion.

What a win for PV! The problems with child care in California aren't over by a long-shot, but their creative, compelling organizing is helping to build a safer world for millions of children across their state and beyond.

See what we mean by inspiring?

NY Times Offers State-by-State Guide to the Gender Pay Gap

Ever wonder how your state stacks up against others when it comes to the gender pay gap? If you're looking for some answers, check out the New York Times' Economix blog, which now features an interactive map that shows just how the earnings difference between female and male workers breaks down, state-by-state. (The map is below and a bar graph of the same data appears at the end of this post.)


Where do full-time and salaried female workers earn the most relative to their male peers? The District of Columbia, where women earn 96.5% of what men do. At the other end of the spectrum is Louisiana, which comes in dead last; women workers there earn just 65% as much as male workers do (which is just one reason why the Ms. Foundation's strategy to raise the voices and power of women in the South remains so crucial).

The data used to create this map comes from a new report on women's earnings put out by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which we wrote about earlier this week.

We suppose this is great news for the women of Washington, DC -- but really: wouldn't it be remarkable if there were even one state in the nation where male and female earnings were exactly on par? Here's to the day when maps like this one finally have no shades of gray, and equality -- on all fronts -- really is the law of our land.

Women and Work: The Numbers Are In

From the world of research on women in the workplace, two new interesting sets of data you may want to take note of.

The first comes from the U.S. Department of Labor, which just released 2009 earnings numbers [pdf] for men and women in the US. According to their report, women under 35 are, for the first time, earning more than 90% of what their male peers earn for full-time, salaried work.

That's great news -- and the hope is that this points towards a future where full parity is actually visible on the horizon. But troubling signs remain, including that women over age 35 continue to find themselves earning just 75% of what their male colleagues take home. That number has barely budged in decades, and it doesn't take too much effort to figure out why. As the New York Times suggested:

Women who are older are probably more likely to have dropped out of the labor force at some point to have children, and years spent away from the job reduce an employee’s potential pay. Plus, perhaps age 35 is around the time when employers start seriously looking at workers for potential promotion to higher-paying jobs, like management positions.

In other words, women over 35 continue to pay the price both for our country's lack of quality affordable childcare (which is generally why women feel the need to "drop out" of the workforce in the first place) and for the persistent sexism that keeps most women out of executive and managerial positions.

Will the creep towards parity among younger workers be enough to overcome both of those realities? Nobody yet seems sure. But another set of data, from the Center for American Progress, offers a few other hopeful signs about American attitudes on women and work.

This new study found "strong majorities of men and women agreeing that the rise of women in the workforce is a positive development for society -- a belief that crossed partisan, ideological, racial and ethnic, and even generational lines." Notably, it found particular support for the "rising status of women in the workplace" among the Latino population.

Among other trends, the poll suggests that Latinos are among the strongest proponents of new policies that improve work-life balance, are more progressive than other groups on the issue of women and politics, and are much more likely to say that it is important to them that their daughters have access to interesting careers.

In some ways this isn't too surprising. As our recent poll [pdf] with the Center for Community Change found, Latinas have been particularly hard hit by the global recession, with two-thirds saying their personal situation has been affected by the country’s economic situation and more than half reporting that they or someone in their household has lost a job in the past year. With that much economic insecurity hitting their communities, Latinos are likely looking for new solutions, wherever they may come from. And women are the most underutilized resource this country has to offer.

If we have any luck, folks in all communities will follow the lead of our Latino brothers and sisters and support policies that make it easier for women to enter, remain part of and lead in the workplace -- not to mention get paid fairly for the work they're doing. Forty plus years into the second wave of feminism, it seems like it's about time.

Women & Welfare: Revisiting Reform in the Wake of Economic Crisis

While there’s been plenty of talk throughout this global economic crisis about the fate of the newly jobless, newly poor, middle class, stories about how the tanking of the economy has affected those who were already poor in the “best of times” have been few and far between. In this week’s issue of The Nation, however, Katha Pollitt asks some long overdue questions about the current plight of Americans who entered this recession in poverty -- particularly the women among them.

Framing her piece around "welfare mothers," and the impact that the passage of 1996's Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (or PRWORA) has had on their lives, Pollitt notes that despite the tendency of pundits and analysts to label these welfare reforms a “success,” in fact, even in the economically prosperous 1990s, the families most affected by said reforms remained solidly poor. PRWORA may have pushed poor women off the welfare rolls and forced them to find jobs (which conservatives cast as a return to the great American ethic of “hard work”) -- but those jobs tended to pay them much less than it actually took to survive, usually earning them salaries well below the annual poverty line. (Hard to see the “success” in all that.)

So how are these women and families managing nearly 15 years after the passage of the PRWORA and in the worst economic climate in recent memory? The hidden truth may be that they aren’t managing at all; they’re simply subsisting. Homeless shelters have seen the impact: according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, from July to November 2008 the number of families entering New York City homeless shelters increased 40 percent over the same period in 2007. And as Pollitt points out, while the use of food stamps nationwide has also risen 40% over the last 2 years, there’s been little jump in welfare rates over the same period -- meaning, most likely, that the process for accessing the latter type of aid has become so complicated as to “weed out” those who most need it. It’s therefore safe to assume, according to one of Pollitt’s sources, that most of these women and families are now living in a state of “constant suffering and inequality,” vulnerable not just to poverty itself, but to all of its attendant, ugly bedfellows, including increased rates of domestic violence.

There are, of course, solutions to be had to problems of this nature, and, among other things, they involve crafting and pushing for the adoption of policies that put the needs and experiences of women and families at their center -- just as Ms. Foundation grantees the Mississippi Low-Income Child Care Initiative and the Georgia Citizen’s Coalition on Hunger do every day.

With TANF (Temporary Aid for Needy Families – a provision of PRWORA that replaced AFDC) up for recertification this year, Congress now has an opportunity to, in the words of grantee Legal Momentum, finally “make [welfare programs] responsive to the mothers and children [they are] intended to serve.” To do that, though, they’ll need to start listening to the women living on the front lines of extended poverty and including their perspectives in the decision-making process -- an approach that’s clearly long overdue.

Susan Wefald

Executive Vice President & COO

Sara K. Gould on ARRA Anniversary: Child Care, Green Jobs, Grassroots Advocacy Are Key

Today, on the first anniversary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Sara K. Gould, Ms. Foundation President & CEO, shares her thoughts on the National Council for Research on Women's Real Deal blog about ARRA's impact to date and what else is needed to ensure real and lasting security for women, families and communities. She begins:

ARRA has provided a crucial injection of support to states during the worst of our nation’s current economic crisis. Take child care, for example: several states have used the funding to prevent budget cuts; some have reduced waiting lists for subsidized child care; and others have worked to improve the quality of child-care delivery.

That said, a lack of transparency and accountability has prevented grassroots organizations from accessing ARRA funding and assessing the extent to which it has alleviated economic insecurity in their communities. States have had considerable leeway in choosing which funds to accept and which reforms to implement; as a result, billions of dollars have yet to reach those most in need, especially low-income people, people of color and women.

Moving forward, we can do better. In addition to improving transparency and accountability, there should be a greater role for grassroots organizations who know best how to stabilize local communities. We should also bolster support for grassroots policy advocacy. It’s not enough to keep existing programs afloat; we need to continue to transform policies to make them work better for more people, well into the future. Read More

Sara's post is part of the Real Deal blog's Forum on Economic Recovery Act.

Update (22 February 2010)
The Ms. Foundation announces an open call for proposals for Economic Justice and ARRA Implementation.