Anne Litwin

A recent article written by Kweilin Ellingrud for the McKinsey & Company COVID Response Center provides valuable insight into some long-term effects for women who left the workforce during the pandemic and some influences of culture and diversity on the women who left. For this case study, Ellingrud interviewed two Latina mothers who left the workforce. Farida Mercedes was a human resources executive for seventeen years at a global company and Dr. Victoria DeFrancesco Soto was a political scientist at the University of Texas at Austin when they left their jobs to care for their children during the pandemic.

Ellingrud notes that many Black and brown mothers did not have the option of leaving the workforce during the pandemic because they are the primary or sole breadwinners of their families. Prior to the pandemic women were the primary or sole breadwinners in 68 percent of Black families and 41 percent of Latino families. Nonetheless, Black and brown women had the highest unemployment rate as of January 2021.

The role of culture in the decisions of Mercedes and Soto to leave the workforce to care for children during the pandemic is clear. Mercedes explained that in her culture, “Women have never really had the support that men have had in the workforce.” She goes on to explain that in her marriage, she is always the one to take care of the children and that it was just assumed that if someone needed to stay home with the children during the pandemic, it would be her. Soto notes, “In Latin American culture, there are stricter kinds of gender norms. Combine the fact that Latinas are the ones who have been hardest hit by the shecession with the fact that you have these gender norms, and it’s really a recipe for disaster for women and women of color.”

This situation has many implications for women of color:

• Women who cut back their paid-work hours to accommodate family responsibility risk losing wages, benefits, and opportunities for advancement,
• The women who are eventually able to go back to work are not going to be able to advance to the degree they would have before because of the gap in their employment,
• Women who work in service industries as low-wage workers may not be able to regain employment at all. A lot of their jobs were planned for automation before the pandemic, and the pandemic accelerated that timeline.
• In addition to lost paychecks, lost contributions to retirement savings and Social Security will result in long-term hardship.

Ellingrud quotes Soto, coauthor of the report “America’s Recovery from the 2020 ‘Shecession’: Building a Female Future of Childcare and Work,” as saying that to get women, and especially women of color, back to work, we need

• A robust reskilling and retooling program to enable lower socioeconomic women to find stable employment
• Fixes to our broken childcare system
• Maternity leave

The pandemic has laid bare the disparities that women of color face and highlighted many of our broken systems. The shecession is not going to magically disappear as the country comes out of the pandemic. We need to make investments in people and systems—such as childcare—now.

Photo by Marcin Jozwiak on Unsplash

What will it take to bring about real change in racial equity in the United States? Decades of efforts to close the wealth, health, and other gaps for Black and brown Americans have not made much of a difference. In an article written by Earl Fitzhugh, J. P. Julien, Nick Noel, and Shelley Stewart for McKinsey Quarterly, the authors suggest a strategy based on new research that could bring about lasting change.

We are at a particular moment in time when ending racial inequality might be possible. The year 2020 was full of losses for Black lives that the whole world noticed:

• Murders by police of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other people of color in the United States and other countries brought people into the streets in sixty countries and more than two thousand US towns and cities to support Black lives.
• COVID-19 deaths for Black Americans was at least double compared to white Americans.
• The economic burden of the pandemic fell significantly more heavily on Black and brown workers and business owners.

Since George Floyd was murdered in May 2020, organizations and businesses have committed more than $200 billion to address racial inequality. But, the authors note, the events above are rooted in long-standing inequities and a long history of systemic discrimination. They point out that decades of efforts to close the wealth, health, and other gaps for Black Americans have not worked:

• The racial wealth gap has persisted and grown. One study cited by the authors found that since 1950, there has been no progress toward income or wealth equality between Black and white households in the United States.
• Public, private, and social sector efforts to combat racial inequality have not had the intended impact. Each sector has systemic barriers for Black Americans built into it, and no one sector can address these barriers alone. For example, social sector organizations, such as nonprofits, cannot get adequate funding for racial justice initiatives.

The authors declare that “single-sector solutions cannot fully address the barriers to Black advancement.”

They also argue that commitments by individual organizations to combat racism will not be enough. They point out “the best hope lies with a sector-spanning coalition.” The researchers studied coalitions that successfully addressed similar complex challenges, such as discrimination against LBGTQ+ Americans and youth unemployment. Through in-depth interviews and wide-ranging conversations, which took into account the expertise, insights, and lived experiences of the leaders of these successful coalitions, they found five attributes that could be the foundation of an intervention that eliminates structural racism in the United States. The five attributes of successful coalitions from this research are

1. Unite around one clear mission—The authors note that “racial inequalities exist in nearly every area of society—housing, politics, finance, labor, criminal justice, and more.” It can be difficult for different sectors to all agree on one mission, but that is essential. For example, the LGBTQ+ organizations agreed on Freedom to Marry, which aimed to win the right for same-sex couples to marry, as the goal they would unite around, even though many organizations had other agendas. They were able to organize a critical mass of people, supporters, resources, and momentum to accomplish their goal.
2. Coordinate and collaborate via a central backbone—Successful coalitions rely on a backbone structure—a core group that provides national coordination to convene stakeholders, build consensus, coordinate action, collect and disseminate data, track overall progress, and publicize the results.
3. Secure adequate and appropriate funding—The authors note that “Black-led and Black-focused organizations are disproportionately underfunded.” Smaller grants, restricted grants, and unconscious bias in funding decisions limit the ability of Black-led organizations to accomplish their goals. Successful coalitions have a large group of funders willing to pool resources and leave allocation decisions to a strong leader.
4. Ensure accountability—Successful coalitions have systems in place to collect, analyze, and share data on outputs and outcomes of their initiatives and agree on measures of success.
5. Win and maintain support from a broad set of stakeholders—They encourage active engagement from institutions and individuals beyond those directly affected.

These five attributes of successful coalitions make so much sense as components of a strategy to eliminate racial inequality for Black and brown people as well as for other complex social issues. Stacey Abrams implemented a similar strategy for turning Georgia into a blue state. Fragmentation is the killer of dreams, but coalitions can make big change happen.

Photo courtesy of Fibonacci Blue (CC BY 2.0)

Much has been written about the lasting negative impact of the pandemic on women’s employment. In a previous post, I summarized several studies on the potential long-term impact of the pandemic on working mothers. Alisha Haridasani Gupta, writing for the New York Times, notes that “by February [2021], almost two million women had dropped out of the work force, bringing the female labor participation rate to its lowest level since the 1980s.” She goes on to note that the reason for the decreased participation was the increased caregiving burden on women due to the COVID-19 shutdown, when schools and childcare centers closed.

The sudden shift in childcare and eldercare burdens, which fell largely on women when the lockdown happened in spring 2020, changed the focus for many businesses from seeing childcare as a private matter to a business concern as they lost critical employees. Gupta writes that when Tina Tchen, the chief executive of Time’s Up, an advocacy organization, reached out to businesses to ask if they were interested in starting a new coalition called the Care Economy Business Council, almost two hundred small, medium, and large organizations became founding members with a focus on pushing for sweeping reforms to the caregiving infrastructure in the United States (). They note “that crumbling child and elder care systems ultimately affect business productivity and bottom lines.” The Care Economy Business Council released this groundbreaking statement:

“Our economy cannot reach its full potential without women, and women cannot reach their full potential without a reimagining of care.”

This statement from the council represents a radical shift in perspective for the business community, which acknowledges that the care infrastructure problem is bigger than they can solve on their own and that the federal government needs to play a role. The council will both look for ways they can improve workplace policies and advocate for federally funded

• Family and medical leave
• Affordable childcare and eldercare
• Elevated wages for caregiving workers

There is bipartisan support in Washington, DC, for President Biden’s infrastructure bill, which includes investment in our national care infrastructure. It’s important to lend our support to this new proposed legislation. The health of our economy and the future careers of women depend on us.

Photo courtesy of Savanna Smiles (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I was truly surprised to read about efforts by the president of Argentina, Alberto Fernández, to expand the rights of women in his country. Alisha Haridasani Gupta and Daniel Politi, writing for the New York Times, explain that President Fernández fulfilled a campaign promise by legalizing abortion at the end of 2020 and vows to “help mothers get back to work [after the pandemic] by building more preschools” and to fight against gender violence. Fernández deserves credit for putting the structures in place in his government to implement this feminist agenda, and he has put three strong feminists in charge of driving these changes:

• Elizabeth Gómez Alcorta, the country’s first minister of Women, Genders and Diversity
• Vilma Ibarra, the president’s top legal adviser who wrote the country’s landmark abortion bill
• Mercedes D’Alessandro, the country’s first national director of economy, equity, and gender within the Economy Ministry

These three leaders sprang into action when the COVID pandemic hit just after the new president was inaugurated in December 2019. In fact, the United Nations ranked Argentina number one for gender-sensitive COVID-19 responses in the world. Gómez Alcorta, Ibarra, and D’Alessandro explain that the gender-sensitive responses fall into four categories:

1. Gender-based violence—The three leaders created enhanced communication channels through WhatsApp and email to enable women to reach out for help during the pandemic lockdown and declared services related to gender-based violence essential services.
2. Food emergencies services—Food delivery and protection from eviction were implemented, especially with regards to the trans community, which is particularly vulnerable in Argentina.
3. Emergency family income—An emergency family allowance, which reached nine million people, was implemented to acknowledge that many women work in the informal sector and often do unpaid care work. The authors cite studies published by the Economy Ministry showing that unpaid care and domestic work are the largest sector of Argentina’s economy and that 75 percent of that work is carried out by women.
4. Professionalizing care work—Gómez Alcorta notes that, postpandemic, the administration plans to create eight hundred kindergartens, nurseries, and day-care centers around the county and will revise parental leave policies to create more equality in the workplace. The eight hundred childcare programs will not only help mothers go back and stay in the workforce, they will also professionalize care work and recognize the value of that work.

D’Alessandro explains that many gender-based problems still exist in the country. There are large gender gaps in the judiciary, trade unions, and the business sector, and the society is “still a male-dominated patriarchal, unequal structure with clear discrimination against women.” She goes on to state, “We’re not against men. All we want to do is take apart a system that has abused and hurt women.” I believe their attention to structural changes will help society for the better.

Photo courtesy of Ministerio de Cultura de la Nación (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I remember how disappointed my good friend was when her daughter was born about the lack of parenting equity in her marriage. She felt sure that she had chosen a man as her spouse who would truly be an equal partner in parenting. And he did express a commitment to the idea of equity. But once her first child arrived, she would marvel to me that while he did a lot of tasks around the house, he still did not carry an equal load. The lack of equality showed up in intangible ways that required a lot of her attention to details or tasks he did not notice or think about. She felt frustrated, but he could not understand her complaints. That is why new research reported by Jessica Grose of the New York Times is so helpful—this research gives language to previously hard-to-describe “work” that women tend to do more of that researcher Allison Daminger calls “cognitive labor.”

Grose notes that while she has been writing about the gender gap in housework and childcare among heterosexual couples for almost a decade, the gap in the mental load, “an invisible combination of anxiety and planning that is part of parenting, . . . remains frustratingly uneven.” Grose points out that the work of Daminger, a doctoral candidate in sociology and social policy at Harvard University, breaks down “cognitive labor” into four parts: anticipate, identify, decide, and monitor. Using planning for summer camp as an example, the four parts are described as

• Anticipate—thinking ahead about something, like the need to find a summer camp placement
• Identify—researching possible summer camps
• Deciding—choosing a camp to sign up for
• Monitoring—making sure that all the steps for enrollment, such as turning in the application and medical forms, are complete by the due date

Through interviews with thirty-five heterosexual couples, published in a paper in the American Sociological Review, Daminger found gender differences in the four parts as follows:

• Women do the vast majority of anticipating. Women are the ones who carry the awareness that steps need to be taken to enroll in a program or camp, and women are the ones who have to bring it up and start a planning process.
• In her research, Daminger found that men and women jointly handled identifying and deciding which camp is best.
• But women do a lot more than men on the back end of following up on the details such as turning in required forms on time.

This is exactly what my friend complained about in her partnership. She had to hold space in her brain to anticipate or follow up on details that her husband did not do, which felt unfair to her. Daminger suggests that it is not that men are not capable of executive function. They demonstrate this capacity at work, “and yet,” she notes, “those same traits are not activated at home.”

While Grose and Daminger agree that the reason for this difference probably lies in the societal expectations for “good mothering,” which are still different for “good fathering,” there are some steps that couples can take to level this playing field. For example, get granular about how you define “fair.” If one partner is in charge of laundry, define the whole area of responsibility as including being responsible for monitoring the supply of detergent. In other words, agree on whole areas of responsibility and spell out all the tasks involved so that everyone agrees and is clear.

Daminger recommends a new book by Eve Rodsky called Fair Play that talks about how to define household and childcare tasks. We are making progress, but we are not there yet.

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

Adia Harvey Wingfield, professor of sociology at Washington University in Saint Louis writing for the Brookings Institute Gender Equality Series, shares a summary of her new research on ways the intersection of race and gender create uneven and divergent outcomes for women of color in a variety of professions. She has published new research in her book Flatlining: Race, Work, and Health Care in the New Economy. Here are some of the divergent outcomes that Wingfield discusses.

Pay gaps—Wingfield writes that “as a result of factors including, but not limited to, motherhood penalties, gender discrimination, and occupational segregation, women make 79 cents for every dollar men earn.” Wingfield goes on to note further divergence due to the intersections of race and gender for Black women who earn only 64 cents on the dollar and Latinas who earn 54 cents.

Stifled opportunities—Wingfield’s research confirms a challenge for women of color who cannot find mentors to help them advance in their careers because of race. She cites the research of sociologist Tsedale Melaku who reports that Black women in particular are more ambitious than white women but less likely to find mentors because of discomfort with Black people. When white executives do not have Black people in their personal or professional circles, they may be uncertain or uncomfortable interacting with them. Without senior white executives as mentors, Black women find it difficult to advance.

Specific forms of sexual harassment—Wingfield also cites research from Margaret Chin showing that Asian American women “experience racialized and gendered forms of sexual harassment that leads to isolation and results in exclusion from leadership opportunities.”

Doubts about competence and intelligence—Research has also shown that Latinas find that coworkers interact with them based on stereotypes that they are unintelligent or illegally in the country. Wingfield points out that these attitudes may account for the dearth of Latinas in leadership positions.

Being an only—When women of color do make it into high status jobs, they are often an “only”— the only person of color in the organization or at that level. It is not unusual for “onlies” to feel unsupported and exhausted by having to work extra hard to prove themselves.

Wingfield also specifically zeroed in on three healthcare professionals–doctors, nurses, and medical technicians–where Black women face different challenges.

Doctors—While Black women are 7 percent of the US population, they represent only 3 percent of medical doctors, “a disparity that has devastating consequences for health equity in a rapidly diversifying society,” notes Wingfield. For Black women doctors, Wingfield found that gender accounted for more microaggressions than race as “every Black woman doctor with whom I spoke shared accounts of being mistaken for a nurse rather than a doctor,” which was not a problem that Black men experienced. The extremely low number of Black women doctors also makes it difficult for them to find mentors.

Nurses—The challenges for Black nurses are not the same as for Black doctors. The Black nurses reported few instances of gender bias but dealt with frequent racist interactions with their white women colleagues and with patients.

Technicians—Black women technicians also reported racial tension with white women nurses rather than gender bias.

Wingfield offers some solutions to the problems created by the intersection of race and gender in the workplace. She suggests organizations change hiring practices to pair with institutions known for training workers of color so they can increase the representation of groups of color. She also suggests they collect data to understand the challenges and obstacles faced by their employees of color and change aspects of their culture that allow sexual harassment to flourish.

Wingfield has shed light on how intersections of race and gender create problems that have a cost for all of us.

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It is exciting to learn about women erased from history and to bring their names and accomplishments into the public realm. The accomplishments of so many women were erased because of discrimination and were credited to men, sometimes because the women had to pretend to be men to be taken seriously and published their work under men’s names. At other times they were blocked from recognition because as women they were told they did not belong in the world of men. Always they were paid less than men.

Some new research by Joan Marie Naturale, a researcher of deaf history, illuminates the stories of four remarkable deaf women erased from history, some of who were pioneering astronomers and journalists, and all of who were early suffragettes fighting for women’s right to vote. Here are some of their stories.

Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer. Naturale writes that Cannon, born in 1863, was one of the first women from Delaware to attend college and graduated valedictorian from Wellesley College. Deaf from a young age, she is credited with cataloging 350,000 stars at the Harvard College Observatory. She developed a unique system for ranking stars that is still used today—though it is named after Harvard, not for her. Cannon also fought for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution to give women the right to vote. She declared, “If women can organize the sky, we can organize the vote” and was a founder of the National Women’s Party.

Helen K. Watts, born 1881, and Kate Harvey, born 1862, were two deaf suffragettes in Britain who fought for women’s right to vote. Both were arrested and imprisoned in their struggle.

Laura Redden Searing, born 1840, was a deaf newspaper reporter and poet who published under the pseudonym of a man, Howard Glyndon. Naturale reports that in 1860 she became the earliest deaf woman journalist and interviewed General Ulysses S. Grant, soldiers on the Civil War battlefield, and President Abraham Lincoln. She wrote about women’s issues and campaigned for women’s right to vote, stating, “Having decided that black people do not belong to white ones, why not go a step farther and decide that women do not belong to men.”

Closer to our own time, Elizabeth Becker, writing for the New York Times, shares the stories of women who worked as combat reporters during the Vietnam War, but whose accomplishments were erased. Becker, in researching for her book on the women who pioneered new approaches to war correspondence during the Vietnam War entitled You Don’t Belong Here focused on three women: Kate Webb, Catherine Leroy, and Frances FitzGerald, whose names have been erased from public memory. While the names of young men who covered the Vietnam War, such as David Halberstam, remain in public memory, Becker notes that male journalists who wrote memoirs about their time in Vietnam either left out any mention of their female colleagues or belittled their accomplishments “no matter how many awards the women had won.”

Becker shares that in the mid-1960s when the war was raging, “newsrooms largely confined female reporters to the women’s-news section.” The three women who Becker researched “paid their own way to war, arrived with no jobs, no role models and no safety net.” They were not welcomed by male reporters and were treated with distain. Becker cites a memoir published in 1995 by Peter Arnett, a Vietnam War correspondent, as saying, “The prevailing view was that the war was being fought by men against men and women had no place there.” Here are some of the stories researched by Becker of Webb, Leroy, and FitzGerald.

Kate Webb rose to become bureau chief for United Press International in Cambodia, but there was no press release to celebrate this singular accomplishment. Webb was captured by the North Vietnamese and held captive for twenty-three days. She was honored at the time when she was released but then quickly forgotten. And she never wrote a memoir about her life, which is not surprising. Becker points out that women calling attention to their own work created intense backlash for them.

Catherine Leroy, a French photographer, was one of the few women combat photographers in the early years of the Vietnam War. Becker notes that Leroy pioneered an intimate style of combat photography to great acclaim. Her male colleagues were threatened by her success, filed shameless complaints against her, and got her press credentials stripped away by the Agence France-Presse. She fought back and regained her press card, but her colleagues dismissed or ignored her accomplishments in their memoirs about the war.

Frances FitzGerald wrote the Pulitzer Prize–winning book Fire in the Lake about the Vietnam War. The backlash from the war correspondents was intense as they claimed she was not qualified as a journalist to write such a book. Even Ken Burns, in his 2017 documentary about the Vietnam War, left her book off of his recommended reading list.

Becker closes her article with this lament: “The work of the women I looked to as role models has gradually slipped away from public memory. The women chroniclers of Vietnam were relegated to a footnote in history, denied their rightful place as pioneering war correspondents.” Becker has done an important service to history in bringing their accomplishments back to the light in her own book.

Photo courtesy of manhhai (CC BY 2.0)

New research from Harvard Business School (HBS) professor Julian Zlatev and colleagues on women and salary negotiation reveals surprising results. I used to always advise my women coaching clients to negotiate for raises or promotions by having an outside offer in place to strengthen their negotiating position and to give them confidence to negotiate assertively. While this makes sense to me intuitively, this research now proves me (and many others) wrong. This new HBS research finds that the more empowered women feel at the negotiation table, the more likely they are to reach a worse deal or no deal at all. Kristen Senz, writing about this study, notes that the results held regardless of whether their negotiation partner was a man or woman. In fact, Senz reports that “when a woman with a strong outside option, such as a job offer from another company, is negotiating, the likelihood that the discussion will end in an impasse nearly triples.” Clearly, this research reinforces that women are still in a lose-lose position when negotiating.

This study, conducted by Zlatev of HBS, Jennifer Dannals of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, Nir Halevy, and Margaret Neale, both of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, analyzed data from 2,552 MBA students and executives from five continents who took part in virtual and in-person classroom exercises in negotiation. In this study, 35 percent of the participants were women and 19 percent were senior executives. Senz reports, “Members of the group negotiated in groups of two: 43 percent of the pairs included a woman and a man, 43 percent were only men, and 14 percent were only women.”

In addition to the finding previously mentioned that the more empowered women feel at the negotiation table, the more likely they are to reach a worse deal or no deal at all, Senz reports that the study found

• A more powerful woman triggers a more powerful backlash, likely based on ingrained stereotypes about how women “should” act.
• In a corporate setting, the higher a woman rises through the company’s ranks, the more backlash she faces if she negotiates her salary assertively.
• Neither assertiveness nor conforming to stereotypes leads to success in negotiation for women.

The researchers suggest that this lose-lose situation for women contributes to the dearth of women in the C-suite and the gender pay gap. For change to happen, organizations need to “reimagine their negotiation process,” says Zlatev. By this he means taking steps such as eliminating salary negotiations from the hiring process. Some companies, such as Reddit, have implemented this change, which makes certain elements of a compensation package, such as salary, non-negotiable. It seems clear that unless companies establish structural changes such as eliminating salary negotiations from the hiring and promotion processes, women are going to remain in this lose-lose situation.

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Much has been written about the dramatic exit from the labor market of women with children. Add to the exit the numbers of women who are pregnant and cannot get accommodations from their employers that would allow them to stay on the job. While this is not a new problem for pregnant women, the need to keep women in the labor force to help our economy recover from the pandemic means we must take action. One major step would be to get much-needed federal legislation passed that would provide protections to both pregnant workers and employers.

Chabeli Carrazana, writing for the 19th News, explains that while pregnancy discrimination was outlawed in 1978, “vague language in the law about exactly how employers should accommodate pregnant workers has spawned numerous lawsuits, many of them unsuccessful.” Carrazana notes that the 1978 law also puts the onus on the pregnant worker to prove that the employer has been able to accommodate another employee in the same facility who is in a similar position. The author points out that because pregnancy is a complex situation, no two situations may be the same, and courts have held a very high standard for what qualifies as a “similar position,” thereby tossing out suits with examples that are “too dissimilar.”

Carrazana points out that the resulting confusion for both employers and workers has had a differential impact on low-wage workers who are predominantly workers of color and most vulnerable in jobs with fewer labor protections. The author cites Elizabeth Gedmark, the vice president of A Better Balance, an organization that set up a hotline for workers to call if they faced pregnancy discrimination, as noting a pattern in the calls they received: “Many of the pregnant people calling were working in low-wage jobs where they were told to take unpaid leave or encouraged to quit when issues of pregnancy accommodation came up.” Gedman explained that some employers were refusing to offer accommodations because the law did not explicitly require them to.

Pregnant workers who cannot get accommodations have to deal with serious consequences. Carrazana offers some examples:

• The most obvious is the loss of employment with a family to support
• The health of the mother and the fetus are at stake in cases like that of Tesia Buckles, whose employer refused to allow her to keep a bottle of water at her work station. Her pregnancy sickness meant she was throwing up a lot and needed frequent hydration. She felt she had to quit for the health of her fetus.
• In another case, four women in one warehouse miscarried in 2014 after the site’s contractor denied requests for workers to carry lighter loads. One of these women had a note from her doctor and was denied a chair and lighter duty anyway. She miscarried for a second time in that job.

What can be done? Carrazana notes that a bill, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, has been languishing in Congress since 2012. The bill closes the loopholes in the original law and clarifies the responsibility of employers to provide accommodations. It removes the onus on workers to prove they need accommodation. The bill also uses inclusive language, such as “pregnant workers” to refer to all people who may become pregnant. The conditions may be right for this bill to finally be passed. A related bill, the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, is also getting attention in Congress as an attempt to “end the unintended consequences of a 2010 law designed to create accommodations for nursing mothers who needed break time to express breastmilk.” The original law provided so many exceptions to who was covered that some nine million workers were exempt from pumping protections. This needs to be fixed.

Let’s hope for movement on these common-sense protections to help women stay in the workforce.

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In an adapted excerpt from her forthcoming book, The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos, Judy Batalion writes about her discovery of the stories of dozens of women who fought in the Jewish resistance against the Nazis in Europe during World War II. Batalion shares that even as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors who has a doctorate in women’s studies, she had never heard these stories or the names of these women fighters. While living in London in 2007 she visited the British Library to find out more about one Jewish woman she had read about as a child whose name and brave exploits she remembered. While hunting for material on this one woman, she stumbled upon a 180-page handwritten book entitled, Women in the Ghettos, written in Yiddish. This book detailed, many stories of “young Jewish women who defied the Nazis, many of whom had the chance to leave Nazi-occupied Poland but didn’t; some even voluntarily returned.” Batalion notes that some resistance narratives like these were published after the war but were sidelined or ignored and then forgotten. Batalion spent dozens of years in research archives and in living rooms across Poland, Israel, and North America reconstructing as many of the narratives as she could find of the Polish Jewish “ghetto girls” who

• Paid off Gestapo guards
• Hid revolvers in teddy bears
• Flirted with Nazis and then killed them
• Distributed underground bulletins and forged papers to ghetto inhabitants
• Flung Molotov cocktails
• Bombed train lines
• Organized soup kitchens for starving ghetto inhabitants

What do we know about the Jewish resistance? Batalion writes that “more than 90 European ghettos had armed Jewish resistance units. Approximately 30,000 European Jews joined the partisans. Rescue networks supported about 12,000 Jews in hiding in Warsaw alone. . . . Women, aged 16 to 25, were at the helm of many of these efforts.” So-called courier girls connected the locked ghettos where Jews were imprisoned by slipping in and out of ghettos with information, hope, bulletins, false identification papers, and food. They smuggled pistols, bullets, and grenades in food packages and clothing. Because they were not circumcised like their brothers and were often educated in Polish public schools while their brothers attended Jewish schools and yeshivas, the young women were better positioned than their brothers to pass as Polish and work as spies.

It is important to say the names of some of these women so they are not forgotten. Here are some of the names and snippets of the stories of women Batalion has recovered:

• Renia Kukielka was chosen for undercover missions as a courier girl after she escaped the ghetto where her family was imprisoned. She moved grenades, false passports, and cash strapped to her body and transported Jews from ghettos to hiding spots.
• Bela Hazan got a job working as a translator and receptionist for the Gestapo and stole documents to deliver to Jewish forgers.
• Vladka Meed smuggled dynamite into the Warsaw ghetto by passing bits of gunpowder through a hole in the wall of a basement on the ghetto border.
• Hela Schupper dressed up as an affluent Polish woman and brought five guns and clips of cartridges to a militia in Krakow.
• Ruzka Korczak in Vilna found a Finnish pamphlet about how to make bombs that became the underground’s recipe book.
• Vitka Kempner blew up a German supply train after slipping out of the Ghetto with explosives under her coat.
• Zelda Treger completed seventeen trips transporting hundreds of Jews out of ghettos and slave labor camps.
• Haviva Reik and Hannah Senesh joined the British Army as paratroopers, helping thousands of Slovak Jews and rescuing Allied servicemen.

The legacies of these strong women can inspire us—but only if we know their names and their stories.

Photo courtesy of Cedric Labrousse