Month: February 2021

Several recent important moments in history for women in other countries stand out and seem important to highlight. Here are a few.

France

This headline in the New York Times caught my attention: “City of Paris Fined Nearly $110,000 for Appointing Too Many Women.” It seems that the first-ever woman mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo was deemed to be too successful in correcting historic imbalances in gender representation in city government. Technically, the law under which she was fined says that no more than 60 percent of appointments in a given year can be given to one gender. Her appointments of women in 2018 exceeded that percentage, but women now hold 47 percent of senior leadership positions in city government overall. Women still make up only 37 percent of top civil service jobs in the country. After centuries of male-dominated leadership in France, this fine is absurd.

Poland

Amanda Taub, writing for the New York Times, reports that women have been at the heart of a large protest movement in Poland rebelling against a court decision to ban most abortions. The large protests produced a delay from the government of the implementation of the new ban, but it could still be implemented any time. Taub explains, “Women’s demands for reproductive freedom and their calls for greater equality threaten to upend a power structure” controlled by men since the fall of Communism.

Switzerland

In September 2020, Swiss voters approved a law mandating paid paternity leave, making it the last country in Western Europe to do so. Switzerland has been slow to recognize gender equity. Women did not gain the right to vote until 1971 and had to get permission from their husbands to work outside the home until 1988. The new law does not apply to adoptive or same-sex parents. More work needs to be done.

Vatican

I have written in past articles about the frustrations of women in the Catholic church because of the lack of leadership roles for women. Elisabetta Povoledo, writing for the New York Times, reports that “Pope Francis has changed the laws of the Roman Catholic church to formally allow women to give readings from the Bible during Mass, act as altar servers and distribute communion, but they remain barred from becoming deacons or priests.” These new roles are not new for many women in the church, especially in developing countries. While this is considered a step forward by some for the pope to formalize these roles, the lack of access to the senior leader roles of deacon or priest remains disappointing to many.

Japan

Shinzo Abe resigned in September 2020 as prime minister of Japan after serving in office for eight years. One of his most consequential unfulfilled promises was his goal of promoting women in the workforce, specifically into management roles. At the end of his eight years, this promise remains unfulfilled. Motoko Rich and Hisako Ueno report that in 2020, women held less than 12 percent of corporate management jobs and represented less than 15 percent of lawmakers in Japan’s parliament. Until more women are in parliament, significant policy changes to make childcare more available and to support women’s careers will remain unlikely. Rich and Ueno cite Megumi Mikawa as saying, “The fundamental ideas of the country are controlled by men. That’s why we don’t have any policies to really cater to ordinary people.” Unfortunately, there is no indication that the patriarchal culture of Japan is going to change any time soon.

Stay tuned—hopefully more change is on the way.

 

Photo by Dovile Ramoskaite on Unsplash

Let’s mark this moment. As of this writing, President Joe Biden has officially nominated the most diverse cabinet in US history. If members are confirmed, this will be the first-ever gender-balanced US cabinet with 50 percent of positions (eleven positions plus Vice President Kamala Harris) held by women. Of the eleven women nominated, seven of them are women of color—another long-overdue milestone. Several men nominated are also men of color, increasing the diversity of the whole cabinet. Here are the eleven women nominated to cabinet positions that require Senate confirmation, and some other notable nominations for women. Their level of competence to serve in these positions is exciting.

Janet Yellen—Treasury Secretary

As reported in New York Magazine by Intelligencer staff, Janet Yellen will not only be the first woman to lead the Department of the Treasury but the “first person to have headed the Treasury, the central bank and the White House Council of Economic Advisers,” the three most powerful economic positions in the nation. In recent months, Yellen has expressed a willingness to use fiscal measures to stimulate economic recovery in a nation with a poverty rate above 11 percent. “This is not a good time to have fiscal policy switch from being accommodative to creating a drag,” Yellen said in October. “That’s what happened [last decade], and it retarded the recovery.”

Deb Haaland—Secretary of the Interior

Biden nominated New Mexico Representative Deb Haaland to be his pick for secretary of the interior, becoming the first Native American to lead the department that determines policy for federally owned natural resources, as well as tribal lands.

Gina Raimondo—Commerce Secretary

CNN reports that Gina Raimondo is the first woman governor of Rhode Island and has served in the role since her election in 2014. She has been praised for her leadership amid the coronavirus pandemic and for the remarkable economic turnaround she led in her state before the pandemic.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield—US Ambassador to the United Nations

New York Magazine notes that Biden named Foreign Service veteran Linda Thomas-Greenfield to the UN ambassador position. He will reestablish the role in the cabinet after his isolationist predecessor demoted it.

Jennifer Granholm—Secretary of Energy

Politico reported that Biden will name former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as the leader of the expansive Department of Energy. Her experience in Lansing from 2003 to 2011 is an asset as Biden works to speed up the transition to electric cars, among other green energy priorities.

Avril Haines—Director of National Intelligence

According to New York Magazine, Avril Haines served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2015. If confirmed, she will oversee the seventeen agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community, becoming the first woman to fill the role.

Neera Tanden—Office of Management and Budget

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, Biden nominated Neera Tanden—the frequent Twitter user and president of the center-left think tank Center for American Progress—to be his OMB director.

Katherine Tai—US Trade Representative

CNBC announced that Biden nominated Katherine Tai to be the top US trade representative. Tai was a trade lawyer on China during the Obama administration. The US trade representative is responsible for developing and recommending United States trade policy to the president of the United States, conducting trade negotiations at bilateral and multilateral levels and coordinating trade policy within the government through the interagency Trade Policy Staff Committee and Trade Policy Review Group.

Marcia Fudge—Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

Representative Marcia Fudge of Ohio was selected to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Politico notes that while Fudge lobbied to be the first Black woman nominated for the post of secretary of agriculture, she has a big role to fill at HUD since this department will play a key role in the incoming administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused millions of people to fall behind on rent and mortgage payments.

Isabel Guzman—Administrator of the Small Business Administration

Ms. Magazine reports that Biden nominated the director of California’s Office of the Small Business Advocate, Isabel Guzman, to lead the Small Business Administration, a cabinet-level position.

Cecelia Rouse—Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors

Cecilia Rouse was a member of the Council of Economic Advisors during the Obama administration. She is an American economist and dean of the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

Other notable nominations of women to cabinet-level positions include Gina McCarthy as the White House climate czar, Jennifer Psaki as the White House press secretary, Susan Rice as the White House Domestic Policy Council director, Rochelle Walensky as the director of the CDC, and Rachel Levine as assistant secretary of health. Levine, if confirmed, will be the first-ever openly transgender woman to be confirmed by the Senate. Let’s give our support to these stunningly qualified women as they take on leadership of our troubled country.

 

Photo courtesy of John Brighenti (CC BY 2.0)

Once in a while, events in the country bring different interest groups into alignment to work together for structural change. It seems possible that the combination of the urgency of hardships families are experiencing wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and the narrow Senate majority established by the election of two Georgia democrats will create that possibility. As I wrote in a previous post, citing Claire Cain Miller, “Nearly everybody cares for family at some point”:

• In two-thirds of married couples with children, both parents work.
• Nearly half of adults in their forties and fifties are caring for both children and parents.
• The United States is the only developed Western country that does not support working parents with national policies for paid family leave or subsidized childcare.

New legislation proposed by the Biden-Harris team “approaches the care economy in a holistic way, across the age spectrum,” says Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, in an article by Paula Span. Their plan combines Medicaid benefits for older and disabled adults, preschool funding for toddlers, and better pay and benefits for home-care and childcare workers into one package. Specifically, Span explains:

• The Biden-Harris plan builds on earlier campaigns for paid family leave and recent efforts to rebalance Medicaid, making it more focused on covering caregiving at home for older adults rather than in dreaded nursing homes.
• Their plan would convert “the anemic federal Family and Medical Leave Act, which mandates only unpaid leave, into 12 weeks of paid leave.”
• It proposes a tax credit for as much as $5,000 to reimburse families for expenses associated with unpaid caregiving, such as paid help, home modifications, remote safety monitoring devices, and hearing aids.
• It would also give family members social security credits for time out of the labor force to care for family members.

How will this caregiver package be paid for? Span notes that the Biden team asserts that the costs can be paid for over ten years “by rolling back tax breaks for real estate investors with incomes over $400,000 and increasing tax compliance for other high earners.” The Biden team also asserts that the plan will create three million new caregiving and education jobs and increase employment by five million by allowing unpaid caregivers to reenter the work force.

This kind of change is so needed but will not happen without strong support. Let’s let our congressmembers know that we support caregivers by writing and calling them to support this legislation when it comes up—and I believe that it will come up soon.

 

Photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash

Title IX of the Education Amendment, signed into law in 1972, “forbade institutions receiving federal funds—virtually all public schools and universities—from discriminating on the basis of gender” in organized sports, as reported by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times. Practically speaking, this meant that schools had to provide equivalent resources for sports, but they did not have to let the women and men play on the same teams. This is why the story of Sarah Fuller is so significant. Fuller was invited to step onto the field for the Vanderbilt University football team, the Commodores, in November 2020. Fully suited up in pads and team jersey, she became the first woman to play in a Power 5 football game when she performed the second-half kickoff. Renkl notes that Fuller wore her own helmet emblazoned with the words “Play Like a Girl,” the slogan of a nonprofit that promotes sports and STEM opportunities for girls.

Thanks to Title IX, Fuller had the training, skills, and confidence to step in when the team, due to the coronavirus, was left without a kicker. The Vanderbilt women’s soccer team had just won the Southeastern Conference Division I championship with Fuller as a goalkeeper with a powerful kick—and the Commodores badly needed a kicker. She received a personal tweet from Hillary Clinton saying, “Thank you, Sarah, for helping to prove that women and girls belong on every playing field—quite literally.” Why shouldn’t women and girls be able to bring their talents to any and every field, not just those designated for women and girls?

In fact, so many opportunities in sports and elsewhere are defined as “for women” or “for men” when, in reality, the lines of sex, gender, and talent are blurred and beyond these binary categories. Talents are denied rather than celebrated based on criteria that are unfair and unproven. Jeré Longman of the New York Times writes about the uproar over who can compete in certain competitions in the Olympics. Based on sex testing that arbitrarily defines which chromosomes and hormones qualify someone to run a race as a woman, Longman cites Payoshni Mitra, an Indian scholar and athlete’s rights activist, as saying that the World Athletics organization is committing human rights violations by enforcing testosterone regulation on intersex athletes like Caster Semenya of South Africa and Annet Negesa of Uganda, both talented athletes who identify as women and who are not being allowed to compete unless they agree to undergo medical intervention. Longman notes that Human Rights Watch has deemed “medically unnecessary and humiliating” medical interventions as discriminatory and racially biased, disproportionately affecting women of color when there is no scientific consensus on the precise impact of testosterone on athletic performance.

Maybe it’s time to remove these artificial barriers of sex and gender and let all people bring their talents to whatever their field of endeavor is.

 

Photo by John Torcasio on Unsplash