by ACLU Staff

In early October, the United States Labor Department reported that women were leaving the workforce at four times the rate of men. A few months earlier, a report from McKinsey Global revealed that while women made up 43 percent of the workforce, they had borne 56 percent of COVID-related job losses. This data — and much more — led one news source to call this moment “America’s First Female Recession.”

This week, Colleen Ammerman joined At Liberty to discuss why this is happening, and what we can do about it. Ammerman is the director of Harvard Business School’s Gender Initiative. She is also the co-author of an upcoming book Glass Half Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work.

While disparities in pay and access to power in the workplace are not new, Ammerman says the divides are now starker than ever because of COVID-19: “What we’re seeing the pandemic do is really just both reveal and entrench some of these inequalities, both along racial and gender lines.”

https://soundcloud.com/aclu/how-covid-19-is-setting-working-women-back/s-A0Xsu36Shi9

By Georgeanne M. Usova, ACLU Legislative Counsel

After four years of attacks on our reproductive rights and health by the Trump administration and the anti-abortion legislators it has emboldened around the country, there is much to repair. When President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris take office, their administration must make it a top priority to not just undo the damage, but to take bold, visionary steps to make reproductive health care — including abortion — accessible to all, regardless of their income or ZIP code. Congress, too, has a key role to play in ensuring that everyone is afforded the dignity to make our own decisions about our lives.

Here are just a few of the many items that should top our elected officials’ to-do list:

Reverse dangerous Trump administration regulations targeting reproductive health care, including:

• The refusal of care rule, which aimed to dramatically expand health care institutions’ and workers’ ability to withhold and obstruct access to essential, even life-saving medical care and information — with no regard for patients’ well-being.While it was rightly struck down in court, it is one of many attempts by the Trump administration to invoke religious or personal beliefs to justify discrimination, particularly against LGBTQ people and people seeking reproductive health care. The Biden administration must ensure that religious liberty is never used as a license to discriminate, and that patients’ needs always come first in health care.
• The rule undermining the ACA’s birth control benefit, which allows employers and universities to deny their employees or students insurance coverage for contraception by invoking religious or moral objections. This is yet another example of how the Trump administration has discriminated against those seeking health care under the guise of protecting religious liberty. In July, the Supreme Court allowed this discriminatory rule to take effect, potentially robbing hundreds of thousands of people of their no-cost birth control coverage, and forcing employees and students to instead pay out of pocket. The Biden administration must guarantee that no one is denied birth control coverage because of where they work or where they go to school.
• The rule that has devastated Title X, the 50-year-old family planning program that has provided 4 million patients with low or no incomes with affordable birth control, cancer screenings, STI testing and treatment, and other critical preventive care. The rule prohibits family planning clinics that participate in the program from referring patients for abortion care and imposes other onerous and dangerous requirements. It has resulted in the widespread loss of Title X providers and reduced access to family planning services for those who rely on the program. The Biden administration must restore and rebuild the critical Title X program.

Ensure safe access to medication abortion during the pandemic and beyond.

During the pandemic, the Trump administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to make it as difficult as possible for people to safely access medication abortion care — specifically mifepristone, a prescription medication that has been used to safely end early pregnancies and treat early miscarriages for 20 years. The administration has refused to allow patients to obtain their prescription by mail, insisting that patients travel to a health center solely to pick up a pill, subjecting patients to needless COVID-19 risks. This is despite the Food and Drug Administration having suspended similar requirements for other, far less safe medications during the pandemic. The ACLU won in court, blocking the in-person requirement during the pandemic, but the Supreme Court will soon consider the Trump administration’s request to reinstate it.

This in-person dispensing requirement is part of a longstanding package of outdated, medically unnecessary FDA restrictions that, even prior to COVID-19, have obstructed access to medication abortion — particularly for people with low incomes and communities of color. The Biden administration must immediately pause enforcement of the mifepristone in-person dispensing requirement during the public health emergency. And the FDA should undertake a comprehensive review of the full set of restrictions on mifepristone to ensure that, beyond the pandemic, patients’ access to this safe, effective medication is based on the latest science and medical evidence. 

Make the Hyde Amendment history once and for all. 

President-elect Biden has pledged his support for ending the Hyde Amendment, a harmful ban on abortion coverage for people enrolled in Medicaid and other insurance programs. For decades, Hyde and related bans have pushed abortion care out of reach for people struggling to make ends meet, particularly women of color — the same communities that face severe health care disparities as a result of structural inequality and are now being hit hardest by the pandemic and economic crisis. 
Now it’s time for Biden to take the critical first step toward ending these discriminatory coverage bans by striking Hyde and all related abortion coverage restrictions from his first budget. This, along with calling on Congress to pass the EACH Woman Act to lift coverage bans, will send a clear message that this administration will work to make abortion not only legal, but also accessible to all. 
 
Enact a nationwide safeguard against state restrictions.

States have passed more than 460 politically motivated laws to push abortion care out of reach over the last decade çefforts buoyed recently by Trump’s appointment of multiple Supreme Court justices. These laws range from bans on abortion from the earliest days of pregnancy, to laws that interfere with the provider-patient relationship like forced ultrasounds and mandatory delay periods, to clinic shutdown laws that force patients to travel long distances (paying for transportation, lodging, and child care in the process) to obtain care. These restrictions have so severely eroded access to care across vast regions of the country, leaving the right to abortion effectively hollow for many people. 

President-elect Biden should also call for swift passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act to address the crisis of state attacks on abortion access. WHPA would put a stop to these state attacks and, paired with EACH, would make care more affordable and accessible for people throughout the country.

As we look back at the last four years and toward a new administration, there’s no question that there’s a lot of work to do — but we’re ready to go. And our elected officials should be too.

By Ria Tabacco Mar, Director, ACLU Women’s Rights Project and Dana Sussman, Deputy Commissioner for Intergovernmental Affairs, New York City Commission on Human Rights

One of the simplest joys of expecting a baby is sharing the news with other people. That wasn’t the case for Steven van Soeren, a product designer for Disney’s streaming service, when his wife became pregnant.

“You shouldn’t have a kid,” one Disney coworker told him, according to allegations in his complaint. “I don’t know why he decided to have a kid,” said another within earshot of van Soeren.

Objections to van Soeren becoming a father weren’t limited to cruel remarks. Shortly after van Soeren returned from two weeks of paternity leave, he was fired. Van Soeren thought that was wrong — and illegal. He sued his former employer, but a federal court dismissed van Soeren’s case last month, reasoning that his firing wasn’t unlawful discrimination because van Soeren himself had not been pregnant.

The late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would have disagreed. She was well known for her legal strategy arguing cases on behalf of men to demonstrate how sex discrimination harms us all. Ginsburg wanted everyone to have equal opportunity to work and participate in family life according to their own needs and wants, regardless of their gender. She also knew that in order for women to enjoy full equity outside the home, society would have to empower men to share the responsibilities within it. That meant breaking free from traditional gender roles and discriminatory laws that dictated that caregiving was a woman’s job — and never a man’s.

Ginsburg’s view of the law prevailed, in 1975 and beyond. In a 2003 decision authored by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist (and joined by Ginsburg, by that point a member of the court herself), the Supreme Court noted that by denying men paternity leave or discouraging them from taking it, employers “created a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination that forced women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver.” Congress, it held, was rightly empowered to address sex discrimination of this kind.

Yet the van Soeren decision demonstrates that existing federal law is insufficient. Local laws have filled the gap — New York City, for example, added express protections against discrimination for caregivers, regardless of gender or one’s ability to become pregnant, in 2016. In June, Sen. Cory Booker introduced legislation that would protect all mothers, fathers, and other family caregivers from employment discrimination.

That’s important because caregiving isn’t just about parenting. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, which enforces local laws against caregiving discrimination, regularly receives complaints from New Yorkers who say they’ve been penalized for caring for their spouses, parents, and other loved ones. One man reported losing his job after telling his supervisor that he needed to take a week off to care for his wife after an illness. He says his supervisor laughed at him for doing “the woman’s job” and then replaced him while he was out caring for his wife.

Another New Yorker said she asked to work remotely from her mother’s home in another state while her mother went through cancer treatment. She was surprised when the request was denied; she worked for an international company, where teams were spread across multiple offices and collaborate remotely, and other employees had been allowed to work remotely for personal travel or a spouse’s sabbatical. And though she wasn’t able to care for her mother, she was punished simply for making the request, coming under increased scrutiny and, ultimately, laid off while others without caregiving responsibilities were allowed to keep their jobs.

Fortunately, both workers were protected by New York City’s law. But without nationwide express protections from caregiver discrimination in all its forms, the van Soeren decision sends a terrible message — and one that could not land at a worse time.

Women are at the center of the most unequal recession in modern American history. The back-to-school season — without physical school reopenings in many parts of the country — has worsened the situation: Of 1.1 million workers who dropped out of the workforce in September, 80 percent were women. This shouldn’t be surprising. Parents, overwhelmingly mothers, have had no alternative but to drop out of the labor market to manage their children’s education. This decision is likely the result of women’s entrenched income inequality, leading many different-sex couples to try to preserve the earning potential of the partner who makes more. In most cases, that’s the man.

Other mothers have had the choice made for them, either because they work in jobs that can’t be done from home or because their employers penalized them for having children at home while they worked. Coupled with the already disproportionately high rates of unemployment for women since the start of the pandemic, it may take decades for women to recover. And these disparities are far worse for women working in low-wage positions, Black women, and other women of color.

All of this explains why Ginsburg might well have decided to take on a case like van Soeren’s. As Ginsburg famously said, “Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.” Now more than ever, lawmakers across the country must work to make Ginsburg’s vision a reality by ensuring caregiving discrimination protections for all — regardless of gender.