Lady Business: “You cannot have a strong workforce, a strong economy, and a strong democracy if women aren't included.”
Hello, and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 131st issue, published July 11, 2021.
1989 Feels
I started my post-July 4 work week by interviewing a U.S. Cabinet Secretary. The Biden administration clearly returned from the holiday ready to push its American Families Plan, the ambitious and expensive caregiving infrastructure proposals that might actually reverse some of the pandemic’s economic damage to working women. And so U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo wanted to tell me, and Fortune’s readers, why businesses—and bipartisan members of Congress—should be willing to embrace the higher taxes needed to fund these policies.
“You cannot have a strong workforce, a strong economy, and a strong democracy if women aren't included,” Raimondo, a moderate Democrat and the former first female governor of Rhode Island, told me. “If you want a truly strong economy, which includes everybody, then you need more investments in job training for women; more tech and digital education available for women; and more childcare, homecare and elder care. Until we do, we will not have an equal economic comeback.”
Yes, it’s a targeted, carefully-honed message aimed at drumming up political support from constituents that almost always oppose higher taxes. But the baseline facts are indisputable. The economic data remains bleak, as any regular reader of this newsletter knows. More than 18 months after the pandemic’s U.S. onset, women are still stuck at 1989 levels of labor force participation.
1989. Thirty-two years ago. The first year of the first George Bush’s presidency. Before any official U.S. wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. An entire Taylor Swift’s lifetime.
The economic data is also—say it with me now—so much worse for women of color. Despite the most recent jobs report’s seeming rosiness, 8.5% of Black women and 7.9% of Latina women remained unemployed last month—about 1.5 times the unemployment rate of white women. And among all the other things that are depressing and infuriating about these statistics, they come after a year of high-profile corporate pledges to address racial injustice and systemic inequities.
“It's deeply unfair that so many women of color work full time, in poverty, by doing some of the most important jobs in America,” Raimondo told me. “You cannot say you believe in equity, and then not support investments in childcare, home care, or paid medical leave. Because the lack of that care and educational infrastructure hurts women, and hurts women of color, much more so than men.”
One recurring obstacle to this discussion—and to the Biden caregiving infrastructure proposals in general—is that affordable childcare, paid leave, and other systemic support for working women so often gets dismissed as not really infrastructure, and only of concern to us ladies. The frivolous, girly stuff.
Which I asked Raimondo about at one point in our conversation: Along with everything else in her portfolio as U.S. Commerce Secretary—the rest of the economy, and the trade situation with China, and cybersecurity, and semiconductor manufacturing, and all the other things that don’t get dismissed as gendered—how does she prioritize policies that will “only” help women?
I included a condensed version of her answer in my Fortune article, but it’s also worth reading her full response:
“I think it is just as important as anything else we're working on. Now, as Commerce Secretary, my primary job is to focus on U.S. competitiveness, to make sure that businesses can compete globally, and continue to grow. And then among the most important things that businesses need to grow are talent. So, if you want to have top talent, you cannot exclude 50% of the workforce. Which is to say, women.”
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