More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Around 43.5 million caregivers provide unpaid care to an adult or child each year, and 61 percent of them are women. Work isn’t working for most people—and when work doesn’t work, families become financially unstable and women leave the workforce.
I implore Congress to focus on this issue in 2024, to make it a reality for workers across the country. Millions are waiting.
For every dollar a white man makes, a Black woman earns 63 cents.
Along with severe wage inequality, Black women continue to be disproportionately overrepresented in low-paying, service-oriented jobs. More than one-third of the essential workers—many of them the people who have powered our country throughout the pandemic—are Black women. COVID-19, inflation and stagnant wages have laid bare how necessary it is for our elected representatives to act by voting to increase the minimum wage and creating a robust paid family and medical leave package accessible to all.
Caregiving is an essential and difficult profession, yet it is written off as “women’s work” and severely undervalued.
This Women’s History Month, let’s break gender-based economic barriers with the same enthusiasm with which we cheer for women who’ve broken glass ceilings. Let’s demand a federal economic policy that centers women—and honors the work of the unknown women of history whose caregiving labor was ignored and nearly forgotten.
