New Research Reports
The Student Parent Equity Imperative: Guidance for the Biden-Harris Administration
Institute for Women’s Policy Research | Chaunté White and Lindsey Reichlin Cruse | April 13, 2021
The memorandum serves as a call to the Biden-Harris administration to include parenting students and their families in its policymaking efforts tied to postsecondary education, early care and education access, and social welfare. It provides policy recommendations to prioritize student parents and their families’ wellbeing and contribute to the development of sustainable and equitable pathways to educational attainment. The recommendations span four areas: supporting student parents’ college access and success, building affordable pathways to college for student parents, expanding caregiving support and child care access for student parents, and increasing basic needs security for student parent families.
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A Lifetime’s Worth of Benefits: The Effects of Affordable, High Quality Child Care on Family Income, the Gender Earnings Gap, and Women’s Retirement Security
National Women’s Law Center | Robert Paul Hartley, Ajay Chaudry, Melissa Boteach, Estelle Mitchell, and Kathryn Menefee | April 12, 2021
Parents are paying more than they can afford. Providers are not being paid enough. In short, the lack of public investment in care infrastructure is one important reason that women—as both paid child care providers and mothers—bring home less pay, experience higher poverty rates than men at every stage of life, and are less secure in retirement. Parents are paying more than they can afford. Providers are not being paid enough. In short, the lack of public investment in care infrastructure is one important reason that women—as both paid child care providers and mothers—bring home less pay, experience higher poverty rates than men at every stage of life, and are less secure in retirement. In short, investing in high-quality, affordable child care not only supports families, the development of children, and the communities of families and providers in real-time, but has additional effects that increase economic security for women and families throughout their lives.
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The Enormous Impact of Eroded Collective Bargaining on Wages
Economic Policy Institute | Lawrence Mishel | April 8, 2021
A major factor depressing wage growth for middle earners and driving the growth of wage inequality over the last four decades has been the erosion of collective bargaining. Indeed, the only factor more responsible for weak wage growth for the typical worker is the excessive unemployment perpetrated by central bank policymakers’ high interest rate policies and fiscal austerity. The share of workers covered by a collective bargaining agreement fell from 27.0% in 1979 to just 11.6% in 2019. The erosion of collective bargaining has been especially harmful to men’s wages because men were far more likely than women to be unionized in 1979 (when 31.5% of men were covered by collective bargaining versus 18.8% of women). Thus men had more to lose from the subsequent attack on unions and collective bargaining.
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Perceptions of Discrimination and Unfair Judgment While Seeking Health Care
Urban Institute | Dulce Gonzalez, Laura Skopec, Marla McDaniel, and Genevieve M. Kenney | April 5, 2021
In this brief, we draw from the most recent wave of the Urban Institute’s Coronavirus Tracking Survey, a nationally representative survey of nonelderly adults conducted between September 11 and September 28, 2020. That survey wave asked respondents whether in the last 12 months they had ever felt a doctor, other health care provider, or their staff judged them unfairly or discriminated against them based on their race/ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, a disability, or a health condition and about the consequences of these experiences. Our questions were broad, allowing respondents to select multiple reasons for these perceptions of discrimination or unfair judgment. We focused on perceptions of discrimination by health care providers and their staff, so we do not capture interactions with other actors in the health care system, such as pharmacists or health insurance companies.
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The Economic Impact of Supporting Working Family Caregivers
AARP | April 2021
People age 50-plus in the U.S. spent an average of 164 hours per year caring for adults, equivalent to over $260 billion in the total value of caregiving. By better engaging and supporting these caregiving efforts, the U.S. could both maintain and support this invaluable contribution and enable greater workforce participation among family caregivers of all ages, especially those age 50-plus. While caregiving cuts across all generations, this AARP study explores the potential economic benefits that can be captured if employers and governments provide better support for working family caregivers age 50-plus, enabling them to remain more active participants in the labor force. The prolonged economic downturn makes it especially important for working family caregivers—particularly workers age 50-plus who are in their peak earning years—to stay in the workforce.
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The Impact of Paid Family Leave on Employers: Evidence from New York
National Bureau of Economic Research | Ann P. Bartel, Maya Rossin-Slater, Christopher J. Ruhm, Meredith Slopen, and Jane Waldfogel | April 2021
We study the introduction of New York’s PFL policy, which was the fourth state-level PFL policy implemented in the U.S. (following California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island), taking effect in January 2018. We designed and fielded a survey over the years 2016 to 2019, using a representative sample of firms with 10 to 99 employees in New York and Pennsylvania, a neighboring state without a PFL policy. Our survey asked employers to rate their employees’ performance, as well as the ease of coordinating work schedules and handling employee absences of various durations. We find that PFL leads to an improvement in employers' rating of their ease of handling long employee absences, concentrated in the first policy year and among firms with 50-99 employees. We also find an increase in employee leave-taking in the second policy year, driven by smaller firms.
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