Building on Women’s Resilience, Protecting Women’s Progress, and Centering Women in a Vision for the Future
Amid the heated rhetoric, deep partisan divisions, and starkly different views of the world animating the current policy debates about the country’s direction are competing narratives about what women need, what women deserve, and what women want. Too many politicians are quick to claim alignment with and speak authoritatively about women’s interests, all while substituting their personal preferences and beliefs instead of pursuing informed policy choices that respond to the real-world challenges women face. But we actually know a great deal, from history and the progress women have made over decades, about what is needed to ensure that women are best positioned — to achieve their own version of success, to overcome and minimize the barriers and disparities they may encounter, and to be full participants in a society with an inclusive vision that can propel and sustain them, and every woman, into the future.
Women should have the power and agency to decide what kind of life they want to live, and the opportunity, access, and economic means to pursue it. This basic premise, rooted in the concepts of individual freedom and fundamental equality essential to democracy, seems obvious yet has too often proven to be elusive. Much of this country’s history, especially women’s history, has involved countering and undoing a status quo designed to hold women back or frozen in time, confining them to specific spaces, narrow roles, and perceived gender norms. This work has included pushing for concrete change by targeting those in power – whether lawmakers, employers, political leaders, or other decision-makers – to expand opportunity and reject outdated attitudes and working to shift culture to embrace new ideas that can help make the promise of equality and democracy a reality for women. Through legislation, court cases, protests, and more, women across race, identity, nationality, disability status, and class have – however imperfectly – fought to secure rights and protections that have afforded them mobility and opportunity, such as the right to vote, the right to access contraception, the right to equal pay, the right to work free from discrimination and harassment, and the right to pursue their own financial independence.
This progress is now under threat by the current administration seeking to advance an alternative agenda that would reposition women by diluting their rights and protections and driving a false counter-narrative:that the best way to create a prosperous America is to sacrifice the progress of millions of women in the workforce and at home. This narrative, both spoken and unspoken, deceptively deploys words such as “protection,” “safety,” and “security” to cede hard-earned ground that enabled women to access opportunities, justify attacks on gender equity and combatting gender-based disparities, limit women’s reproductive choices, demean or disparage different groups of women such as immigrant women, women of color, and transgender women, and discourage women’s economic and labor force participation. This approach is completely contrary to everything we know and have learned— about women’s history, about preserving women’s progress, and about what is needed in a comprehensive vision to move women forward.
Trump Administration Tactics Undermine Women’s Progress
To further its agenda, the Administration has sought to redefine progress, in part, by recasting in a negative light the very tools and measures used to support women and the gains that women have made. The Administration has moved at a dizzying speed to decimate the federal government – which has played a pivotal role enforcing and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws – and install loyalists tasked with thwarting agencies’ work. In particular, the Administration has aggressively worked to roll back key civil rights protections and enforcement tools, attempting to mischaracterize them as no longer necessary or inherently discriminatory. This includes the rescission of long-standing protections against workplace discrimination by federal contractors, threatening to halt implementation of regulations that would provide reasonable accommodations for pregnant workers, and intimidating private sector companies to do-away with efforts to implement equitable hiring practices. Further undermining women’s full economic participation, the Administration has made it harder to pursue and resolve discrimination complaints. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCCP) are crucial avenues for remedying workplace discrimination – just in the last decade, OFCCP obtained more than $260 million and the EEOC recovered $5.6 billion for workers who experienced discrimination. The work of both agencies has been severely compromised through executive orders, mass firings of federal workers and office closures, and policy reversals that have made it much harder for the agencies to function and take action. Collectively, this erosion of rights and enforcement sends a troubling message – that compliance with the law is no longer a priority, and women workers are on their own to navigate unchecked barriers and discrimination.
Additionally, the Administration’s signature economic policy reforms, which include massive proposed tax cuts funded by drastically gutting critical social and health care programs, are entrenched in an economic narrative that relies on old-school assumptions about gender roles and whose work has value. Thus, rather than prioritizing critical investments that help workers navigate their work and family obligations such as paid family and medical leave and affordable child care, the Administration is focused on a tax plan that favors the wealthiest earners over the lowest paid workers and ignores the pressing need for supports that are especially important for women workers. Instead, their strategy is to de-emphasize work supports and any prioritization of women’s work outside the home.
The Administration has continued to pursue policies to limit access to abortion, even though such access has been shown to yield important benefits to women’s overall trajectory. For example, studies find that having access to abortion – along with full control of an individual’s reproductive health – leads to better health, well-being, and economic outcomes for women. In addition to making it harder to access abortion at a provider facility, the Administration is now taking action to jeopardize access to medication abortion which can be self-managed at home. At the same time, President Trump has sought to recast his actions by nicknaming himself the “fertilization president” – even while fostering a climate that has jeopardized access to reproductive technologies – and aligning with a formerly fringe, right-wing “pronatalist” movement whose prominent supporters have explicitly focused on white nationalism and increasing the number of white births. The Administration claims to be actively pursuing policies that could encourage people have more children, all while making the workplace and the health care system more dangerous for women and limiting their ability to make choices about when and if to start a family.
The Administration has also tried to weaken any opposition by attacking sources of criticism such as the press, universities, non-profits, and law firms, and retaliating against those who publicly oppose the President. Together, all of these actions are the latest iteration of a decades-old conservative agenda to reverse key areas of progress for women. The conservative movement has spent years working to tilt the balance in federal courts, state legislatures, and other institutions that should be part of an important system of checks and balances on executive power, all in furtherance of efforts to undo or undermine gains that have given women more autonomy and control. These attacks are on top of actions taken by a conservative majority on the Supreme Court to strip millions of people of the fundamental right to control their bodies and reproductive choices under the guise that women’s political and electoral power at the state level is a sufficient counter to the loss of individual autonomy and abortion access nationwide. The regression of women’s rights is now on the agenda across a host of issues that are vital to the full participation of women in the economy, including workplace protections, unions, wages, workplace policies that accommodate family care needs, and more.
Power grabs are not only happening on a national level. It is becoming increasingly common for states to upend policy changes that would especially support women and women workers, even when they’ve been voted in by a majority of voters through ballot initiatives or referendums. This pattern of undercutting or overturning the will of the people can be seen across states, including in Alaska, Nebraska, and Mississippi on issues such as paid sick leave and access to abortion. In Missouri just last month, state legislators voted to repeal the paid sick leave laws voted in overwhelmingly by their constituents just months ago. These policy choices are harmful and undermine the economic participation of women workers, in particular, who increasingly provide critical economic support to their families.
A Vision for the Future Must Center Women
An agenda focused on undoing past progress is not the vision for the future that women need. Confining women to one role is inconsistent with how they live their lives – they often play different roles at different times over the course of their lives and their needs evolve. America’s earliest policies around work, family, and well-being were never designed to center the needs of any women, most especially women of color – and neither was the country’s political process. But we have ample evidence that women are integral to our nation’s growth and prosperity, to the economic stability of families, and to the functioning of an inclusive democracy. Thus, we must be clear in stating a vision for the future that centers women, and the diverse experiences they bring with them, by supporting their participation in the economy and different facets of society. We must invest in policies and infrastructure that promote their health and well-being and enable them to make their own health decisions. We must prioritize policies that support women’s economic participation, including access to paid family leave, fair wages, family friendly workplace standards, expanded opportunities for women in non-traditional jobs, protections for workers’ right to organize, and comprehensive health care. Most importantly, we must see all of these policies as pivotal to the success of our economy, our workplaces, our health care systems, and more, not peripheral options and secondary priorities. As we look to a vision of the future where everyone has a fair shot at a good life, following through on the policy changes women need to participate fully in the economy and our democracy are essential.
