According to the National Women’s Law Center, women accounted for 100% of job losses in December.
That sounds impossible or like an exaggeration. But it’s true. So the Biden-Harris administration—aware that it has its work cut out—has decided to take some concrete action: On Tuesday, with less than 24 hours to go until the inauguration, President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris announced the formation of the White House Gender Policy Council, aiming for what the team is calling a government-wide focus on uplifting the rights of girls and women in the United States and around the world, restoring America as a champion for women and girls.”
The council will be cochaired by Jennifer Klein and Julissa Reynoso, two women with extensive experience fighting for gender equity. According to a press release that the incoming administration released, the council will “guide and coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls, across a wide range of issues such as economic security, health care, racial justice, gender-based violence, and foreign policy, working in cooperation with the other White House policy councils.”
The pandemic had been and continues to be crushing for women, particularly for women of color. Aside from the job loss, which National Women’s Law Center President Fatima Goss Graves tells Glamour sets us “back at 1980s levels of women’s share of the workforce,” a disproportionate number of women are essential workers, women take on more care and domestic work at home, and during lockdowns, domestic violence has spiked. And long before the pandemic began, the Trump administration was working diligently to strip away protections for women and gender minorities—limiting access to reproductive health care, making it harder for survivors of sexual violence on campus to seek justice, and rolling back equal-pay rules.
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