If you’re like millions of Americans, you’re feeling warily optimistic. It’s not a muscle we’re used to using these days; last year was a nightmare no matter how you shake it. Covid ravaged the country, taking over half a million lives, while half of our political system committed itself to antidemocratic stances. We spent that year in our homes; we missed our friends, our families. We missed births and deaths. But right now, things seem to be looking up.
LONDON – JULY 18: In this photo illustration a pregnant woman is seen at the office work station on … [+]
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Job growth is strong. The economy is rebounding. Wages are going up. Covid cases have cratered. And Americans report feeling more optimistic about where this country is headed than at any time since the 2006 midterms.
Fueling that optimism, at least in part, is assertive government action to address not only the problems the pandemic created, but those it exacerbated as well. From sex-based and racial discrimination to criminally low wages for essential workers to a lack of affordable housing to child poverty to food scarcity, this country has a unique opportunity to tackle ongoing economic concerns and reshape the economy into something much more human.
To get a better sense of how these programs will and won’t affect American women, who faced staggering job losses and whose recovery lags far behind, I spoke with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director and CEO of MomsRising, a women’s political advocacy group, about the administrations proposed American Jobs and American Families Plans.
Liz Elting: Good morning, and thank you so much for speaking with me. Your organization, MomsRising, is dedicated to advocating for real change in the conditions in which women have to exist here in the United States. Your campaigns at the moment include fighting for abortion access and urging Congress to extend unemployment benefits. Tell us a little bit about MomsRising’s mission.
Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner: MomsRising.org is a unique on-the-ground and online grassroots organization, and we’ve had (and are still having) a tremendous impact. With our more than a million members, we work to increase family economic security, decrease discrimination against women and moms, and build a nation where businesses and families can thrive. We are also MamásConPoder.org, a Spanish language website and community.
Right now, a lot of our focus is on building the care infrastructure our country, our families, and our economy urgently need. That includes universal childcare; paid leave for all; access to home- and community-based services for people with disabilities and the aging; living wages; a permanent child tax credit; health care for everyone including abortion care; a path to citizenship for all essential and care workers, Dreamers, and TPS holders; investing in communities and divesting from woefully ineffective carceral systems that continue to cause harm; and a fair tax code to help pay for these investments. We advocate, as well, for breastfeeding rights, so all children can have a healthy start, and we are working to protect our democracy and advance gun safety.
At MomsRising, our members are the secret sauce and are an incredibly powerful force; bringing the voices and real-world experiences—along with the contributions, needs, and priorities—of women and mothers to local, state, and national leaders who have the power to make change and leaders listen. Together, we’ve been making major policy strides forward at the state and federal levels, and together, we are building momentum for the transformative change our nation still needs.
Elting: The pandemic has set women back in the workplace by decades, forcing millions of us out of work. Why were women so much more likely to bear the brunt of the pandemic economy?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: The damage the pandemic caused to America’s women has been monumental, with moms and women of color experiencing compounded health and economic harms due to structural racism. Decades of grossly insufficient investment in our care infrastructure is a key reason women and moms were hanging by a thread before the pandemic, and a key reason it hit us so hard. Suddenly, moms were asked to do everything: raise our children, care for our parents, educate our kids, hold down jobs, and more—all at the same time and in the same location. It simply wasn’t possible. An astonishing 32% of women between the ages of 25 and 44 were pushed out of much needed jobs during the pandemic simply because of a lack of access to child care. Women were half of our paid labor force at the start of the pandemic, but now our workforce participation has plummeted. These were much-needed jobs. Women are key breadwinners in most families. We have suffered a huge setback for women, families, for gender and racial equity, and for our economy. It’s time to turn that trend around by building a care infrastructure.
Elting: What could the long-term consequences of the “she-cession” be if women’s job recovery continues to fall behind? I’m thinking especially about the economic impact. We can certainly expect increased levels of child poverty, as women are much more likely to be single parents without another source of income, so it seems to me that we could be looking at a generational loss.
Rowe-Finkbeiner: Dr. C. Nicole Mason, CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, coined the term “she-cession” after looking at the data on job losses during the pandemic, which disproportionately pushed women out of the labor force, with women of color experiencing compounded harms due to structural racism. Now, it’s clear that unless we turn this around by building a robust, durable care infrastructure right now, women, families, businesses and our economy will suffer for generations to come.
You are right, fewer women and moms will be in the workforce and pushed out of much-needed jobs due to the “she-cession,” more children and families will live in poverty, and our country and economy will suffer terribly without the contributions of women. In fact, the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing their work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity. So just as we need infrastructure investments in bridges and roads so we can get to work, we also need investments in child care and a care infrastructure so parents and caregivers can get to work, children can thrive, and also so we create good care jobs. We can’t forget that building a care infrastructure is both job sustaining and job creating.
Elting: The American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan initiatives of the Biden White House both tackle issues key to improving women’s lives, especially tackling the childcare crisis. In your analysis, do these plans go far enough in relieving the childcare burden? What more could be done?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: Yes, MomsRising supports the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan, as crafted by the Biden-Harris administration. We do not want to see these proposals weakened in any way. In fact, building off the President’s historic plan, we will work with the Administration and Congress to move key components forward immediately, as we also continue to address our nation’s emergency by pressing to fully implement the paid leave program as quickly as possible; ensure that Congress invests at least $700 billion in direct spending to build the comprehensive child care and early learning system that children, families, early educators, providers, employers, and communities need; extend the increased Child Tax Credit (of $3,600 per child under age 5 and $3,000 per child age 6 to 17) permanently; and extend the poverty-reducing tax credit again to mixed-status immigrant families. We will also urge Congress to extend the unemployment boost, currently set to expire at the beginning of September, through the end of the year, since the job market will not fully recover before then. And we will continue urging lawmakers to remember that immigrants are a critical part of our early learning and caregiving workforce and creating good jobs in those sectors necessitates a path to citizenship for essential workers, Dreamers, and Temporary Protected Status holders.
The American Rescue Plan helped stabilize our child care system, and now it’s time to build a system that works for families and care workers. Together, these packages will help put our country’s care system on firmer footing. For instance, we support the American Jobs Plan not only because it supports and upgrades child care facilities, but also because it increases pay and benefits for direct care workers—essential workers who are disproportionately women of color and immigrants. Right now, the amazing early educators who care for and educate our youngest children are being paid poverty-level wages. Like all working people, early childhood educators deserve family-supporting wages with benefits, like health care and paid family leave. And one of the reasons we are fighting so hard for the American Families Plan is that it will finally provide comprehensive paid family leave all working people need.
All in all, the American Families and Jobs Plans are historic and badly needed. They will help end decades of underinvestment in our care infrastructure, and finally help advance the economic, gender, and racial justice our country needs. Its priorities are moms’ priorities. Its success will be our nation’s success. We will work tirelessly to make real its promise of a stronger, more equitable America.
Elting: Systemic bias in hiring is copiously documented. And women are simply more likely than men to hire women, but women’s exodus from the workforce means fewer women in hiring positions. Are you confident that the American Jobs and Families Plans do enough to counter this trend? If not, what can businesses do to incentivize more equitable hiring practices?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: Discrimination in wages and hiring is, indeed, well-documented and pervasive and it contributes mightily to the wage gap that punishes women, causing compounded harm to women and moms of color due to structural racism. To be clear, this hiring bias isn’t because of women being more likely to hire women; study after study shows it’s due to direct discrimination. In fact one study from Cornell University found that women with equal resumes and job experiences were 80% less likely to be hired if they were moms—and were offered $11,000 lower starting salaries than non-moms, as well as judged more harshly in the labor force, including being taken off the management track for fewer late days. Dads, on the other hand, with equal resumes as men who were not dads, got a $6,000 pay increase. That’s direct discrimination.
This wage and hiring discrimination hurts families, businesses and our economy. The American Jobs and American Families Plans will help, and we also need policies like the Paycheck Fairness Act, which the U.S. House passed in April but the U.S. Senate has yet to vote on. It would address the bias and discriminatory practices that depress women’s wages, increase pay transparency, prohibit retaliation for sharing information on wages, and strengthen penalties for pay discrimination. Put together, universal paid leave (like most other industrialized nations already have), access to affordable child care for all, health care, and paycheck fairness policies would go a long way to help close the wage gap. And, for sure businesses should also incentivize more equitable hiring practices by examining their recruitment, salary setting, and promotion practices and ensuring that their benefits support working parents through paid leave, flextime, and other benefits that make it possible for workers to do their jobs and care for their families.
Elting: Paid leave has long been on the wishlist of women’s rights advocates. Can you explain to our readers why this is so critically important? How do you expect such a policy to materially impact women’s wellbeing?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: Our lives don’t work without paid leave. Everyone gets sick, and everyone deserves the chance to get better. Failure to provide paid leave has been a huge problem in this country throughout our history. It became an even more devastating problem during COVID-19. Too many people have been forced to make an impossible choice between the income they need and the families they love when a crisis strikes or a new baby arrives because they had no paid leave. Too many employers lost employees they could have kept on. In other countries, paid leave is a core part of a commonsense care infrastructure people take for granted and their governments recognize that working people have family responsibilities, too. But that hasn’t been the case here and that needs to change. Unless it does, too many of us will find our financial security in peril when critical illness strikes or new babies come.
Elting: What are the issues you see as the most critical to the recovery of economic independence for American women?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: A robust, durable care infrastructure is absolutely critical. We can’t go back to the slow sliding state of emergency we had before the pandemic where childcare cost more than college and childcare workers were among the lowest paid in our nation—and when families struggled without access to affordable quality child care, paid family and medical leave, health care, and living wages. Too often, when moms can’t make it work, they think they have personally failed. But these aren’t individual failures, they are national structural problems that we can and must fix. We need to build back better if we’re going to have a just and successful recovery.
Elting: What initiatives would you like to see that are not presently under consideration by Congress or the White House?
Rowe-Finkbeiner: The voice of women and moms, caregivers and voters are still very much needed to call on Congress to move forward the American Families and Jobs Plans. Our work isn’t done yet. And, in addition to the issues we’ve talked about, we need Congress to move forward on key components of the BREATHE Act to take seriously investing in communities and divesting from ineffective carceral and policing systems that continue to cause harm. Further, there’s a tremendous threat to women’s health and well-being right now with the anti-abortion laws some states are adopting and the cases heading to the U.S. Supreme Court that threaten Roe v. Wade. Moms want lawmakers to protect our right to choose abortion. Moms also want lawmakers to take meaningful action to stop gun violence and police violence, and to protect our democracy by stopping voter suppression. Without all that, moms and families can’t succeed or thrive.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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