Workplaces Must Adapt to Greater Role of Women In Workforce

by James Parks, Mar 8, 2010

A new Center for American Progress (CAP) report released in time for International Women’s Day today offers practical solutions to help America’s workers and families meet the dual demands of work and family. (Read the full report here.)

The report, “Our Working Nation: How Working Women Are Reshaping America’s Families and Economy and What It Means for Policymakers,” calls for:

• Updating basic labor standards to recognize that most workers also have family responsibilities and need predictable and flexible workplace schedules,access to paid family and medical leave the right to paid sick days.* Improving basic fairness in our workplace by ending discrimination against all workers, including pregnant women and caregivers.
• Providing direct support to working families with child care and elder care needs.
• Improving knowledge about family-responsive workplace policies by collecting national data on work-life policies offered by employers and analyzing the effectiveness of existing state and local policies.

The report builds on the 2009 Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation, which took a comprehensive look at working women and how their work has transformed today’s workplace.

In a telephone press conference this afternoon, the report’s co-author Heather Boushey, senior economist at CAP, cited a poll that shows a large majority of Americans support new, more family-friendly workplace policies. A full 85 percent of respondents say businesses that fail to adapt to the needs of modern families risk losing good workers. Boushey said:

These issues are becoming more important in the recession. Most of the jobs that have been lost have been lost by men leaving millions of women and mothers to support their families On top of this for those worker who have their jobs we need to make sure they stay employed, that…family-work conflicts don’t put them on the unemployment rolls.

In the United States and around the world, working women fall short of getting equal pay, according to the International Labor Organization (ILO).

In addition to higher poverty rates and the ongoing prevalence of sexual and domestic violence, the United Nations reports that women earn between 30 percent and 40 percent less pay than men for equivalent work. And with the nation’s financial debacle, U.S. women are shouldering the added burdens of sky-high unemployment, rampant foreclosures and inadequate access to health care. 

The AFL-CIO  has a “long-standing commitment to gender equality in the workplace,” AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Liz Shuler said. 

And today we’re reaffirming that commitment, standing firm with workers around the world to call for a more equitable and inclusive future for women.

In a statement, the AFL-CIO said:

It’s clear that the jobs crisis is a crisis for working women.  But like the women who marched in New York City over 100 years ago for shorter working hours, better pay, an end to child labor, and the vote, women today are fighting back. As labor readies for a massive campaign to create the jobs our country desperately needs, the AFL-CIO is proud to stand with them in that fight.

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