Bryce Covert | The Nation
Don't Like Sports? Three Other Reasons to Be a Fan of Title IX
This Saturday marked the fortieth anniversary of Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits discrimination in education on the basis of sex. To say I’m not sporty may be an understatement. True story: I fulfilled my high school team sport requirement with a short-lived stint on the bowling team, during which I devoted more attention to my calculus homework than to perfecting my strikes and spares. I am about as likely to hit a baseball as to hit the lotto jackpot. I am far from a poster child for the common perception of a Title IX beneficiary: one of the girls who entered school sports in droves. The number of girls participating in sports in elementary and secondary schools rose from 295,000 the year Title IX was enacted to 3.2 million in the last school year.
But there’s a lot more to love about the law than the paths it cleared for women of the sporty persuasion. If you’re like me and not a fan of what Mitt Romney and I call “sport,” here are some other great reasons to be on board—and push for enforcement of the law to go even further:
1. Education: Remember the days of home ec and shop class, when Jane was taught how to cook, clean and be a perfect mother and Dick was given access to power tools? We can thank Title IX for putting those days in the past. Schools can no longer shut girls out of certain courses because they are deemed “inappropriate” for the feminine sensibility, nor can boys be barred from learning how to bake. It goes further than those extracurriculars, however. It mandates equality of opportunity all the way through career counseling, admissions, recruitment, outreachand retention.
Why Can't Women Have It All? It's Not You—It's Discrimination
From Baby Boom in 1987 to I Don’t Know How She Does It just last year, we’ve long been obsessed with how women do—and, more often, don’t do—“it all,” which is assumed to mean a successful career and a happy, healthy family. But as the cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic points out, this question has too often been seen as an individual one. While dressed in controversial framing—a reference to “having it all,” a cover depicting an unhappy-looking baby stuck in a briefcase—author Ann-Marie Slaughter's article successfully turns our attention from the isolated “failings” of women who can’t swing both a high-powered career and raising kids to why our society and economy make this impossible.
So how do we challenge—and ultimately change—the structures that make women feel they have to choose between work and home life? That’s where Slaughter’s structural argument stops short. While she envisions more women at the top changing workplace cultures and policies, she fails to see the discrimination that still keeps them from reaching those lofty ranks. And her solutions also stop short of taking on the larger, deep-rooted problems. While she begins a good conversation, she doesn’t quite take it all the way through to real change.
It’s important to first acknowledge what subset of women Slaughter is talking about. She herself makes sure to note that she is writing for her demographic: “highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place.… We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.” And it’s also these women whom Slaughter sees as integral to creating the change we need. “The best hope for improving the lot of all women…is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 woman senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders,” she writes. “Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers we will create a society that genuinely works for all women.”
Americans Want to Keep Teachers, Cops and Firefighters on the Job
It’s no secret anymore (particularly since Obama's The-Private-Sector-Is-Doing-Fine-Gate) that there have been huge numbers of government worker layoffs during the recovery. Many are rightly pointing out that this is only making the jobs crisis worse. But what’s behind those losses?
In a column in the New York Times yesterday, Tyler Cowen suggested that it’s Americans’ lack of trust in government, which has been steadily eroding over recent decades. And he is certainly right that Americans are distrustful of their government. Approval ratings have been hitting record lows lately. In November, Congress was less popular than the IRS, lawyers and BP during the oil spill, and it was tied with Hugo Chávez.
But is that what’s driving cuts in the public sector workforce? Cowen thinks so. He writes:
Romney’s All Wrong on Public Sector Employment
Republican presidential candidate former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks during a campaign stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa, Friday, June 8, 2012. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)
How the Paycheck Fairness Act Can Help Democrats Win Elections for Years to Come
Photo by Jerry Bunkers
The latest shot across the bow in the battle for women’s hearts and votes: a push for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. The Senate will begin debate on the bill later today now that it’s back in session, with a vote lined up for tomorrow. The bill is expected to fail, and it looked even more doomed after the House voted not to consider it on Thursday. Yet this bill doesn’t just make policy sense for all the women earning less than their male counterparts. It makes political sense for Democrats, giving women a reason to head to the polls and, perhaps more important, more financial firepower to spend on political campaigns for years to come.
Jobs Report Shows How Romneynomics Would Hurt the Recovery
Today’s jobs numbers don’t look good. The economy added only 69,000 jobs and the unemployment rate stands at a painful 8.2 percent, little changed from previous months. And the news for government workers continues to be grim. Another 13,000 were thrown off the payrolls in May, adding up to a total of 650,000 public sector jobs lost since the official end of the recession in June 2009.
This might be awkward news for Mitt Romney, who earlier this week called for even more pain for public workers. He told a group of supporters in Colorado on Tuesday that government employees should give up their jobs for those who work in the private sector. In talking about President Obama’s stimulus package, he said:
That stimulus he put in place, it didn't help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs, and the one place we should have cut back was on government jobs. We have a 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let's send them home and put you back to work!
Income Inequality Keeps Poorer Americans Away from the Polls
It’s no secret that money and politics enjoy a nasty love affair in this country. And as Ari Berman has written here, the problem has gotten even worse this cycle after the ill-fated Citizens United decision unleashed the power of Super PACs. As he reports, campaigns are increasingly reliant on that money, yet “Super PACs on both sides of the aisle are financed by the 1 percent of the 1 percent.” That means the rich have an even more outsized impact on the outcome of the election.
At the same time, it’s been hard to miss the GOP’s relentless campaign to roll back voting rights in the name of eliminating the (mostly imaginary) threat of fraud. Many of those tactics will severely affect low-income voters and likely suppress their turnout in November, handing even more power over to the 1 percent.
There’s something else that suppresses their vote, however, even if they are legally able to do so. And that something is income inequality, as a new report from the OECD on the Better Life Index shows. Of the thirty-four countries included in the report, the US ranks second to last in social inequality, bested only by South Korea. When it comes to income inequality we are at the extreme end of the scale, with levels similar to those of Cameroon, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Nepal and Uganda.
Can Suing for Equal Pay Really Close the Gender Wage Gap?
Senator Barbara Milkulski is holding a press conference later today to press the Senate to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, which she recently introduced. But didn’t President Obama already kill the gender wage gap? Not quite. While Obama has long been touting the first bill he signed once in office, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, it only provides a woman more time to file a claim of discrimination. The Paycheck Fairness Act would go further by ensuring employees can discuss their salaries with each other—since it’s hard to root out pay discrimination if you don’t know how you stack up against everyone else.
Lilly Ledbetter certainly helps women who want to bring lawsuits against their employers by giving them more time to do so. In that way, Obama’s first act did recognize the problem of pay discrimination. But it’s a baby step forward in the march toward equal pay.
The numbers since its signing bear that out. According to Bloomberg, the number of pay discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission actually fell from 2,268 when Obama signed the Act in 2009 to 2,191 last year. Meanwhile, the pay gap has widened from 77.8 in 2007 to 77.4 percent in 2010.
The Outlook Is Still Grim for Women in the Job Market
Mothers may have had something extra to celebrate on Sunday as they were brought breakfast in bed: getting a job. They were probably expecting bad news. Since the beginning of the recovery, women have gained only 16 percent of the almost 2.5 million jobs added, which is part of why their unemployment rate has dipped only 0.2 percentage points while men’s has been reduced by 2.4 points. Yet along with the flowers and hand-drawn cards, last month’s jobs report came as a gift to some women. Could it be a sign that they are finally going to participate in the economic recovery?
April’s jobs report had more positive signs for women’s job growth than any over the past few years. According to the National Women’s Law Center’s analysis, they gained almost three-quarters of the jobs added last month. As the report notes, that’s “the largest share of monthly job gains for women since the start of the recovery.” Remember that just last August, they were steadily losing jobs. Even more surprising is that while women have suffered two-thirds of the public sector layoffs since 2009, last month the tables were turned. The public sector shed 15,000 jobs, but it was men who felt that pain; women actually gained 4,000 jobs.
The recovery does look like it’s becoming kinder to women. This year has so far been much better for women’s unemployment picture than the past three. But it may not be time to get comfortable yet. As Joan Entmacher, vice president of NWLC, told me, because the overall number of jobs added last month was so small, it didn’t take much for women to come out on top. After all, 73 percent of only 115,000 jobs won’t make a huge dent in a high unemployment rate.
The Great Recession Is Pushing Women Out of the Workforce
Friday’s jobs report seemed to grab headlines for one aspect in particular: the labor force participation rate, i.e., the number of people either working or looking for a job, fell to 63.8 percent, the lowest level since 1981. That means more and more people are dropping out—retiring, turning to something else like grad school or just giving up on the prospect of a job altogether. But there was a debate about how much of a bad sign this is. Is it because the recession has made people lose hope of finding gainful employment? Or is it just because baby boomers are hitting prime retirement age and moving to Miami?
It’s likely a combination of factors. But there seems to be a big difference in what’s driving men and women to leave the labor force.
What do the numbers look like for both genders? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Current Population Survey, men’s participation rate—the ratio of men working or looking for work versus those who have dropped out—has fallen 3.1 percentage points since the beginning of the recession, and women’s has fallen 1.8 points. The dip looks more troubling for men than for women. The last time women’s labor force participation rate was this low “was in June 1995,” Joan Entmacher of the National Women's Law Center told me. But her colleague Katherine Gallagher Robbins noted that this year has been pretty steady for women’s rate, while men are starting to experience a real decline.
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