More Than A Magazine, A Movement
As athletes prepare for the Tokyo Olympics, women Olympians are still fighting for equal pay.
“What we’ve learned, and what we continue to learn, is that there is no level of status – and there’s no accomplishment or power – that will protect you from the clutches of inequity,” said star soccer player Megan Rapinoe.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in in this biweekly round-up.
This week: abortion restrictions skyrocket in 2021; Olympic policies disproportionately target Black women; Supreme Court rules in favor of free speech and gender expression; state legislatures endanger voting rights; and more.
Businesses over the years have spoken out on gay marriage, bathroom bills, and most recently on voter suppression, but there is dead silence on abortion rights. This is especially noteworthy, given state-level abortion restrictions cost the U.S. economy $105 billion per year by reducing women’s labor force participation and earnings and increasing turnover and time off from work among women ages 15 to 44 years. Without abortion restrictions, the national GDP would be nearly half a percent greater.
The threat to women in sports is not transgender athletes. It is misogyny, and an attendant unwillingness to cede that women not only deserve equal opportunities to compete, but that their athletic efforts are worthy of our collective attention.
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.”
When Lilly Ledbetter, a longtime manager at Goodyear, discovered her salary was significantly lower than her male colleagues, she took the company to court. While her case was overturned at the Supreme Court, her hard work finally paying off when President Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 into law as his first official act.
Now, Lilly’s life and her case are going to be the subject of “Lilly,” a feature film, directed by Rachel Feldman and starring Patricia Clarkson. Ms interviewed Ledbetter and Feldman about their exciting project.
Stop telling me to take a bath to relax.
Self-care puts the solution on the individual rather than the people, the systems, and the reasons the January 6 insurrection, for example, was allowed to happen in the first place.
Financial sanctions and incentives to enforce gender quotas have been gaining popularity both in politics and business over the last decade.
But in the U.S., despite decades of demanding a seat at the table, women make up less than 30 percent of all elected officials. Political parties and our government have a role to play in improving women’s political representation up and down the ballot; and, it is time they start using their money to make it happen.
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.
Thursday, October 29 is Latina Equal Pay Day—the approximate day in 2020 when the average Latina finally catches up to what the average white, non-Hispanic man earned in just 2019 alone.
