An awesome majority of voters need President-elect Joe Biden and the following Congress to advance insurance policies associated to gender fairn
An awesome majority of voters need President-elect Joe Biden and the following Congress to advance insurance policies associated to gender fairness upon taking workplace in 2021, in accordance with a brand new ballot offered solely to Vox.
The survey, carried out by Lake Analysis Companions in collaboration with the Nationwide Girls’s Regulation Middle, discovered that 83 p.c of respondents need Biden and members of Congress to work on ending sexual harassment in faculties and the office, 77 p.c assist insurance policies that might assist shut the gender pay hole, 81 p.c wish to assure entry to reasonably priced, high-quality youngster care, and 56 p.c wish to defend and develop entry to reproductive well being care, together with abortion. And 76 p.c of Biden voters mentioned the Trump administration’s strategy to ladies’s points motivated them to take political motion, together with voting.
These outcomes counsel that the incoming administration would have broad assist for prioritizing insurance policies that handle gender disparities as a part of its legislative agenda, together with proposals the Biden marketing campaign has beforehand highlighted.
Biden’s “agenda for ladies” contains assist for a coverage primarily based on the FAMILY Act, which would supply as much as 12 weeks of paid household and medical go away for all staff, and as much as $8,000 in tax credit to assist low-income and middle-class households pay for youngster care. He’s additionally mentioned he would restore federal funding for Deliberate Parenthood, which has been blocked underneath a Trump administration rule barring well being care suppliers that obtain Title X cash from performing or referring for abortions. Biden has additional famous that he’d push to reauthorize funding for the Violence Towards Girls’s Act, which allocates cash to meant to stop and prosecute abuse in opposition to ladies, inside his first 100 days.
Carried out between October 31 and November 3, the ballot surveyed registered voters who had already voted or deliberate to vote within the 2020 election. Questions on voting had been fielded with 2,400 individuals, whereas the questions on particular concern areas reached a complete of 1,200 individuals. The survey has an total margin of error of plus or minus 2 proportion factors, with a 2.Eight proportion level margin of error for the problem questions particularly.
Along with findings about totally different concern areas, the NWLC survey underscores simply how a lot assist from ladies — particularly ladies of shade — bolstered Biden: 53 p.c of ladies polled mentioned they voted for him, together with 92 p.c of Black ladies and roughly 60 p.c of each Latina and Asian American and Pacific Islander ladies. (The survey notes the smaller pattern measurement of AAPI ladies.)
“The widespread assist for an agenda that actually focuses on and facilities gender justice needs to be the large takeaway right here,” mentioned NWLC President and CEO Fatima Goss Graves. “Folks need equal pay; they need low-cost, accessible well being care; they need reasonably priced, high-quality youngster care; they usually wish to finish sexual harassment and violence in faculties and in workplaces — no matter who they voted for.”
The pandemic has exacerbated gender inequities — and highlighted the necessity to handle them
A renewed push for these insurance policies comes because the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated gender inequities even additional.
As Bryce Covert beforehand reported for Vox, the dearth of complete paid household go away and youngster care choices in addition to COVID-19’s financial fallout have contributed to pushing hundreds of ladies out of the workforce:
In August and September, 865,000 ladies left work altogether; in September, there have been 2.2 million fewer ladies within the labor drive than a yr earlier. There are fewer ladies employed or searching for work, and extra ladies merely sitting on the sidelines of the labor drive, than any time since 1986.
Younger moms have been way more doubtless than fathers to say they couldn’t work as a consequence of closed faculties and day cares, Covert famous. The paid go away included within the Households First Coronavirus Response Act — which assured people as much as 12 weeks of paid go away in the event that they wanted to handle youngsters whose faculties or day cares closed on account of the pandemic — helped some, nevertheless it wasn’t accessible to these working at bigger firms with 500 or extra workers. These departures may set ladies’s participation within the workforce again many years, Covert wrote.
Due to the pervasive results of the pandemic, any steps the Biden administration takes to deal with ongoing disparities throughout work, schooling, youngster care, and well being care are as urgent as ever. The outcomes of the NWLC ballot are among the many information factors stressing that — whereas concurrently capturing how integral ladies had been to Biden’s victory.