The latest news, analysis and opinion on the state of low-income women and their families from Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. For the week ending 4/8/2011: The demand for Planned Parenthood may be on the rise.  Virginia becomes the latest state to ban abortion coverage for private plans that will take part in health insurance exchanges.

Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a national foundation-led initiative, is excited to collaborate with The Women’s Foundation to bring you the latest news and analysis on women and poverty. Spotlight is the go-to site for news and ideas about fighting poverty.

Here’s this week’s news:

•    The Los Angeles Times reports that demand for Planned Parenthood services in Los Angeles is up 10% to 15% despite the proposal to cut the agency’s federal funding.

•    Last week, Virginia became the eighth state to pass a ban on abortion coverage for any private plan that would take part in the health insurance exchanges that will be created under recently passed health care reform legislation; low-income earners, who are usually not covered by an employer’s plan, will be among the first groups offered access to these new exchanges, according to the New York Times.

•    Two Texas state senators are concerned that a decrease in family planning funding for the poor may have the unintended consequence of a rise in unwanted pregnancies, which the CEO of Health and Family Planning Association of Texas tells the Houston Chronicle is the number one factor for low-income women becoming welfare dependent.

•    The Associated Press gives an overview of the ongoing debate in New York City over recently enacted legislation that requires abortion alternatives centers — which usually operate in low-income areas — to disclose the services they offer.

To learn more about Spotlight visit www.spotlightonpoverty.org

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The Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity team

In today’s rundown: Homelessness on the rise in the DC metro region. | Shrinking budgets at some DC public schools. | Going behind the niqab with Muslim women.

— Homelessness in the Washington area has increased two percent since 2007, reports the Washington Examiner. The number of homeless families in the region went up nearly 10 percent during the economic downturn, according to The Washington Post. Surveyors counted 11,988 homeless people in the region.  Nearly one-third were children and 5,315 were in families.

— Even though Mayor Vincent Gray’s proposed 2012 budget for the city would increase school spending by $67 million, many District schools will see their budgets shrink when the next fiscal year begins, reports The Washington Post. “… 49 of 123 public schools would lose at least $500 in per pupil funding under Gray’s plan….”

— Also in the Post: a reporter explores why some Muslim women wear a niqab, a head-to-toe veil, and the reactions they get in their communities.

Photo credit: Ed Yourdon via Creative Commons

April 12th represents a frustrating milestone in America: it marks how long into the current year women must work, on average, to make the same amount of money their male counterparts made the previous year.  Nationwide, women are paid just 77 cents for every dollar that men earn, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

A gender wage gap persists in our area despite the fact that women in the D.C. region have higher levels of education and higher earnings than women nationwide, according to 2010 Portrait of Women & Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area (Portrait Project 2010), a recent report from Washington Area Women’s Foundation on the status of local women and girls. The report shows that the wage gap is particularly wide when race and gender are taken into account.

Portrait Project 2010 found that:

–          Men’s annual median earnings in our region ($63,738) are 20 percent higher than women’s annual median earnings ($51,338). While this is lower than the national gap of 22 percent, the local gap is closing at a slower rate than the national gap.

–          African American women working full-time make 45 percent less than white men in our region – a wage gap that is much larger than the national wage gap of 38 percent between Black women and white men.

–          The earnings of Asian women and Latinas also lag significantly behind those of white men, with earning gaps of 41 percent and 63 percent respectively.

Portrait Project 2010 shows that pay inequities persist across all types of occupations, even in those in which women represent the majority of workers.  Women predominate in office and administrative support occupations, but their median earnings ($41,690) are still 8.9 percent lower than men in similar positions. And the largest gender earnings gap is found in healthcare practitioner and technical occupations where women’s median earnings ($60,972) are 38 percent lower than men’s.

“Closing the wage gap is not a women’s issue,” said Nicky Goren, president of Washington Area Women’s Foundation. “A gender wage gap has major repercussions on our entire community.  Paying women what they deserve will mean more economically secure families and a more prosperous region. And to quote the National Women’s Law Center’s recent campaign: ‘women are not worth less.’”

Portrait Project 2010 also notes that, because Social Security benefits are tied to earnings, the impact of lower wages for working women is cumulative.

Portrait Project 2010 is available online. See pages 31- 34 for more information on wage inequities.

The latest news, analysis and opinion on the state of low-income women and their families from Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. For the week ending 4/1/2011: Women, unions and “the husband issue.”

Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a national foundation-led initiative, is excited to collaborate with The Women’s Foundation to bring you the latest news and analysis on women and poverty. Spotlight is the go-to site for news and ideas about fighting poverty.

Here’s this week’s news:

•    A New York Times op-ed entitled “An Extraordinary Intrusion on Women’s Rights” says that several new state laws limiting women’s access to providers of abortions will especially limit access for low-income women.

•    Despite massive state-wide cuts to programs that help illegal immigrants, Washington state is federally mandated to allocate $300 million in funds to services for illegal immigrants, primarily child welfare and health services for seriously ill and pregnant women, according to the Seattle Times.

•    In an editorial piece for the New York Times, Natasha Vargas-Cooper discusses how she worked as a union organizer and had to overcome “the husband issue” when convincing low-wage female workers to join the unions; the women always sought approval from their husbands before joining the union, an act that Vargas-Cooper argues would not occur if the same question was posed to men.

To learn more about Spotlight visit www.spotlightonpoverty.org

To sign up for our weekly updates with the latest news, opinion and research from around the country, click here.

The Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity team

I 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.