In the Lead
“I just feel like I’m falling through the cracks.”
Ilsa, a mother in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was trained as a lawyer, but a decade ago when her children were born, she decided to start a small business because the schedule was more flexible, making it easier to take care of her children. Ten years later, the pandemic forced her to close down her small business for good. Meanwhile, she found herself going through a divorce. She suddenly felt like she lost everything: “If I had gone out to be [...]
“I experienced unpredictability because I was working full-time and no longer had child care”
"I experienced unpredictability because I was working full-time and no longer had child care"
(Transcript) Build(ing) the Future: A Symposium on the Policies we need for an Equitable Future for Women & Families
If you don’t understand who’s being most impacted by your policies, your strategies, and what you think should be done, the policies and programs you put forth will be short sighted and not reflective of the lived experiences and realities of those who are most impacted.
“I felt guilt making this decision to step out of the workplace”
Establish a National Child Care Infrastructure Like many working mothers, Nancy, a public affairs professional in Arlington, Virginia, left the workplace where she had spent almost 15 years in order to take care of her two-month old son when the pandemic took away her child care options. She expressed a sense of guilt in an interview with WBUR: “[M]y mother, she dedicated her life to raising me and my siblings. And while I think we are as successful today because [...]
“That’s what keeps me going—the hope”
When she was laid off in mid-March from a job she had held for decades, a hotel employee in Rhode Island felt abandoned by her employer. As she told WBUR, she felt that they did not care that, “I have a family that rely on me. It's not like that you are only telling me when something happened to me, you're telling everybody who depend on me.” Ideally, assistance and support should be widely available to individuals and families in [...]
A Blueprint for an Equitable COVID Recovery
Women have experienced a disproportionate number of job losses since the start of the pandemic. The COVID pandemic has had an unprecedented economic impact on women— A “shecession” in which 11.5 million women lost jobs between February and May, compared to 9 million men. Women also dropped out of the labor force in numbers far higher than men-- between August and September, 2.65 million have left the workforce since February due to caretaking demands or an inability to find work. [...]