COVID-19 and Recovery Response
As the pandemic enters its third year and the nation turns to recovery, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research is committed to amplifying and addressing the challenges women face. IWPR’s new research provides insights and recommendations for policymakers to help meet the urgent and long-term needs of women, their families, and their communities.
The Gender Pay Gap: Why It’s Still Here
By Tom Spiggle By now you’ve probably heard of the gender pay gap. It gets especially a lot of attention on Equal Pay Day. This year, Equal Pay Day was March 21, as that’s how far into 2021 the average American woman had to work (in addition to working all of 2020) to make as much money as the average American man earned in 2020. Over the past few decades, this gender pay gap has been narrowing. But it’s a [...]
IWPR Testifies to Congress on the Importance of an Accessible, Affordable Child-Care System
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for a robust child-care infrastructure in the United States. As the country emerges from the COVID-fueled recession and the Biden administration builds its recovery policy, the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) remains a strong advocate for the needs of parents and child-care workers. “The lack of access to affordable, reliable child care not only makes it harder for parents to work, it perpetuates systemic gender, racial, and class inequalities by relying on [...]
New Report Shows Young Women Workers Still Struggling a Decade After the Great Recession, Offers Lessons for the Pandemic Recovery
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – May 25, 2021 Contact: Erin Weber | weber@iwpr.org | (646) 719-7021 Washington, D.C. – A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that a disproportionate number of young women (ages 16 to 24) worked part-time involuntarily and earned low wages a decade into the economic recovery from the Great Recession. In 2019, two-thirds (68.5%) of young women earned less than $15 per hour, compared to 58.6% young working men, 27.1% women aged 25 to [...]
Young Women Workers Still Struggling a Decade After the Great Recession: Lessons for the Pandemic Recovery
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a “she-cession,” with women experiencing a disproportionate share of job losses (Institute for Women’s Policy Research 2021). Young women ages 16 to 24 years old suffered the largest percentage decline in employment compared to young men and prime-age workers, mainly due to their concentration in service sectors and occupations that had been hit the hardest by the pandemic recession (Sun 2021). The outsized effects of the COVID-19 pandemic recession on young women reflect pre-existing inequalities in the labor market. Achieving an equitable economic recovery requires understanding how the U.S. labor market has been transformed in the past decade and beyond—to the detriment of workers.
Why It’s Hard to Hire Right Now
In the past few weeks, 22 states have announced they would end federal pandemic unemployment benefits, which pay recipients $300 on top of state benefits and are scheduled to run into September. (New Hampshire is the latest.) Many of the states’ governors, all Republicans, made statements similar to that of Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina, who said the expanded benefits are “incentivizing and paying workers to stay at home rather than encouraging them to return to the workplace.” The [...]
Child Care at Core of Women’s Slow Post-Pandemic Return to Work
By Katie Kindelan In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, legislation that would have established a network of nationally funded, comprehensive child care centers. But President Richard Nixon vetoed the legislation, and Congress has not passed anything similar in the five decades since. Now 50 years later, President Joe Biden has proposed an ambitious legislative proposal -- his "American Families Plan" -- that would, among other things, create universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds, cap how much low- [...]
