Priorities for the Future: Advancing Women's Economic Status

Advancing Women’s Economic Status

Education is a key factor in determining the economic status and empowerment of women. But education alone cannot resolve the growing economic insecurity faced by so many women and children.

• The gender wage gap remains an issue in the U.S., with female full-time workers earning an average of 78 cents to every dollar earned by male full-time workers¹.
• One-quarter of all African American, Latina, and Native American women live below the poverty line².
• Older women are twice as likely as older men to live in poverty³.
• Victims of domestic violence experience lower employment rates than women who are not abused⁴.

Rigorous research and evaluation of public policies and programs that promote women’s education, employment, health, and safety are essential in closing these gaps. WCW’s decades of work on the affordability and accessibility of quality child care, on the need to enhance the status of traditional “women’s work,” and on the influence of—and the critical difference made by—women’s leadership, provides the foundation for our newest in-depth work on economic justice.

What your support for the 35th Anniversary Fund will do:

The Wellesley Centers for Women will be able to respond more rapidly to economic disparities by…

… providing essential start-up funding for timely research on those barriers that prevent women from achieving full economic equality.

… examining the economic value of women’s contributions—as parents, as skilled workers, and as leaders.

… offering a range of solutions to the home–work balance dilemmas confronting families everywhere.

1 U.S. Census Bureau. “Woman’s Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s Earnings by Race and Hispanic Origin: 1960 to 2007.” Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/ histinc/p40.html.
2 U.S. Census Bureau, 2007 American Community Survey. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/ acs/www/Products/.
3 Ibid.
4 Audra J. Bowlus and Shannon Seitz, “Domestic Violence, Employment, and Divorce,” International Economic Review, Vol. 47, No. 4 (November 2006).