NBC Reporter and political celebrity Maria Shriver, in collaboration with the Center For American Progress (CAP) recently released a comprehensive report on women's economic issues in the US.
CAP conducted its usual execellent analysis of statistics and demographics showing problems today's working women face. Their analysis showed, among other things, that there are 42 million women, and 28 million dependent children, who face financial hardship, either living below the poverty line or very close to it. Forty percent of US households with children under the age of 18 are headed by single women, they say, and women still earn 77 percent of what men earn.
It's a grim picture of life for US women, but it doesn't tell the full story. Follow me below the jump to learn more.
The Shriver Report is currently available for free downloading at Amazon.com. If you have a Kindle, android device, or a computer and have an account at Amazon.com, you can download a copy at this link. It's free until midnight tomorrow, so hurry to download if you're interested. After that, it can be downloaded for under $10. Note: There aren't many excerpts or links for the Report in this diary because it's published as a book in Kindle format. If I find more text to copy and paste, I'll add it in updates.
The topics covered in the report mainly deal with issues in the workplace like paid sick leave and gender based wage disparity. It suggests employers show more sympathy to working women and their families by providing paid sick days and helping with day care costs and giving families time off to help elderly parents. It also encourages women to graduate from high school and pursue higher education.
While these new statistics revealing the vast numbers of women living in or on the border of poverty, the remedies it offers are small, dated, narrow in focus and limited in overall impact on women's economic problems in the US. On Andrea Mitchell's show today,Shriver admitted that the solutions she proposed in the report are based on her belief that goals need to be "bipartisan" and easy to achieve. Okay.
Update: Below is a list of the Report's policy agenda w/ polling results. Note it applies mostly to working women with children, not addressing needs of those unemployed or without minor children living at home.
Link
So what's missing from Shriver's report?
Unemployed Women
Currently, of 10.3 million Americans currently unemployed, over 4.7 million of them are women. While the report highlights important areas about women's wages and poverty, it offers little in the way discussion or remedy for reducing unemployment. The solutions it offers - fair wages, paid sick leave, affordable child care, etc. - ignore the fact that a growing number of US workers are employed as temps or contract workers - areas where its difficult legislate improvements in working conditions.
Shriver's remedy for some of these problems is Shriver Corps, a program that helps link women with resources currently available in their communities like food stamps, job training, etc. The report overlooks the reality that many of these social safety net programs have been shredded and reduced in recent years, thanks to budget austerity. Unless they can provide some data showing significant numbers of women are unaware of how to apply for food stamps or jobs training programs, Shriver Corps mission seems too limited to make a significant impact, to say nothing of what it implies about the ability of low income women to understand how to seek government assistance.
The report doesn't offer an action plan for reducing unemployment or stimulating the economy to create more jobs. It also discusses increasing the minimum wage in the US, but again, while it may help reduce unemployment by stimulating consumer spending, its benefits are limited.
Older Women
There's no mention made, nor statistics provided that address the problem of growing poverty among elderly women. The National Women's Law Center has done excellent work on this issue, showing that
The average Social Security benefit for women 65 and older is about $12,700 per year.
Social Security is virtually the only source of income for nearly three in ten female beneficiaries 65 and older.
Without Social Security, nearly half of women 65 and older would be poor.
Social Security provides benefits to over 3.2 million children and lifted over 1.1 million children out of poverty in 2011.
Women rely more on Social Security than men
Unmarried women rely on Social Security more than married women
Among people 65 and older, more than twice as many women (2.6 million) as men (1.3 million) lived in poverty in 2012.
The poverty rate for women 65 and older is 11% and for elderly women living alone, the poverty rate is 19%
There's little mention of elderly poor women in the Shriver report.
The only recommendation the Report mentions for reducing poverty in elderly women is one suggesting the creation of a "universal 401K program" that all workers can contribute to. Yeah, the alarm bells went off when I read that. It sounds suspiciously close to privatizing Social Security since, with shrinking wages and low incomes, women can't always afford to contribute to both Social Security and a 401K. Look for it in a section of the report written by Hillary Clinton. Sad.
A Real Action Agenda
While making vague suggestions about raising the minimum wage and legislating more sick & maternity leave, it recommends women focus on electing more women to public office
It doesn't really have one, outside of recommendations on how women can change their own lives. Here's a sample of some compelling survey questions the Shriver Report posed to low income women that gives an idea of the recommendations the report offers for personal action.
75 percent of them wish they had put a higher priority on their education and career, compared to 58 percent of the general population.
73 percent wish they had made better financial choices (as did 65 percent of all those we polled).
They were less likely to be married (37 percent, compared to 49 percent of all the men and women we polled).
Only 30 percent of those with children wished they had delayed having kids or had fewer of them.
So, make better financial choices, take out a loan and go to college, get married and keep having kids. Oh, and elect more women to public office.
I sincerely hope this report isn't what it appears to be - a misguided attempt by conservative politicians to define what the modern Women's Agenda should be in advance of the 2016 elections. I sincerely hope the women who participated in the development of this report are willing to accept that women leaders will develop a more evidence-based approach to defining a modern Women's Agenda and that the priorities and remedies will come from the bottom up, not from the top down.
The report is new, just released and I encourage everyone to read it and provide some input. But women, don't you ever accept that some celebrities and leaders in DC are going to tell you what public policy you need to improve your future and that of other women in this country. Don't let them tell you what's important or what's possible. Those decisions belong to you and you alone.
So, if you've read the report, what do you think?
Update: Thanks for the diary rescue. The following links show both the experts who have developed this report and recommendations and the corporations who have sponsored it.
National Advisory Committee
Funding Partners