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Yesterday, the Obama administration held a roundtable at the White House campus celebrating the 37th aniversary of Title IX. Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, and Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to the president, hosted "an all-star line-up of women athletes and scientists," per the White House release. That included Billie Jean King and Dominique Dawes (rapidly becoming an administration favorite), and a slew of representatives from women's groups like the Feminist Majority, NOW, the Women's Sports Foundation, and the National Women's Law Center... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Like Hanna, I, too, am finding it hard to muster enthusiasm for the White House Council on Women and Girls. Obama's heart is certainly in the right place, but this council seems amorphous and somewhat random. What I can get onboard with is all the funding increases for sexual and reproductive health programs coming out of the omnibus bill the Senate passed last night. Providing more money for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and 14 million less for abstinence-only programs seems like a much more concrete, results-oriented way to keep improving women's lives. I was also encouraged by the bill's inclusion of the Affordable Birth Control Act, which restores access to birth control to low-income college-age women whose contraceptive resources were restricted under the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005.
No less important, of course, was the restoration of U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, providing a total of $545 million for family planning and reproductive health programs worldwide.
With all of these councils being created, bills being signed, and funds being allotted to various women's interests, it is easy to forget that much of the recent progress has been a mere correction of Bush administration policies like the global gag rule. The White House Council on Women and Girls is the first truly nonreactionary measure Obama has taken with respect to women, so it will be interesting to see how the council, as it hopefully takes a clearer direction, defines Obama's own vision for American women and girls.
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I'm not sure what to make of the new White House Council on Women and Girls. Seeing that snapshot of Pelosi and Boxer up there had a throwback feel, and not entirely in a good way. (Back to the tokenism!) And coming in a week when the Washington meme is Obama doing too much, this seemed like a frenzied afterthought. That said, Obama's words were just right, or at least they spoke to me.
"I've seen it in Michelle, the rock of the Obama family, juggling work and parenting with more skill and grace than anybody that I know. But I also saw how it tore at her at times. How sometimes when she was with the girls, she was worried about work; when she was at work, she worried about the girls."
Now that women are nearly half the workforce, it's high time we had some national policy to figure this out, or at least tried. What we have now at the top of the pay scale is pretty good—a lot of flexibility in certain kinds of jobs. But the burden is on each individual woman to carve her own path. At the bottom, of course, it's a different story. As Jennifer Barrett wrote recently in Slate, it's not exactly true that the stimulus bill is shafting women. It's just that when it comes to women, there are not many decent industries to stimulate. Women work in service jobs, not the high-paying union construction jobs.
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