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RESEARCH MAKING THE NEWS


Colleges Could Do More To Help Student Parents Pay For Child Care, Watchdog Says

Elissa Nadworny │ │September 12, 2019


And Del Rio is not alone: More than 1 in 5 college students in the U.S. are raising kids. That's more than 4 million undergraduates, and they are disproportionately women and people of color. Of those students, more than half will leave school without getting a degree. That's all, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog. The report, first obtained by NPR, found that schools often aren't giving student parents information that could help them access untapped federal money to pay for child care.


Citing: More Information Could Help Student Parents Access Additional Federal Student Aid by the Government Accountability Office.


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'Going to Bed Hungry': the Harrowing Reality of Poor Children Living in DC

Joan E. Greve │ │August 29, 2019


According to a new WalletHub study, children in the district are the most underprivileged in the country. The study – which looked at a number of factors, ranging from the share of children in foster care to high school graduation rates – found that DC children face worse conditions than children in states like West Virginia (third worst), Louisiana (fifth worst) and Oklahoma (seventh worst).


Citing: States with the Most Underprivileged Children by Adam McCann at WalletHub.


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Trump’s Title X Rule Defunding Planned Parenthood yet Another Blow to Low- Income Women

Michelle Chen│ │August 23, 2019


A new study on abortion in a “Post-Roe world” projects that, were the decision to be repealed, women would immediately face outright abortion bans in eight states — Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Tennessee — and extreme restrictions in many others, which would dramatically lengthen the distance women would need to travel to an abortion clinic. About 4 in 10 women ages 15 to 44 would have to travel farther, some up to nearly 800 miles from home. The average additional distance traveled would be nearly 250 miles, which would compound the existing “abortion deserts” that already sprawl across many cities and rural regions.


Citing: Predicted Changes in Abortion Access and Incidence in a Post-Roe World by Caitlin Myers, Rachel Jones, and Ushma Updhyay at American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology


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Gender Pay Gap: Discrimination Found to be Most Significant Contributor to Inequality

Lisa Martinj ││ August 21, 2019


Discrimination is the most significant factor driving the gender pay gap in Australia, according to a new report by KPMG. […] Researchers attributed gender discrimination to almost two-fifths (39%) of the gender pay gap and noted its influence on the gap has increased since 2014. Gender discrimination refers to direct discrimination as well as unconscious bias. The report notes that this is the element of the pay gap if all other factors were equal between men and women.


Citing: Increasing gender discrimination a barrier to equal pay by KPMG


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Why the U.S. Has Long Resisted Universal Child Care by

Claire Cain Miller │ │August 15, 2019


This disconnect between ideals and reality helps explain why the United States has been so resistant to universal public child care. Even as child care is setting up to be an issue in the presidential campaign, a more basic question has recently resurfaced: whether mothers should work in the first place […….] In many ways, it has already been settled: 93 percent of fathers and 72 percent of mothers with children at home are in the labor force. It helps the economy when women work, research shows, and it’s often economically beneficial for their families, too — 40 percent of women are their families’ breadwinners. Significant evidence demonstrates that when there’s high-quality, affordable, easy-to-find child care, more women work.


Citing: Expensive Childcare and Short School Days = Lower Maternal Employment and More Time in Childcare? Evidence from the American Time Use Survey by Leah Ruppanner, Stephanie Moller, and Liana Sayer at Sociological Research for a Dynamic World


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NEW RESEARCH REPORTS


The Gender Wage Gap: 2018; Earnings Differences by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity

Ariane Hegewisch and Adiam Tesfaselassie | Institute for Women's Policy Research | September 11, 2019


The ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings was 81.6 percent for full-time, year-round workers in 2018, a statistically insignificant change from 2017 when it was 81.7 percent. This ratio means that the gender wage gap for full-time, year-round workers is 18.4 percent. Women’s median full-time, year-round earnings in 2018 were $45,097, compared with $55,291 for men. Both women’s and men’s earnings increased in 2018, compared with the previous year, by 3.3 and 3.4 percent, respectively.


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From Decent to Lousy Jobs: New Evidence on the Decline in American Job Quality, 1979-2017

David R. Howell | Washington Center for Equitable Growth │ August 30, 2019


A defining feature of the post-1970s American economy has been unshared growth, strikingly illustrated by the absolute decline in average incomes for the bottom 50 percent of working-age adults. This regressive growth path should have important implications for the share and distribution of decent jobs. This paper uses Current Population Survey data to document changes in job quality for 1979-2017 with measures of decent-, low- and lousy-wage jobs for groups defined by age, gender, education, race and nativity. These indicators are defined by two wage threshold formulas chosen to reflect the wage a full-time worker requires for a basic-needs budget: 2/3 of the mean wage for full-time prime-age workers ($17.50 in 2017), which marks the cutoff between decent- and low-wage jobs; and 2/3 of the median full-time wage ($13.33), the boundary between lousy- and other low-wage jobs. These thresholds generate decent- and low-wage segments (55% and 45% of jobs in 2017), each with two wage contours. A wide variety of non-wage job quality indicators (e.g., benefits, time-off, work scheduling and physical conditions) are found to vary systematically across these four wage contours, from worst in the lousy-wage contour (29% of jobs) to best in the good-wage contour (33% of jobs).


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The Well-Being of Women in Utah in 2019

Valerie Lacarte │Institute for Women’s Policy Research│August 12, 2019


The percentage of women in Utah who work outside the home continues to increase, now slightly surpassing the rate of women’s labor market participation in the country as a whole. The percentage of women working part-time in Utah is still the highest in the nation. Business ownership and representation in professional and managerial positions among Utah women are also increasing, more Utah women now live above the poverty line, and women in Utah have made great strides in education attainment; however, the progress in these areas is markedly different when race and ethnicity are taken into account


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Best and Worst States to Work in America

OXFAM America│August 2019


While the BSWI is a complex database with hundreds of data points and weighting formulas, in the end it comes down to a simple question: Do workers encounter positive or negative workplace conditions? Oxfam believes that the state scores reflect daily reality for millions of workers; seemingly abstract ratings translate into take-home wages and rights. For example, the minimum wage in DC is $14 an hour, which means a full-time worker earns more than $29,000 annually. In neighboring Virginia, the minimum is $7.25, which means that a worker earns just over $15,000 annually. As all costs of living have climbed steadily over the ten years since the federal wage was last raised, the worker earning $290 a week is struggling just to meet basic needs. In California, workers have protections regarding sexual harassment, accommodations for pregnancy, regulations on scheduling demands, and mandated paid sick and family leave. In Virginia, there is no guarantee around accommodations for pregnancy, no mandated paid sick leave, and no legislative support for best practices in work schedules.


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Gatekeepers to Opportunity: Gender Disparities in Congressional Nomination to the Military Service Academies

Connecticut Veterans Legal Center │July 23, 2019


This report illuminates an aspect of the service academy admissions process that has received comparatively little attention: congressional nominations. In order to be considered for admission to one of these academies, most applicants must first obtain a nomination from their U.S. Representative or U.S. Senator. While congressional committees and individual members have spoken about a concerning lack of gender diversity in the service academies, they have rarely acknowledged the disparate rates at which Members of Congress themselves nominate female candidates for admission.6 This analysis, the first of its kind, finds that Members of Congress have overwhelmingly nominated young men rather than young women, thus depriving the academies of a more balanced pool of candidates.


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The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that conducts and communicates research to inspire public dialogue, shape policy, and improve the lives and opportunities of women of diverse backgrounds, circumstances, and experiences. Find out more about IWPR at iwpr.org.
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