More Than A Magazine, A Movement
September saw one of the largest dropoffs of women from the labor force since the pandemic began. The last time women left the workforce in such large numbers was in September 2020—and that’s not a coincidence.
The start of school during the pandemic has now coincided twice with significant job losses for women, underscoring that sectors disproportionately employing women continue to be hard hit and childcare centers are struggling.
The Black Girl Freedom Fund raised over $20 million last year, allowing teens to give grants to organizations prioritizing the safety and well-being of Black girls.
The Build Back Better Agenda marks an opportunity for America to support childcare and paid leave.
“These measures pay off for our economy — keeping workers employed, increasing earnings and productivity, and investing in our next generation.”
Texas’s S.B. 8. has laid bare the precarious nature of abortion rights. Even still, it’s hard not to notice a relative silence from corporate America. Cecile Ricards, former president of Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018 and daughter of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards, calls this silence “unthinkable.”
“This was the moment for corporations, businesses and employers, to stand up on behalf off the people that they employ, the people that they sell products to, and the places where they do business, on an issue like abortion rights, which has been a constitutional right in this country for [nearly] 50 years,” Richards told Ms. “Now in one state, Texas, essentially, that constitutional right effectively no longer exists.”
Front and Center highlights the success of Springboard to Opportunities’ Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which this year will give $1,000 per month for 12 months to 100 families headed by Black women living in federally subsidized housing.
“I have this ability through the money from the trust to provide for my family in a hard time, because before I got that call that I was selected to be part of the program I was really struggling to keep on top of my bills and responsibilities.”
On Sept. 1, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed an unconstitutional Texas abortion ban to go into effect. While the Supreme Court did not rule on the law’s merits, the decision is a chilling harbinger of how they may rule in an upcoming case—Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—on whether previability abortion bans are unconstitutional.
Many are fighting back.
Too often, aid has been delivered on behalf of women and girls. They have been boxes to be checked off and their rights used as tools of trade between men in power. This must end now.
Feminist funders have been supporting local Afghan feminist groups for decades with long-term flexible funds toward urgent community needs and long-term rebuilding. We need to vastly increase this feminist funding that goes directly to local grassroots groups to use how they wish. We know this feminist funding model works, even under repressive regimes, and even in Afghanistan.
Wednesday, Sept. 8, marks Native Women’s Equal Pay Day—the day it takes Native women in America to earn what non-Hispanic white men finished making on December 31 of last year.
As two women elected to Congress, we’re proud to fight alongside Native women for just wages and safe working conditions.
More than 44 million Americans hold a combined $1.7 trillion in federal student loan debt (and those numbers don’t include privatize student loans). And of that collective debt, women carry two-thirds of it, according to a recent study from the American Association of University Women (AAUW).
Biden wants student loan forgiveness to include targeted student loan cancellation, improving student loan servicing, holding student loan servicers and universities accountable, and improving policies around student loan debt collection. But activists want more: the cancelation of *all* student debt.
When most people hear the term “gender pay gap,” they automatically think of the difference in pay between women and men doing the same or similar jobs. But there’s another kind of gender pay gap few even know about—the venture capital gap.
