Author: Gwen Rubinstein

Federal Budget Cuts & the Impact on Medicare, Medicaid & Women

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein

U.S. CapitolMany commentators have written about the current round of negotiations about the federal budget and how budget cuts will affect the poor. Women’s organizations and women columnists (see here and here, for example) have noted the disproportionate focus on cutting programs affecting women’s reproductive health and rights.

Few have paid attention, however, to the potential overall effects of changes in Medicare and Medicaid on women – both young and old.

It is time to take a gender lens to these programs. Reducing the reach and coverage of Medicare and Medicaid – through any means – will affect millions of women, particularly low-income women.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation:

  • Medicaid provided 20 million low-income women with basic health and long-term care coverage in 2007.
  • Women make up the majority of adult Medicaid recipients (69 percent of the total – even higher among the oldest recipients).
  • If this percentage holds true in our area, any changes to Medicaid will affect nearly 1 million women in the District, Maryland and Virginia.

The same holds true for Medicare. Again, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation:

  • The majority (56 percent) of Medicare beneficiaries are women.
  • Any changes to Medicare will affect more than 1 million women in the District, Maryland and Virginia.
  • As we learned from our 2010 Portrait of Women & Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area, this number is likely to grow dramatically in the next decade. Between 2000 and 2008, the population of women over 65 grew by 18 percent in the region, compared to an overall 5 percent increase in the total population of women.

Isn’t it time we started talking about this?

Gwen Rubinstein is Washington Area Women’s Foundation’s Program Officer.

Looking Toward the Future With a Gender Lens

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Power10girlforWebI know it is Women’s History Month and that we are celebrating how our history is our strength.

But I have been thinking about our present and our future. And I am feeling cranky because I am tired of:

  • Reading articles about Social Security that do not acknowledge the reality that most people receiving Social Security are women. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 52 percent of Social Security beneficiaries were women in December 2008, compared to 40 percent who were men (the remaining 8 percent were children).
  • As research from our 2010 Portrait Project revealed, the majority (57 percent) of our region’s population over 65 is women. We also learned that older women are slightly more likely to be poor than all women in the region and that poverty rates are exceptionally high for women 75-84 in the District and Arlington County, where 1 in 5 is poor.
  • Learning about new research around children and youth, only to find out it does not address any gender differences. For example, Kids Count research does not break down its data by gender.
  • Hearing from government agencies and community-based organizations that they need help re-designing services to respond to the particular needs of women or girls – because those needs were not considered during program design. This still happens, even after 20+ years of literature about the need for gender-specific programs and services and the availability of effective models in many areas of practice.
  • Seeing advocacy campaigns focused on reducing poverty that do not acknowledge that the majority Americans who are poor are women and their children. As our Portrait Project showed, women in every jurisdiction in our region have higher poverty rates than men and women-headed households have the highest poverty rates of all.

I wonder how we can really understand tomorrow’s challenges to the success of women and girls if we don’t have the right information about what happened yesterday and today.

Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

Call for Presenters for Stepping Stones Research Briefing

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein

Do you have compelling new research findings about what helps low-income women raising children achieve economic security and financial independence? Would you like to share them with the community of Washington Area Women’s Foundation?

If you answered yes to these questions, please consider presenting your research at the annual Washington Area Women’s Foundation Stepping Stones Research Briefing, scheduled for the morning of Friday, May 20, 2011, at The Urban Institute in downtown Washington, D.C.

Stepping Stones is The Women’s Foundation’s multi-year initiative focused on increasing the economic security and financial independence of low-income, women-headed families in the Washington metropolitan area. The Stepping Stones Research Briefing provides an opportunity for The Women’s Foundation and its partners to learn about the latest research that can inform their work supporting this population.

This is the sixth year that The Women’s Foundation and The Urban Institute will co-sponsor the research briefing. The first five briefings each drew an audience of more than 100, including representatives from community-based organizations, funders, government agencies and research institutions.

If you are interested in presenting this year, please submit an abstract of your research and findings (no more than 1,000 words) to Peter Tatian at The Urban Institute by 5:00 pm on Friday, March 18, 2011.  Abstracts should make clear how the research is relevant to issues facing low-income, women-headed families and those who are working to assist them.

This year, we are particularly interested in abstracts related to how best to re-imagine/re-engineer this work in light of the new economic reality, including submissions on:

  • Improving housing security for low-income women with children through approaches that help sustain homeownership (including foreclosure prevention) or support renter stability.
  • How best to help prepare women for in-demand jobs in the expected economic recovery.
  • Effective policies and practices that have increased access to affordable, high-quality early care and education.
  • Successful approaches to building income and assets in the current economy, including through public benefits and work supports, including child care and transportation.

Presenters will be selected by March 31, 2010.

Copies of all presentations, as well as audio recordings of the entire event, will be posted on The Urban Institute’s web site after the event.  Presentations from last year’s research briefing can be found here.

Questions: Address them to Peter Tatian at The Urban Institute or Gwen Rubinstein at The Women’s Foundation.

Even if you don’t have research to present please do save the date so you remember to join us!

A Budget Strong Enough for a Man, Made for a Woman

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein

old secret adLast week, staff of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (@TheDailyShow) tweeted: “Tonight: States struggle to balance budgets. pH-balance, that is. You try creating a budget strong enough for a man, but made for a woman!”

A silly tweet riffing off an old Secret deodorant commercial, but it got me wondering… what would a budget strong enough for a man but made for a woman actually look like? It is easy enough to identify policies that are made for a woman – policies women think would help them support themselves and their families.

Based on polling results, women want policies and investments that improve economic security for more women (and men) and improve supports for families, including paid leave (family, sick and safe) and affordable child care.

For example, according to a June 2010 poll by Lake Research Partners:

• More than half (55 percent) of women think it is time for government to take a larger or stronger role in making the economy work for the average American.
• More women (79 percent) than men (68 percent) think equal pay and benefits for men and women should be top policy agenda item.
• More women (57 percent) than men (44 percent) think available and affordable child care should be a top policy agenda item.

To me, the better question is: When will men, who still hold the majority of policy decision-making positions, be strong enough to enact a budget made for a woman?

Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

Photo credit: Twitchery on Flickr

Dear Mayor Gray

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein

Dear Mr. Mayor:

Congratulations on your election and inauguration. We all hope for and expect great things from you and your administration!

“One city” – the slogan from your campaign and your inaugural address – is a great unifying and organizing principle for the District. Our fates are tied together, no matter what part of the city we live in, what we look like, how we make a living and who we call family.

As we work together toward your vision of coming together as one city, I urge, at the same time, that we not lose sight of the diverse parts that make up our one city, especially women and girls.

To be sure, many women and girls in our community are doing well and sharing in the overall prosperity of a region that has – so far – been spared some of the worst effects of the recession. But our recent report 2010 Portrait of Women & Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area also revealed deep challenges facing women and girls in the District (and the region), including:

  • Nearly 62,000 women and girls in DC lived in poverty in 2008-2009 (35 percent of all of the women and girls in poverty in the region), compared to nearly 43,000 men and boys (a 44 percent difference).
  • The poverty rate for women and girls in DC was nearly 21 percent in 2008-2009 (the highest in the region), compared to 16 percent for men. What’s more, the District had exceptionally high poverty rates (26 percent) for African-American women and girls.
  • Women-headed families with children in DC had median family income of $29,900 in 2008, the lowest in the region. This contrasts sharply with the $53,634 estimated that an adult with one infant and one pre-school child needs to achieve minimum self-sufficiency.
  • Too many DC women (35 percent in 2008) have no education beyond a high school diploma.
  • African-American women in DC had an unemployment rate of 12 percent in 2008, compared to 2.8 percent for white women and 5.6 percent for Latinas.

We hope you will call on us at The Women’s Foundation to help you and your team address these and other challenges facing our city’s women and girls.

Gwen Rubinstein is a program officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

Gender Fatigue — Is Our Work Done?

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Barack_Obama_signs_Lilly_Ledbetter_Fair_Pay_Act_of_2009_1-29-09Do you care about the role of women in our workforce?  If so, you may be suffering from gender fatigue.

According to an article in Newsweek (“Women Will Rule the World”), the debate over women in the workforce in the United States is an old issue.  “We’re done,” the magazine quotes Rosalind Hudnell, the head of diversity and inclusion at the Intel Corporation, as saying.  I am not making any of that up.

I am suffering from fatigue, alright – but I am tired of silly articles about how our work is done and how women will soon rule the world.

As far as I know:

  • The U.S. still has a pretty significant gender pay gap, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Women’s Foundation Grantee Partner.
  • Women are still segregated in “women’s” jobs such as secretaries, nurses and teachers.
  • Men still earn more than women at every educational level.  In fact, women with some college or an associate’s degree actually have *lower* median weekly earnings ($628) than men who are high school graduates but have no college ($709), according to the 2009 Women in the Labor Force Databook.
  • Government funded training programs perpetuate occupational gender segregation, according to a new report by the Center for American Progress.

I think what we are suffering from is imagination fatigue.  Why can’t we imagine and work to create a world where women and men of equal skill and education are paid equally for the same work?  Why can’t we imagine and work to create a world that places a higher value (literally) on “women’s work?”  Why can’t we imagine and work to create a world that didn’t think of certain work as “women’s” or “men’s?”

I would love to hear what fatigues you about this conversation, as well as what you want to imagine and create.

Gwen Rubinstein is a program officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

Photo credit: The White House; President Obama signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009

Not Time to Celebrate: Women Catch Up With Men in Achievements, Not Earnings

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Equal Pay

An article in the most recent issue of The Atlantic (“The End of Men” by Hanna Rosin) asks a lot of questions about women’s progress in the economy.  Reactions are flying around Twitter and other cultural touchstones, like The Colbert Report.

One of the article’s questions I have been thinking about is: What if the modern, postindustrial economy is more congenial to women?  My conclusion so far is: I will remain unconvinced until women begin reaping the higher economic rewards that would and should follow if this were the case.

Currently, some economic rewards for women have come in the form of less job loss than men.  Overall, the recession has been relatively less economically dislocating for most women because the sectors women tend to work in (such as health care and education) have not been shrinking.  Although, as I have noted here before, women who head families have higher unemployment rates than many other population groups (11.6 percent in May 2010, compared to 9.8 among men 20 and older, for example).

Increasing educational attainment among women – both in general and relative to men – should also reward them economically.  Americans with bachelor’s degrees, for example, have more than two times the median weekly earnings of those who never completed high school (see here).  According to the National Center for Education Statistics, women are projected to earn 62.3 percent of associate’s degrees, 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 61 percent of master’s degrees conferred in 2009-10.

Still, these rewards are behind schedule:

  • Women surpassed men in attainment of associate’s degrees in 1977-78, bachelor’s degrees in 1981-82 and master’s degrees in 1985-86.
  • Women are not earning as much as men in most occupations.  According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (a Grantee Partner of The Women’s Foundation), median weekly earnings for full-time women workers were $657 in 2009, compared with $819 per week for men (a gender wage gap of 19.8 percent).
  • Women are not earning as much as men even in most women-dominated occupations. Women who are registered nurses, secretaries, maids and cashiers still have lower median weekly earnings than men in the same jobs.

We literally cannot afford to rest on our successes.  We must continue to advocate for women’s economic equality at the international, national and regional levels, including in pay, benefits (such as paid sick leave) and workplace flexibility.

Gwen Rubinstein is a program officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

A Super Tuesday for Women Politicians

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein

4 women candidatesWomen won several high-profile races on Tuesday at both the state and national levels.  I am celebrating these victories, even for women whose politics and positions I don’t share.

When was the last political “year of the woman”? 1992.  We are past overdue.

Women continue to be significantly underrepresented in elected positions at all levels of government.  According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers, women hold 16.8 percent of all seats in the current Congress (both the House and the Senate), and the percent of women holding statewide elective office actually decreased to 22.9 percent in 2010 from a high of 27.6 percent in 1999.

Compare both of these to the percent of American adults who are women: 51.3 percent, as of July 1, 2008, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

These numbers have to change.

Increasing the number of women officeholders could and should have many benefits, among them higher priority placed on women’s right, health care and children and families, according to research, again, by the Center for American Women and Politics .

Thinking about this also reminded me of a profile I am reading of Esther Duflo in the May 17th issue of The New Yorker. Duflo, a rising star professor of development economics at MIT, created an innovative approach to randomized studies of social and public health policy strategies. After studying quotas for women village leaders in India, she concluded: Any community that starts considering women candidates for the first time doubles the size of its leadership pool and should expect policy benefits and economic gains.

Here’s wishing it happens here!

National Women & Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day — Your Awareness Can Have an Impact

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HIV Awareness Day

Are you aware that a woman tests positive for HIV every 35 minutes in the United States?

Are you aware that one in four Americans living with HIV is a woman?

Are you aware that HIV/AIDS is a growing problem for women and girls in our region, particularly African-American women and girls?  The District of Columbia and Maryland had the highest and second-highest women’s AIDS case rates in the country in 2007 (90.2 cases per 100,000 population for DC and 22.2 cases per 100,000 population for Maryland) (http://www.statehealthfacts.org/)?  For more on the specifics in D.C., you can read a previous blog of mine by clicking here.

Maybe you can you guess from my questions that today is National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

I hope that increased awareness leads us to recognize that we must act – for ourselves and for others – because lives are literally on the line.  I hope we can act together to improve:

  • Prevention strategies that address the dominant ways women acquire HIV: sex with men who are infected and injection drug use (much more of an issue for women than for men).
  • The availability of routine HIV testing in places women already go for health and other services for themselves and their children. (By the way: Do you know your HIV status?)
  • Attention to treatment, including to AIDS drugs but also for the many health conditions that occur with HIV, such as alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness.
  • Women’s empowerment.  In D.C. this has started with a new effort — the first in the nation — to make the newly re-designed female condom widely available for free (thanks to the hard work of the Washington AIDS Partnership and support from the MAC AIDS Fund — and The Women’s Foundation’s own Julie Leibee).
  • Support for organizations that help individual women with HIV in our community, including The Women’s Collective and Our Place, DC (both Grantee Partners of The Women’s Foundation), as well as organizations that bring this issue and solutions to it to the attention of policy makers and the public, such as DC Appleseed (another Grantee Partner).

Wishing you act-ful awareness on March 10th – and every other day.

Gwen is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.

How Women Can Achieve Economic Security — Call for Submissions

Posted on by Gwen Rubinstein
Do you have compelling new research findings about what helps low-income women with children achieve economic security and financial independence – even in these difficult economic times? Would you like to share them with the community of Washington Area Women’s Foundation?

If you answered yes to these questions, please consider presenting your research at the annual Washington Area Women’s Foundation Stepping Stones Research Briefing, scheduled for the morning of Friday, May 7, 2010, at The Urban Institute in downtown Washington, D.C.

Stepping Stones is The Women’s Foundation’s multi-year initiative focused on increasing the economic security and financial independence of low-income, women-headed families in the Washington metropolitan area. The Stepping Stones Research Briefing provides an opportunity for The Women’s Foundation and its partners to learn about the latest research that can inform their work supporting this population.

This is the fifth year that The Women’s Foundation and The Urban Institute will co-sponsor the research briefing. The first four briefings each drew an audience of more than 100, including representatives from community-based organizations, funders, government agencies and research institutions.

If you are interested in presenting at this year’s briefing, please submit an abstract of your research and findings (no more than 1,000 words) to Peter Tatian at The Urban Institute by 5:00 pm on Friday, March 12, 2010.  Abstracts should make clear how the research is relevant to issues facing low-income, women-headed families and those who are working to assist them.

This year, we are particularly interested in abstracts related to how best to re-imagine/re-engineer this work in light of the new economic reality, including submissions on:

  • Demographic and economic conditions for women
  • Successful approaches to building income and assets in the current economy
  • The role of public benefits as income and work supports, including child care, transportation and worker training
  • Workforce development and emerging employment sectors
  • Early care and education
  • Health and safety, particularly as affected by social determinants (such as place, race, gender, age/aging)

Final selection of presenters will be made by March 31, 2010.

Copies of all presentations, as well as audio recordings of the entire event, will be posted on The Urban Institute’s web site after the event.  Presentations from last year’s research briefing can be found by clicking here.

Questions: Address them to Peter Tatian at The Urban Institute or Gwen Rubinstein at The Women’s Foundation.

Even if you don’t have research to present please do mark your calendar to save the date and plan to attend!

Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.