More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The energy sector in Mexico is known for its gender imbalance. While women are underrepresented in board of directors in all sectors, the energy sector is worse, with only 3% female participation.
In order to support women’s advancement to the upper echelons of the industry, a group of prominent women in the sector have formed an advocacy organization called Voz Experta. The organization aims to advocate for its members to balance out expert panels composed only of men, or “manels.”
Many women in many dual-parent households have dropped out of the workforce during the pandemic to carry this domestic load, but most solo moms can’t do that. We have to keep the plates spinning as best we can. I wonder about all the other pandemic lock-in kids living in single-mother households—roughly one quarter of the U.S. population.
AWID’s latest funding analysis show that 99% of development aid and foundation grants do not reach women’s rights and feminist organizations. WROs receive only 0.12% of the total Official Development Assistance and 0.4% of all gender-related aid. 48% of women’s rights and feminist organizations in the Global South operate on limited annual budgets of $30,000 or less.
Yet the urgency to adequately resource the full diversity of the ecosystem of feminist movements has never been greater.
The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Sept. 18 has reignited a conversation about women’s rights—including financial ones, which modern Western women hardly question.
Now, with potential rollbacks looming, experts recall the decades of work to secure landmark women’s rights.
The Labor Department reported an alarming 865,000 women left the workforce in the month of September.
The Female Future of Work report shows how old the barriers faced by working women are and how seldom U.S. policymakers cared. The new report brings a recognition to working women’s history.
The Biden-Harris administration appears poised to make a good hard policy push towards gender equality in the workplace. But experts warm their efforts could be derailed—whether because of the multiple crises the new administration will be facing on Day 1 or legislative gridlock.
A significant number of women are being considered for key economic slots in the Biden administration, including as secretaries of Treasury, Commerce and Labor.
With a threatened mass exodus of women from the work force, the pandemic is prompting a national conversation about the plight of working women and the issues that impede their success at work.
If greater attention is paid to these issues, this pandemic-fueled recession could enable the future inclusion of women in the workplace for three reasons.
The economic security prong of Biden’s agenda for women includes fighting for equal pay and better wages for women, ending pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment, supporting women-owned small businesses, expanding women’s access to education and training, and providing pathways for women to enter higher-paying professions.
(President-Elect Biden’s platform for women promises to be the most ambitious presidential agenda yet addressing issues that affect women and girls in the U.S. and around the globe. This piece is the second of a multi-part series covering the agenda.)
On average, Latinas in the U.S. are paid 46 percent less than white men, and 31 percent less than white women.
We can wait for this to change, and hope that the number of leaders who grasp the severity of the diversity gap in the workplace can hold the rest of the company accountable—or we can take matters into our own hands.
