Research2021-04-08T12:06:28-04:00

Publications

FPA launch
IWPR Federal Policy Agenda to Advance Gender Equity Now Live

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) is proud to launch its Federal Policy Solutions to Advance Gender Equity agenda—a transformative blueprint outlining our long-term policy vision through actionable recommendations to improve women’s lives and create lasting, systemic change.

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Filling the Gap: Community College Students Expect Sexual Health Education on Campus

Decades of research point to the importance of comprehensive sex education for promoting health beliefs and behaviors that lead to healthier relationships and reduce young people’s risk for unplanned pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). But a survey of community college students found that [...]

The Numbers Don’t Add Up: Women Continue to Earn Less, Regardless of Occupation

In 2025, women were paid less than men for full-time work in all 20 occupations that employ the most women and in all 20 occupations that employ the most men in the United States. Across all detailed occupations with sufficient data, women were paid up to [...]

Unseen Efforts: Disparities in Unpaid Care Work Before and After COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the fore the need for unpaid care work, as well as the highly unequal distribution of care work. This study contributes to the understanding of care work by providing post-COVID assessments of changes in unpaid caregiving by gender, race/ethnicity, [...]

By  and |February 24, 2026|Caregiving and Families, Publications, Working Paper|

One Year Into Trump’s Second Term, Black Women Face Disproportionate Job Losses

The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Black women lost 251,000 jobs between January and August of 2025. While this number reflects a downward revision from a higher estimate last year, it still represents a large and unequal decrease [...]

Revisiting Occupational Segregation and the Valuation of Women’s Work

While population ageing increases the demand for care work, new automation technologies, including artificial intelligence (AI), reinforce the importance of human interaction, with recent research documenting significant wage premiums for social skills. Against this background, we investigate two factors behind the gender wage gap: [...]

Essential but Undervalued: Systemic Barriers Facing Black Women in Social Work

Black women have faced systemic racial and gender discrimination in the labor force, and although historically they have had high labor force participation rates, they tend to be overrepresented in care and service jobs. As such, an intersectional lens is key to understanding Black [...]