More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Financial education won’t undo systemic inequity and exclusion. Until we forge the products, practices and policies that advance an equitable economy, we can’t ask the individual to overcome the structural.
April is Financial Literacy Month. Here’s hoping it’s the last.
On March 16, the Senate confirmed Isabella Casillas Guzman, President Biden’s pick to lead the Small Business Administration (SBA), an agency that has seen its profile grow enormously in response to the pandemic. She is the first Latina to lead the agency and the only Latina in Biden’s diverse Cabinet.
“Now more than ever, our small businesses need us,” Guzman said.
Magnolia Mother’s Trust and other guaranteed income programs make the case that cash without restrictions is a crucial and powerful component of the social safety net that the federal government should provide.
As President Biden prepares to introduce a new plan aimed at jumpstarting economic rebirth, he must build on a key lesson from the past year: There is no equitable jobs plan that does not include child care.
As has been well-documented during this pandemic, women and men interact with the economy differently. Because of occupational segregation and caregiving obligations, women have been forced out of the workforce at a higher rate than men. For new full-employment policies to serve women, they must proactively address these and other obstacles.
The far-seeing women who pushed for and won the first federal commission on women 60 years ago had a bold and comprehensive plan to move America toward greater equality and well being. President Biden’s American Rescue Plan—aided by the new Gender Policy Council—should follow their lead.
From the Spring 1972 issue:
“Society needs women on welfare as ‘examples’ to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man.”
Nearly two-thirds of the employees making minimum wage are female. In states that have increased the minimum wage, the gender pay gap has begun to close.
“The economy can’t recover as long as millions of people who have been hardest hit [by COVID] are still being paid poverty level wages.”
In this week’s edition, we take a look at the American Rescue Plan Act to what it has in store for those suffering through the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic; mark one year since the pandemic officially began; discuss President Biden’s latest vaccine timeline; and, run down recent attacks on reproductive health.
As we reflect on the past year, let us be reminded that the opportunity for advancing an intersectional feminist agenda is now.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought attention to the struggles of work-life balance, the reliance on women for many domestic activities and the grueling hours and sacrifice health care workers make. If these issues were a Venn diagram, women in medicine would be at the center. But the challenges that women in medicine face were only exacerbated, not created, by the pandemic.
