Workplaces, Laws Fail to Keep up with Growing Role of Women Workers

by James Parks, Oct 27, 2009

For the first time in our nation’s history, working women make up nearly half of all U.S. workers, and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families.

This dramatic shift from just a generation ago marks a permanent cultural change, yet most institutions, including the workplace and government have not caught up with this new reality.

“The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,” released earlier this month by the Center for American Progress (CAP) and Maria Shriver, looks at the changing face and attitudes of the American worker. The multi-faceted report includes a national poll on attitudes about the rising role of women.

“The Shriver Report presents an accurate and detailed portrait of American women and families at this transformational moment in our history,” Maria Shriver said.

It’s been almost 50 years since my uncle, President John F. Kennedy, asked Eleanor Roosevelt to do the same by chairing the very first Commission on the Status of the American Woman. We’ve come a long way since then. Now I’m hoping policymakers, armed with our surveys and analysis, can develop updated policies and practices that address and support the needs of today’s American women, men and families.

Among the report’s findings:

• Three-quarters of the public views the rising proportion of women in the workplace as a positive development for society, with fully 70 percent of men saying they are comfortable having women work outside the home. But both fathers and mothers are concerned about the negative effect on their children when there is no longer a stay-at-home parent.
• Many institutions haven’t kept up with the evolution of American families. For example, basic labor standards and the social insurance system are based on supporting “traditional” families, in which the husband works and the wife stays home to care for children.
• More than 80 percent of men and women agree that businesses failing to adapt to the needs of modern families risk losing good workers. In fact, businesses that support and retain women have healthier bottom lines.
• The current recession has accelerated the workforce shift toward women, because most of the jobs recently lost have been men’s jobs. But the increase in women’s proportion of the workforce will continue, because future job growth is predicted to be most robust in industries, such as education and health, where women dominate.
• Women still earn only 77 cents for every $1 dollar men earn, and women are less likely to be in leadership positions in corporate America. As of July 2008, only 15 companies on the Fortune 500 list were run by female chief executives.

One way to better accommodate women in the workplace would be to make it easier for all workers to join unions, says AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker. In an essay in the report, Holt Baker says union membership is far more important for women than men. All too often, she says, women are the first to be laid off, or denied a raise, or discriminated against, or passed over for promotions.

Writes Holt Baker:

I’ve seen that with a union, a telephone operator can own a home. An assembly line worker can have health insurance and a vacation. A service rep can have a secure pension.

Holt Baker notes that full-time working women with union cards are paid 32 percent more than nonunionized women. Moreover, women in unions are far more likely to have job-based health insurance and defined-benefit pensions. She writes:

I deeply believe that our mission today in a woman’s nation is to help our sisters and daughters achieve economic security and find a place in the middle class.

And I know that the best way to do that is to enable millions more women to join the union movement and win a better life for themselves and their co-workers.

John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, said of the report:

While Americans have been busy adapting to monumental shifts in our culture, our government, businesses and faith institutions have not kept pace with the reality of the modern American family. This report contemplates what a new America should look like after we finally embrace this important new dynamic in our lives and address these challenges, not as “women’s issues” but as fundamental issues important to the livelihood and well-being of both men and women.

 You can download the Shriver Report here. It also is available as an eBook here.

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