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Tag: equal pay
Don’t Believe Ivanka: Trump Doesn’t Fight For Gender Equality

Don’t Believe Ivanka: Trump Doesn’t Fight For Gender Equality

While Ivanka Trump introduced her father on Thursday as a “gender-neutral” candidate who champions women’s equality in the workplace, the Republican nominee’s campaign operations, platform, and stated political beliefs tell a different story.

“As president, my father will change the labor laws that were put in place at a time when women were not a significant portion of the workforce,” Ivanka said during her speech at the final night of the Republican National Convention. “He will fight for equal pay for equal work.”

Contrary to her comments, though, the party platform passed earlier this week with Trump’s approval — and under the observation of his advisors — does little to combat issues like wage inequality or family leave. In fact, it doesn’t mention either one of those topics at all.

Instead, much of the language on gender issues in the Republican platform looks to “affirm the dignity of women” by opposing abortion, a practice that it rejects as a health care measure.

More specifically, the GOP opposes using government funds to perform or promote abortion, including funding Planned Parenthood and similar organizations — who, according to the RNC, “sell fetal body parts rather than [providing] health care.” That comment is a sly reference to a video hoax which purported to show Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue prices.

It’s not just abortion that Republicans find dangerous, though: According to the document, certain over-the-counter contraceptives (not named by the platform) are also a threat to women’s health.

And the only workplace the platform mentions with regard to gender equality is the military, though Republicans in fact want to keep enlisted women from performing the same work as men; they oppose “unnecessary policy changes” that would make women eligible for the draft and keep them away from the front lines of combat — a shift that was approved by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in March.

While the platform is officially the expression of the Republican Party and not its presidential nominee, it still reflects on Trump and his priorities. His campaign added aggressively protectionist trade policies (to the point that many in the GOP aren’t on board) — it also took a decidedly hands-off approach on social issues.

Besides calling for the appointment of judges who oppose abortion, the Republican platform stands against the U.N. Convention on Women’s Rights, a historic document ratified by 189 countries (but not yet the U.S.) that looks to secure political, economic, social and marriage rights for women.

During Ivanka’s Thursday RNC speech, she also hailed her father for promoting gender equality in his own business, declaring that wage equality has been “a practice at his company throughout his entire career.”

Though statistics aren’t public about the Trump empire itself, his campaign operations don’t match up with Ivanka’s claim.

A Boston Globe investigation in April found that men in Trump’s campaign made on average $1600 more than women per month, or 35 percent more — that’s larger than the national gender pay gap. (For comparison, the gender pay gap between men and women in Hillary Clinton’s campaign is an average of $70.)

Ivanka claimed that more women than men are executives in Trump’s businesses, but, again, that doesn’t apply when it comes to his campaign: Just two of the highest-paid officials in his campaign for the month of April were women.

The Globe’s numbers are consistent, however, with Trump’s rare public comments on the issue.

Last July, he hinted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” that he opposes adjusting women’s pay in order to achieve equal pay.

“When you have to categorize men and women into a particular group and a particular pay scale, it gets very — because people do different jobs,” he said. “It’s very hard to say what is the same job. It’s a very, very tricky question.”  By fighting to remove gender from the picture, rather than fighting for women’s rights, his views only seem to perpetuate gender inequality.

On paid family leave, he’s expressed a similar hesitation towards actually pushing for a change to the established, but unfair, system. “I think we have to keep our country very competitive, so you have to be careful of it,” he said on Fox News in October.

But both the platform and his own campaign lack any specific policies on these issues. It’s difficult to see a President Trump achieving anything approaching an equal workplace for women.

 

Photo: Republican U.S. presidential nominee Donald Trump greets his daughter Ivanka as he arrives to speak during the final session  at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S. July 21, 2016. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Obama Administration Seeks To Bolster Gender Wage Gap Fight

Obama Administration Seeks To Bolster Gender Wage Gap Fight

By Ayesha Rascoe

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Obama administration announced plans to expand wage reporting requirements for private businesses on Friday, bolstering its efforts to narrow the longstanding U.S. gender wage gap.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s plan would require employers with 100 or more employees to provide the agency with detailed wage information, broken down by gender, race and ethnicity.

Unlike a similar Labor Department rule proposed earlier, it would apply to all large businesses and not just federal contractors.

The plan, which is expected to take effect in September 2017, will be open to public comment but does not require congressional approval. It is part of a long-running effort by Obama and federal agencies to close the yawning gap between pay for men and women.

The commission’s proposal would not require the disclosure of specific salaries of individual employees, but it would seek aggregate data on pay ranges and hours worked.

“The goal is to help businesses that are trying to do the right thing… to get a clearer picture of how they can make sure their employees are being treated equally,” Obama said at a White House event.

He spoke on the seventh anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The measure, the first bill Obama signed into law, overturned a Supreme Court decision that severely restricted the time period for filing complaints of employment discrimination concerning compensation.

Although fighting gender pay imbalances has been a focus for Obama, the pay gap has narrowed only slightly over the past two years.

“We can’t deliver on the promise of equal pay unless we have the best, most comprehensive information about what people earn,” Labor Secretary Thomas Perez said in a statement on Friday.

The median wage of a woman working full-time year-round in the United States is currently about $39,600, only 79 percent of a man’s median earnings of $50,400.

Gender equality in the U.S. work force, and globally, is still decades away, according to an independent report released on Wednesday.

 

 

(Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; Editing by Andrew Hay and Tom Brown)

Photo: Job seekers listen to a presentation at the Colorado Hospital Association health care career fair in Denver April 9, 2013. REUTERS/Rick Wilking

Republicans Aim For Their Own Feet

Republicans Aim For Their Own Feet

What do women want? Republicans are trying to answer that question and, as usual, they are getting it wrong.

The party has an unerring genius for alienating exactly the demographics it needs to win the White House. Republicans have made it harder for students, urbanites, and minorities to vote. Many of their presidential candidates are competing over who can deport the most immigrants and build the best border wall. Why should the GOP approach to women be any different?

Donald Trump, who has been flamboyantly insulting to immigrants, isn’t helping Republicans with women, either. His history of crude insults about female appearances led NBC’s Chuck Todd to ask him, “Why do looks matter to you so much?” He still talks in weird generalizations and 1950s stereotypes about women (see: “I cherish women” or “women love me” or “I understand the importance of women”).

You’d think Carly Fiorina, another presidential contender from the business world, and the only woman in the GOP field, would have a better handle on this. But she has become a lightning rod because she opposes a requirement that businesses offer paid leave to new parents. She wants it to be a perk companies offer to attract workers.

The United States is the only advanced country that doesn’t give employees paid parental leave, as President Obama has noted repeatedly. But Fiorina says requiring paid parental leave discourages the hiring and promotion of women. Besides, she asks, who would pay for it?

Fiorina’s position, however, carries its own health and monetary costs. Mothers who don’t take leave are less likely to breastfeed or bring a baby to doctor appointments. And low-income workers who take unpaid leave to care for an infant often rely on government help. “When a low-wage worker cannot even have a sick day or a paid leave day after the birth of an infant, she is far more likely to go on assistance, public assistance,” Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) sponsor of a bill requiring paid leave, told Fortune magazine. The upshot is that taxpayers foot the bill, she added.

As for the politics of paid leave, Fiorina’s stand is a loser. Polls show 60 to 80 percent of Americans support requiring paid leave for new parents. That 80 percent figure, from a CBS/New York Times poll in May, includes 71 percent of Republicans and 85 percent of women.

Now abortion is preoccupying the GOP, thrust there by conservatives who secretly filmed Planned Parenthood executives talking casually and graphically about the mechanics and costs of donating tissue from aborted fetuses for research. Republican candidates have grabbed at the chance to demonstrate their credentials as cultural conservatives — emphasizing their opposition to abortion and demanding an end to federal funding of Planned Parenthood, even if that leads to a government shutdown. Some 50 advocacy groups are co-sponsoring protests in nearly 300 cities this weekend to highlight what the Family Research Council calls “Planned Parenthood’s harvesting and selling of aborted baby parts.”

Ohio governor John Kasich explained the rising prominence of the abortion issue this way recently on CNN: “Now that the issue of gay marriage is kind of off the table, we’re kind of down to one social issue.”

The nature of the GOP primary electorate requires that Republican candidates take as hard a line as they can against abortion and explain in great detail their positions on exceptions, restrictions, and any shifts in thinking they may have undergone. They may be convinced that this won’t hurt them with women or moderates in a general election. Gallup found in May that 21 percent of Americans would only vote for a candidate who shared their view on abortion. That’s an all-time high in the 19 years the question has been asked, but they were about equally divided on both sides of the issue.

So does that make it a wash? Probably not. For one thing, the tide seems to be turning in the other direction. Half of Americans told Gallup in May that they were “pro-choice” on abortion compared with 44 percent who said they were “pro-life.” Analyst Lydia Saad wrote that was the first statistically significant lead for the “pro-choice” position in seven years. In addition, polls show pluralities of Americans have positive views of Planned Parenthood and oppose cutting off its federal money.

That hasn’t stopped various Republican hopefuls from calling for a Justice Department investigation into Planned Parenthood. Bobby Jindal, the Louisiana governor, has even vowed to sic the IRS on the group. The crusade is a classic example of overreach that could backfire in a general election. Republicans are their own worst enemy on this, but here’s the real problem: They are jeopardizing health care for low-income women who need birth control, cancer screening, or — yes — an abortion. The potential political bonanza for the Democratic nominee is not worth that price.

Follow Jill Lawrence on Twitter @JillDLawrence. To find out more about Jill Lawrence and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

File photo: Protesters stand on a sidewalk outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Vista, California, August 3, 2015. REUTERS/Mike Blake

Remembering Yvonne Craig, A Superhero For Equal Pay

Remembering Yvonne Craig, A Superhero For Equal Pay

Yvonne Craig, the actress most famous for playing Batgirl in the 1960s Batman TV show, has passed away at the age of 78, her family announced on Wednesday.

As a trained ballet dancer, Craig brought her own acrobatic skills to the role, and she is celebrated among many comic book fans for her insistence to the show’s producers that she perform her own stunts and personally ride Batgirl’s motorcycle instead of handing the task over to a double.

And in the early 1970s, she returned to play Batgirl in a public service announcement for an important cause: Equal pay for female superheroes.

“Quick, Batgirl, untie us before it’s too late,” said Batman, portrayed by an unknown actor standing in for Adam West, over the sounds of a ticking bomb.

“It’s already too late!” Batgirl responded. “I’ve worked for you a long time — and I’m paid less than Robin.”

“Holy discontent!” said Robin, reprised by the original actor, Burt Ward.

“Same job, same employer, means equal pay for men and women.”

“No time for jokes, Batgirl,” Batman responded.

“It’s no joke — it’s the federal equal pay law.”

“Holy act of Congress!”

“Will Batgirl save the dynamic duo? Will she get equal pay?” asked the announcer (the returning voice of Batman series creator William Dozier!) before advising viewers to contact the Wage and Hour Division of the U.S. Department of Labor.

Craig also appeared in the original Star Trek series, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and many other classic TV shows, and co-starred in two movies alongside Elvis Presley, It Happened at the World’s Fair and Kissin’ Cousins.