 Welcome to the Economic Policy Institute. I am delighted, I'm Liz Rose. I'm the Communications Director of EPI, and I'm honored to introduce this powerhouse panel of women to discuss women in the workplace. I've had a secret agenda that I'll announce to all of you now. This is our second all-female panel. It ends up Caroline Fredrickson was on both panels, and I think we're gonna try to keep this going at EPI. The last one was great, and I think this is gonna be great also. The name of this panel is, Are Working Women Being Run Over or Leaning In? I'm going to introduce Caroline Fredrickson first, and then after her remarks, I'll introduce our other panelists, Bridget Schulte of The Washington Post, Kristen Rowe Finkbeiner of Moms Rising, and Valerie Wilson, an economist from the Economic Policy Institute. Each of them will give a short presentation, and then you will get a chance to be in on the conversation. We are live streaming this event, and we are tweeting from at Economic Policy, and the audience members here will have a chance to ask questions. Caroline Fredrickson joined the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy in 2009, and she currently serves as its president. Like all women, she wears many hats. Today, she's here to present her new book, released just last week. Under the bus, How Working Women Are Being Run Over, which examines how and why America's labor laws and basic worker protections leave behind low wage and domestic workers, most of whom are women, and many of whom are women of color. The book is wonderful. In the book, Caroline masterfully connects the policy and hill battles to a compelling narrative of women's stories using specific examples, starting with her own immigrant grandmother who worked as a scullery maid. I recommend that you buy the book, which you can do here today, right outside, and I'm going to turn it over to Caroline. Caroline, are we under the bus? Well, thank you, Liz. Say the first thing I'd like to say is how incredibly lucky I am to have such wonderful friends, especially my women friends who have really been so supportive of my efforts on the book, and collectively the work that we all do. So, as Liz said, I've just come out with a book called Under the Bus, published by the New Press, and I've been working in public policy for a while, and one wonders why, all of a sudden, did you write a book? Well, so I'll start with that story about my great grandmother that Liz referenced. It's a story that when I was a kid, I always thought it was kind of a romantic story. Matilda Olofsson, she was a teen. She left Sweden by herself by boat in steerage. She came to Boston. She worked as a scullery maid. She worked backbreaking hours, was abused by her employers, but when I was growing up upstairs, downstairs was on television. It seems sort of like that. It, that dates me, but now we have Downton Abbey. So the story continues, and just as we had Matilda Olofsson, at the end of the 19th century in Boston, now we have Sonia Suarez. Sonia is a domestic worker, just like my great-grandmother. She works 14 hours or more a day. She's dealt with sexual harassment, physical abuse, wage theft. She's not allowed to see a doctor when she's sick. She does not get paid overtime. So as I started thinking about some of these issues and realized how shocking it is that today, in the 21st century, domestic workers like Sonia and workers in certain other professions, dominated by women, have little more legal protection than did Matilda, who did that same job over 100 years ago. Few people know that as we adopted progressive laws to improve the wages and working conditions of many, we left many behind. During the New Deal, President Roosevelt bargained with Dixie Crats and traded off the rights of certain African-American and women workers to get enough votes for bills, providing a minimum wage and overtime and the right to join a union. Later on, legislation barring discrimination and employment, requiring family leave, and providing health insurance also excluded many women. It's not just nannies and home health aides, but it's farm workers, small business employees, independent contractors, temps and others who have almost no protections under the law. That's a lot of people and particularly a lot of women. So this is what really propelled me to write the book. Lean In is an important discussion and I don't dispute that, but we need to think about the nannies and who takes care of their children when they have to work late, caring for someone else's children. So there's nothing wrong with Lean In, but it doesn't actually address the problems that many women face in America. So we're gonna get into some discussion as this panel is extraordinarily expert in the issues I wanna lay out, but a quick set of the overlapping issues that face women in America. Wages. The weakness and exclusions in the laws are behind the well-known fact that women earn only 77% of men's wages, with African-American women earning only 71% and Latinas only 62%. And as I mentioned just now, many women have no legal protection against discrimination. If they work for a small company, if they're a temp or a contractor. But even when women are covered, the law is so weak it's extremely difficult to win a case. And then of course there's the indirect discrimination that comes from our society undervaluing so-called women's work. Almost half of the wage gap is due to occupational segregation with traditional women's jobs paying less than men's jobs, even with comparable education and skills. And for this we have no legal tools at all. And women are the majority of minimum wage workers and the super majority of those who earn the sub-minimum wage paid to tipped employees, which has been stuck at an embarrassing, in fact, shameful level of $2.13 since the early 1990s. And I commend the Economic Policy Institute for having brought so much attention to the minimum wage and to the issue of tipped employees. And lastly, of course, the shrinking of the labor movement has hurt women more than anyone. With unions, well unions have fought to limit wage discrepancies between job categories. Organized labor has contracted sharply since its post-war strength. But we also have to look at the type of hours that women work and the way that our work schedules are structured. It's the same women who are not entitled to overtime pay can actually be worked until they drop without a dime extra. And domestic workers again provide one of the most poignant examples of how employers exploit the lack of overtime. One home health worker told of working in excess of 80 hours per week for $10 an hour. She doesn't get paid for travel time between her clients or for gas. And if she has to stay overnight caring for her often elderly or disabled patients, which is a frequent occurrence, she earns even less because that's categorized as companion care or otherwise babysitting. And the recent economic downturn has accelerated the trend of employers making more of their workforce part-time to save on benefits. There are now over 8 million involuntary part-time workers, people who would really like a full-time job but cannot find one. And again, this is a category of workers dominated by women. And we hear how Americans work so hard, we work more hours than almost any other people. It sounds kind of brave and tough, but we're talking about people, this isn't one job. People, the executive working a 90-hour work week and pulling down the $3 million salary. This is about low-wage workers working two or maybe even three jobs. And then they're trying to do that with children. And then there are other employers in the retail and restaurant business who in combination with pushing many of their workers into a part-time position have added insult to injury by abandoning regular schedules altogether. And they have what are called on-demand workers or just in time, just like they were an auto part in a Nissan factory. For these workers, they have to call in every day and either they work or they don't. If they do, sometimes it's surprise and they have to figure out how to deal with childcare. Sometimes they think they're going to work and they need the money and all of a sudden they're out of wages for that day. So those kinds of issues have made workers' lives incredibly unpredictable and less manageable. That's tough for anyone, but for a low-wage mother that can be devastating. And women are also the ones who bear the blunt of our flimsy family leave policies and our abysmal lack of childcare. So many of us know that in 1993, the United States finally adopted the Family and Medical Leave Act, providing some workers with the right to take 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the birth or adoption of a child or other family healthcare needs. But even more than other statutes, the Family and Medical Leave Act's benefits are limited to a very small number of employees. First, the employer has to provide leave only if it has at least 50 employees. So that's a pretty big employer. And second, the employee must have worked at least 1,250 hours in the previous year. Because of these two factors and how they work together, over 40% of private sector workers don't even qualify, and the workers with least access to FMLA leave are those most in need, younger, low-wage women of color. And since the FMLA, the Family and Medical Leave Act, provides for only unpaid leave, even those mothers who qualify often don't take the leave because they just can't afford it. There's a story of Samantha who went back to work shortly after giving birth, even though she had a very painful infection from a caesarean section. Other women have told about going back to work just days after harrowing pregnancies, including complications from hemorrhaging, postpartum depression, and other illness. But it's not just the mothers who need this time. When their mother has to return to work quickly after giving birth, babies are less likely to be vaccinated, to see a doctor, and mothers have a harder time with breastfeeding. You'd think we're smart people in this country, we would have paid family leave, seems obvious, but only 11% of the workforce in the United States has paid family leave. That means 89% are left to their own financial resources. Indeed, they may not have the right to take leave at all. And the irony is that men, because they occupy more of the higher paid jobs, are more likely to be eligible for both paid and unpaid leave, but because of the social stigma still attached to being a stay-at-home dad, few of these men take the leave. So I know this is a litany of terrible things, but it's true that for many women, all of these things are happening at once. These are simultaneous problems, and that includes childcare, which is a problem for more than low-wage women, but for families across America. Let me tell you about Alexandra Wallace. She's a typical low-wage worker. She couldn't afford the high cost of childcare at all, and so she used what is frequent for low-wage workers, ad hoc arrangements, looking for friends and family help with her three-year-old. And when she couldn't find anyone, sometimes she had to call in sick to her hair salon, and so she got fired. Without any income, ironically, all of a sudden, her child was now eligible to enroll in the state's subsidized childcare program, but because Arizona, where Alexandra lives, cut their funding for the program, there were way too many children for the slots that they had. In fact, Alexandra's daughter was number 11,001 on the waiting list. So that story is very true for families around the country because we have not funded the slots we need for subsidized childcare. Only 18% of eligible children have access. Middle-class families face a similar situation in that in many places, the cost of private childcare is the same as the cost of in-state tuition at a state university. Just to wrap this up, one of the things that really was quite shocking to me was that I think we often look at these, and I hate to use too many cliches, but the forest for the trees. We look at a lot of trees when we think about women and work. We look at family leave policy or childcare. We look at the minimum wage, or we look at the discrimination laws. And we forget that for very many women, these are all happening at once. And so it's not just the wages or the lack of benefits in childcare, the lack of paid sick leaves and vacation time, but this is actually a situation that is facing more and more workers. And this is why I think I'm hoping as a society that we'll start to address it. As we lose the more higher paid manufacturing jobs and men are moving more and more into these types of jobs, this is a phenomenon that is affecting men and women, although women are the canary in the coal mine that we need to address now. So I wanna wrap it up by just saying, again, I think I was somewhat inspired by a feeling of frustration that the lean in opt out discussion that was going on, well, not irrelevant to some women, really was not the main subject for most women. And so that I hoped by bringing forward these stories and the fact that we have so many gaps and exclusions in our law that we would finally get around to addressing at least some of them. So thank you very much. I really appreciate your coming here and I hope you will enjoy reading under the bus. Thank you so much, Caroline. Bridget Schulte is an award-winning journalist for The Washington Post and The Washington Post Magazine. She writes about work life issues and poverty, seeking to understand what it takes to live the good life across race, class, and gender. Bridget asks, why do Americans work such long hours? How come a minimum wage salary can't cover the cost of a two-bedroom apartment anywhere? Why is good childcare so bloody expensive and hard to find? Our fathers now more harried than mothers and why don't Americans take vacation? And when they do, they bring it along, they bring work along with them. Of course, it makes one wonder if these labor policies were designed with the employers in mind, not with employees in mind, but we'll talk about that later. After a time-use researcher told Bridget she had 30 hours of leisure time a week, she wound up writing a book in search of that leisure time called Overwhelmed, Work, Love, and Play when No One Has the Time. Good morning, thanks so much for having me here. You know, I wanna start talking a little bit about, you know, Caroline had talked about, you know, lean in. Are we leaning in so far that we're falling over and getting run over by the bus? I think the main thing that I wanna, if there's one thing that I could impart today, we talk about leaning in and that was an important book and I commend Cheryl Sandberg for it. But my contention as I did the research for my book is the more I learned about how our workplace is structured, our attitudes, our policies, whether we take them or not, our laws, it doesn't work for anyone anymore. It doesn't work for low wage workers, doesn't work for women. It does not work for high wage workers either. So my contention, my question is lean into what? And my big message would be, we've gotta change that what for everybody. Like Caroline said, the time use research and international data shows that the United States workers here work among the longest hours of any advanced economy. The only two countries that work longer hours than we do are Japan, where there is a word for death from overwork called Karoshi and South Korea, where people, the Wall Street Journal reported not long ago that they've opened up meditation prisons where you can go check yourself in to get away from it all. So we're not quite that bad yet. And yet, when you look at overall trends, it looks like on average, work hours look like they're falling. And yet that really masks what's really going on. That if you look closer and you look by data, look by income level, for high wage workers, work hours, knowledge workers, white collar workers, hours have been on the rise since the 1980s, almost crazy high. Working a 50 hour work week is just normal anymore. You've got people out in Silicon Valley who wear the long hours like a badge of honor. They've got t-shirts that say 90 hours and loving it. There's great social science research that shows that if you don't pull those kinds of hours in Silicon Valley and some certain industries, you're seen as a loser. You're not on your way up in law firms. If you don't pull those kinds of hours, you're not gonna go anywhere. In the crazy world of the billable hour culture, the longer you work, it doesn't matter how efficient you are, but the longer you work, the more you're valued. And when I was doing some reporting for my book, I found law firms that lawyers who just got completely burned out and decided to do it completely differently. They said, you know, I got more and more efficient and I wasn't rewarded even if I won my case because I wasn't putting in the hours. So we have a really screwed up system in terms of what we value. For the low wage workers, their work hours have been falling. And so just like Caroline said, to make ends meet. Because let's face it, costs have continued to rise. Wages have stagnated since the 70s. So if you're gonna be able to make it and your hours have been falling, you're trying to find two and three different jobs to try to make ends meet. In a recent Pew Research Institute report, they showed that the rate of stay-at-home mothers was rising. And so again, we in the media, it's like, oh, look, see, moms really do wanna stay home and that's really what they prefer. But if you looked inside of that data, it told a very different story. It told a story of low wage workers who said they wanted to work, their intention was to work to help their families. But that childcare was more expensive than what they could earn. So it wasn't something that they could even do. So we have all this data, but we have to look closely at the story that it's telling us. And what I discovered in the course of reporting my book is that it's telling us that the way we're living and working isn't working for anybody. We have these, what I call sort of these cultural norms that we all try to live up to. And certainly in the workplace, we are all driven by, and this is in the white collar world, the ideal worker. And if you don't think that exists, there is great research that shows that he is alive and well. WFD Consulting did a survey around the globe and asked executives and top managers, who is the ideal worker, who is the best worker? And more than three fourths said, someone with no caregiving responsibilities. Well, who is that? That's obviously not women. That's obviously not a lot of men either because when you look at millennials in particular, they have great aspirations, both men and women in the workplace. They're ambitious. They want to contribute and have a life of meaning and purpose at work. But they also want to have a life and they want to be involved at home and that's men and women. In fact, men show higher rates of wanting to be involved at home. So what you're doing in our workplaces, we're really trapping people in place. We're trapping them at work in these long-hour cultures. And then in the same time, we're trapping women in the role of being this sort of ideal mother. And I think that when we talk about women in the workplace, that's these two cultural norms are something that we don't talk about that we need to because they're sort of this tune that we're dancing to that we don't even recognize. And when I say that, there are a number of psychologists from Harvard, University of Virginia and other places. They've been given what they call implicit association tests for years to try to uncover this unconscious bias. Our brains evolved to sort things very quickly. This is why stereotypes are so powerful. Back when we were developing and we were in the Pleistocene era or Chromagnoman, we were out on the savannah. We needed to very quickly determine is that a tiger that I need to run from is that a fruit that I can eat? And so you very quickly sort things. And our brains are still doing that even though we don't need that same function for survival. And so when they do these tests to try to uncover that implicit association bias, what they'll find is more than three fourths again of people automatically associate men career, women family. And if you think that that doesn't matter, all you have to do is look at all of the statistics out there. Women have been graduating from college in greater numbers than men since the early 1980s. And yet they're barely representative. They're stuck in what Sylvia and Hula, the economist calls the marzipan layer of middle management. If they can make it that far. We talk about women opting out. But again, if you look inside that data, it's really more being pushed out of a workplace that doesn't work for them. And then when it comes to low wage workers, low wage women, we look at say pregnancy discrimination claims. It's the most overt kind of discrimination. And when you talk with lawyers from the EEOC, they'll say it's unbelievable. It's the only kind of discrimination where you go into a court and the judge will say, now where is that mom who should be home with her kids? So these attitudes are a part of what we need to look at when we talk about changing our culture, changing our laws, changing our policy. We've got to get at the root and change the way we think. I've got plenty more to say, but my time is up and I'd be happy to talk more. Thank you so much, Bridget. Next, we have Kristen Rowe Finkbiner of Moms Rising. She's the executive director, CEO and co-founder of Moms Rising, a national organization with more than a million members advocating for family economic security. Today, she's announcing a campaign, which I suspect she'll tell us about, called Mission Possible, that includes efforts to advance fair pay, paid sick days, family leave and affordable high quality childcare. Moms Rising is an important ally for EPI and for working women. And there's much overlap between Mission Possible and EPI's Agenda to Raise America's Pay. We will be working together on raising the minimum wage and efforts to update overtime rules and more. So I'm delighted to welcome Kristen. Thank you. What hard acts to follow? That was spectacular. Thank you for having me here today as we discuss women being run over by a bus or leaning in or both. In fact, both is often happening at the same time. And I wanna further set the foundation for this conversation and talk about women's wages. It's important to remember that only 10% of women in the United States of America are making $74,000 or more per year. That 10% of women is the conversation around which leaning often happens. But what's important and what other speakers have said today is that that leaves out 90% of women who are not making more than $74,000 a year. From that important conversation. So we're gonna talk a lot about that 90% of women today. Further complicating this discussion is the fact that we have a modern labor force where 50% of women, where women are 50% of the labor force for the first time in history, but our public policies are still stuck in the Stone Ages. They're absolutely stuck. It's time to catch up. And for many people, including me, that means that you went to college, we're in a class where 56% of graduates were actually women. So maybe you thought that equality had happened, that the women who came before us had fought and won the fight for equality. But of course that's not so. And I'm gonna start with my story to talk about how I came to understand what was going on and how I came to be part of mom's rising. I have a confession. I grew up happily thinking that women had actually achieved equality. I actually did. I looked around in my classrooms, we were there. We were doing well, we were excelling. But then I had a child who was amazing, but also so sick, he had a primary immune deficiency problem that I had to quit my job. Now I was raised by a mom who was single through my elementary years. And I had a big moment of what if? What if I was in the situation where my mom was, where I didn't have a husband with job-linked healthcare, where I didn't have a husband who could keep food on the table in a roof overhead while I could take time out of work and take my son to the doctor. What if? For too many women, having a baby is a one-way ticket to poverty. I was lucky. I was lucky that my son is now healthy. I was lucky that my daughter is healthy too. But luck alone should not determine whether families and children can thrive. It's absolutely ridiculous. So we know right now in the United States of America that we have some big hurdles in front of us that we have to address for everyone and for moms in particular. Right now being a mom in America is a greater predictor of wage and hiring discrimination than being a woman. That's right. Discrimination against moms is getting worse. This is a very big deal. This is a big deal considering that 82% of women in America have kids by the time they're 44 years old. And of course, we all have a mother, right? So we all at least know somebody. Anybody with a belly button should be concerned about what's going on with women in America right now. One of the things that's important to note is it isn't just hurting moms. This is hurting families and this is hurting our economy. And I'm gonna share some stories that we're hearing at moms arising from our members across the nation. We have members in every state in the nation and we hear from moms across the nation every day about what's happening in their lives which demonstrate what's going on with women in America right now. Cynthia shared, quote, I worked for an advertising firm and at one event it was obvious just how many women worked for the executive director. I asked him why? Why so many women? He told me I can pay them less. I was 23 and shocked. I hadn't yet learned I was less valuable than a man. That's what she said. No woman is less valuable than a man and in fact a Pepperdine University study of 20 years of Fortune 500 companies found the more women in leadership, the more corporate profits. I'm just gonna leave it right there. Women are not less valuable than men. Barbara came forward to share, quote, I didn't have any paid sick days so I had to postpone taking my kids to the doctor. One time this resulted in my daughter having an ear infection that was untreated and left her with permanent hearing loss. Now I wanna add some facts here, 80% of low wage workers don't have access to a single paid sick day. 40% of private sector workers don't. When we talk about low wage workers, we know about two thirds of low wage workers, minimum wage workers are women. Many of them are moms. So what we're talking about here is we're talking about huge barriers that we together can break down. The drumbeat of stories builds. Sonya had to go back to work just one week after her first baby was born and only four days after her second baby arrived. She said, quote, I really, really wanted one-on-one time with my babies but I just didn't have any leave, end quote. It's a national embarrassment that the United States of America is the only industrialized country in the world without some form of paid leave for new moms. We can do better. We can absolutely do better. We can do better for families. We can do better for moms. We can do better for children. Another story that comes forward all too often is one that came forward from Christina. She said, quote, I'm frustrated that our childcare costs more than our rent and our car payment combined each month, end quote. As other panelists have shared, childcare now costs more than college in most states in our nation. If you had to start saving for childcare like you start saving for college, The New York Times recently reported you would have to start saving when you were eight years old. It's absolutely outrageous. There's also hope in our stories and after this sort of litany of horrible sad stories, I wanna share a story of hope. As Don shared, when my child was recently approved for health insurance, I asked the insurance agent, do you mean that if my son needs another surgery for his preexisting condition, it's covered? The insurance agent said, yes, it's covered because now the Affordable Care Act is in law. Nine out of 10 people in the United States of America now have healthcare coverage. And that's because moms, dads, women, men, and people have raised their voices. So my point here with this is that we know when people get engaged, when people get active, when people raise their voices, change is possible. And change is needed because these stories that I just shared aren't isolated incidents. We all know that when this many people are having the exact same problem at the exact same time, we have structural issues that we must address. It's not an epidemic of personal failings. It's not a failure to lean in. And it certainly isn't a quote balance issue in our lives. What we have is bad policies. And bad policies we can change. We know that these policies are an outline of the daily lives of women in America. And I love that both of you have said that what's going on here? We talk about these policies in silos. But what's going on outside the Beltway, outside the silos is that many women are experiencing all of these policies in the negative impacts at the exact same time on the exact same day and even in the exact same morning. So what we need is access to affordable child care. We need access to paid family leave, which is maternity and paternity leave when a new baby arrives. We need access to paid sick days, to fair pay and a living wage. We need access to healthy food and to health care. I love what our labor secretary often says lately, and I have to repeat it. He says the problem is we are living in a modern family nation with leave it to beaver policies. That's the problem. I love when he says that. I have to like stand up and cheer each time. It's time to update our outdated policies, and it's time to start doing that by also breaking down the maternal wall. So what does the maternal wall look like? A lot of people ask about that. Well, one study found that women without children make $0.90 to a man's dollar. Moms are making $0.73 to a man's dollar. Single moms, of which 41% of births last year were to single moms, are making about $0.60 to a man's dollar. And women of color are taking increased wage hits on top of that. Another recent study found that, more recent study, found that moms are making just $0.68 to a man's dollar. So it's going down. There's a lot of myths about why this is happening. Some of the myths say, well, moms and women, they just don't work as hard. Well, that's ridiculous. One study that I love to point out, and that really addresses the lean-in issue, is it was a study of two pieces of paper. No person who's leaning in or leaning out, no person who's confident or not confident, paper. And when we have on paper equal resumes with equal job experiences, moms are offered jobs 80% less of the time than non-moms and $11,000 lower starting salaries. Dads, on the other hand, are offered $6,000 more. But the good news is, we can do better, and we know how to do better. It's not rocket science. Studies show that when family economic security policies are in place, like access to paid family leave, affordable childcare, sick days, that the wage gaps between moms and non-moms, the wage gaps between women and men, go down. And those studies also show that that helps our economy. It's important to talk about what's going on with women in the economy as we've moved from a manufacturing economy to a consumer economy, where 72% of our GDP is based on consumer spending. And it's important to remember that we're talking about consumer spending. We're talking about moms, and we're talking about women, who make the majority of those decisions. So when we don't have money to spend in our economy, it impacts all of us. There's a negative ripple effect that goes out to local stores, to our communities, where all of us are negatively impacted by the wage hits that moms are experiencing. In fact, other studies show that when we have equal pay for equal work, that 50% of families come out of poverty pretty much immediately. I have a lot of hope that we can get to solutions. And I want to show you why really quickly. Would everyone who is a mom just raise your hand? All right. Now, would everyone who has ever had a mom raise your hand? All right. This is our movement. We're all in this together. And together, we are a powerful force. I want to leave you with some hope. And the hope is that together our actions have added up. More than 20 cities in three states have passed paid sick days policies. We've seen the minimum wage increasing in red and blue states alike. And we've also seen child care policies advancing that allow everybody, or more people, access to high quality, affordable child care. And I want to remind you again of that spectacular moment of now nine out of 10 people in the United States of America having health care. Winds are happening. And these winds are happening because moms are rising, because dads are rising, because people are rising, because we're all in this together, and because we know that it's time to update our outdated policies, and that when we do, we all win. Businesses win, our economy wins, our nation wins, and we win. So I want to thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for having me, and also keep an eye out for the Mission Possible launch later today, where we have 30 organizations coming together to launch these exact same policy priorities on the Hill. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kristen. Valerie Wilson is an economist and is the director of the Economic Policy Institute's program on race, ethnicity, and the economy. Valerie is a nationally recognized source for expert reports and policy analysis on the economic conditions of America's people of color. She's written extensively on various issues around economic inequality in the United States, including employment, income, and wealth disparities. You all should know that Valerie conducts a quarterly analysis of state unemployment data. And we have on our website an interactive map of unemployment rates by state and by race. So you can access that. She recently presented a paper on full employment and the disproportionate impact. It would disproportionately help African-American workers. She explained there that talking about the labor market each month is a little like taking her children on a road trip. The punchline of that story is that we're not quite there yet. Thank you, Liz, and good afternoon. I sort of feel like I'm coming up after this great lineup. And I should just take a seat in the audience, and we go ahead and ask questions and have a discussion with the other panelists. But a lot of ground has been covered this morning already. And so the good news is that I probably can speak for a little less time, and we can go ahead and get into our discussion. One of the things that sort of moved me as I was listening to the other speakers first with Caroline telling her story of her grandmother and Kristen talking about her experience with her mother, I started thinking about my own experience and sort of what brings me to this place. And I think about the fact that my grandmother, great grandmother, were domestic workers as well, facing very different circumstances than today's workers experience, but still facing a lot of those same challenges. And it was just sort of appalling to think of how little has changed in the American workplace over all of that time. But also in just thinking about myself as an African-American woman being in a field that's traditionally, predominantly, a white male dominated field. And so in thinking about some of the topics about leaning in or being run over by the bus, I think it is important that we really sort of look beyond where we are and sort of look at the entire landscape and what women are experiencing overall. There has been progress made. I mean, I stand as an example that there has been progress, but there's still much more progress to be made. Kristen raised one of the statistics that I wanted to open with and the fact that when we talk about the American labor force, half of that is women. And the fact that our policies don't reflect that now is really ridiculous. So half of the labor force is women, more than half of women over the age of 16 work outside of the home. That's a huge shift from what we saw, say, back in 1950 when about a third of women worked outside of the home or even in 1970 when just under half of women were working outside of the home. But again, thinking about over each of these periods, we know for African-American women in particular, they've always had a high labor force participation rate. But as we talked about the gender composition of the workforce changing, the racial composition of the workforce is changing, but our policies have not changed. And that's significant because this affects everything from the types of jobs that women and men hold, what they're paid on those jobs, whether they have access to various fringe benefits like pensions or healthcare. And even in some cases, unfortunately, whether or not they're protected under federal labor and employment laws. And then as we've already heard as well, women of color face additional barriers or an additional layer of inequality because of racial discrimination in the workforce. So what I wanna do that hopefully will be a little different than some of the things that we've already heard today is to talk about one of the basic measures that we track workplace inequality. And the measure that you probably hear most often when we're talking about gender disparities or racial disparities is the pay gap or pay equity. And I like where we're going this morning and some of the things that have already been said because it really makes the point that it's important that the discussion really goes beyond just this basic discussion about equity in terms of pay to discuss some of the other things that affect that pay equity as well. There are some of the things that really affect the quality of work in our modern society that affects all workers. So we know that at the median, a woman working full-time full-year is paid only about 78 cents of what a man working full-time full-year earn. That's based on median annual earnings of about $50,000 for men and about $39,000 for women. So off the bat we're talking about $11,000 difference in the course of a year. And I'm sure we can all think of a lot of things we could do with an additional $11,000 in a year. But when we break this down further by race, we find that African-American women earn about $35,000 in that year. Latinas earn about $31,000 in the year. So again, the gender disparities are even wide and further when we consider race and ethnicity. But still, this measure of pay equity and looking at annual median earnings is really still too general because it doesn't account for differences in education, experience, occupation, or industry, all of which affect how much someone is paid. Another measure that we use to gauge this is looking at hourly wages earned by women and men at different points in the wage distribution. And by doing this, we get a little closer to comparing workers with similar skills or with similar educational backgrounds or similar occupations. But still, based on this measure of pay equity, we still have a gap. So at the median in 2013, a woman was paid about 83% of what a man earned per hour. Again, African-American and Latinas were below or had an even wider gap than that. But I think the thing that is important and really adds to this discussion about looking at work overall and what the American workforce has become is if we compare pay equity, so if we look at those pay ratios at different points on the distribution, I was talking about the median. So this is the worker right in the middle. If we were to look at the differences in pay, say at the 10th percentile, so for lower wage workers, women earn about 92 cents of what men earn. If we were to look at higher wage workers, so say the 95th percentile, women earn about 76% of what men earn. And I think the point there, the punchline in that is, again, that the discussion has to go beyond equity. What we tend to see, whether we're looking at disparities by gender or by race, things sort of get balanced or evened out at the lower end. So I think there are two things that are important. It's important to talk about the types of policies and things that we need to do to raise wages overall because we know that among low wage workers, even though men and women may be earning similar pay, for either of them, that's not adequate for life in this country to either support a family or even to support an individual. So we have to talk about raising pay overall, but then beyond that we have to get to the issues that still create differences by gender and by race as we ascend the scale. So there has been progress, as I started out saying, we know that there's been progress over time. That current median ratio of 83% is up from about 63% in 1979. And between 1979 and 2013, the median hourly wages grew by an average of 6 tenths of a percent for women, but fell by an average of 3 tenths of a percent for men on an annual basis. So that reveals that at least part of this narrowing of the gap was because men's wages were falling. So again, I think we have to get beyond the discussion of just comparing and looking at equity to really looking at the broader issue of wages and the American workplace. And the fact that women's wages grew while men's wages declined over this period reflects the fact that women have been having advances in educational attainment, have been gaining greater access to higher paying jobs. So there's been some of this leaning in that we discussed, but even when that occurs, there are gaps that are still persistent. And along with this persistence of a pay gap, that takes me to the discussion of occupational and industry segregation in terms of employment. So there are persistent differences in employment across industry and occupation. Women are more heavily concentrated on service industries, including healthcare, education and leisure. About 43% of employed women work in one of these industries compared to about a quarter of employed men. If we look at the other side and consider the industries where men are concentrated, about one third of employed men work either in manufacturing, construction, transportation or communications industry. Now the point in raising these differences across occupation is not so much to say that we should have balanced representation across all industries. I mean, I think everyone has a right and should feel free to choose the path, the occupation, the industry that's best suited for their skills, their talents and their interests. The challenge or the issue with this, and it has already been raised before, is the fact that those occupations where women tend to be more concentrated tend to have lower wages. So we see that there's a systematic undervaluing of the skills and experiences that women bring to the workforce relative to their male counterparts. But it's not only the case that occupations and industries that are largely female pay less, and I say pay less, meaning they pay less than even the median earnings of women overall, but even within industry. So even in industries where there's a higher concentration of women, they're still on average pay less than men in that industry. So these disparities are persistent across any measure that we could look at that we would presume may account for some of that broader 78% gap. We've already heard the example about in-home workers, and I think that that example is important because it really brings home the additional penalty that women of color face in the workplace, especially in industries or occupations where they're highly concentrated. The in-home workers are more than 90% female and are disproportionately immigrants and women of color. And as we've heard from sharing some of our stories as Maureen, that hasn't changed in years. We know that these women receive low pay, their median hourly wage is just $10.21 compared to $17.50 in other occupations. And if we were to compare these workers to similar workers in other occupations, so with similar levels of education, skill experience, age, et cetera, they still earn 25% less than similar workers in other occupations. Few receive fringe benefits and have a higher incidence of poverty as a result. The other issue related to that, which has already been raised as well, is that many of these women, because of how the law was established that excluded African-Americans from many of the labor protections, many of the women in these in-home jobs still lack important protections under the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, as well as anti-discrimination laws. And so, you know, we've talked a bit today about the American workforce and how it has not changed, even as the composition of workers have changed, how that's bad for all workers, male, female, black, white, Latino. And how it's important in our current discussions to really talk about how we improve the American workforce, how we raise pay for all workers at the same time that we address gender disparities and racial disparities in the workplace. And so I'm going to go ahead and stop there so we can get into the rest of our discussion. I thank you for your attention and your time and I look forward to hearing your questions. Thank you so much. Okay, so we have a half hour to let you all ask questions. So for the people in the room, if you have a question, come up to this microphone so we can all hear you. So you can line up now. And while everyone else is lining up, I actually just want to ask the panel a quick question which is, you know, it's easy. At EPI, we talk a lot about the policy solutions. You know, women are in jobs. If they got paid when they work long hours, you know, the overtime pay issue, that's an easy policy solution. Maybe not easy, but it's a policy solution. But the, you know, the way society values something, you know, why do teachers get paid less than lawyers? Why do, you know, I mean, I cannot think of a solution to that that doesn't involve, you know, John Locke's blind justice or, you know, something I can't quite figure out how to make happen. If I could have a quick answer. I would say there is actually a policy solution to that. There are, the state of Minnesota actually adopted pay equity for state employees. And they went through a process where they evaluated different job categories, their truck drivers, bus drivers, et cetera, school teachers. And they discovered, guess what? That the jobs that were dominated by women were paid less. And this just didn't happen because somehow we weren't paying attention. It's actually what I would describe as an indirect or discrimination or disparate impact that we value those jobs less precisely because women were in them. But once we look at them and analyze what qualities are required for those jobs, and we see how much they should be paid equivalent to a man's jobs with the same types of skills. So Ontario has done the same thing and there are other places around the world, but they have actually undertaken this process and lifted women's wages. In Minnesota, they lifted the women's wages by 9% overall. My home state. So if anybody has questions, line up. Does anyone else on the panel wanna comment on the question? I think many of the panelists and you Liz raised an important issue of how do we address discrimination through policy solutions and cultural change? One of the ways that we didn't talk a lot about today is the cultural change component, but we did talk a little bit about implicit bias. And so what we're finding at Moms Rising is that often just talking about the issues, getting it out there, that there are huge, huge wage and hiring hits against women, moms, and women of color makes people start to think about what they're doing as managers. We need to, a lot of people don't realize they're doing it. We wouldn't, I don't think that there's a giant panel of people up there saying let's pay women, moms, and women of color less. This has often happened through a series of subconscious decisions. So on the policy side, things like the Paycheck Fairness Act which allows for paycheck transparency which allows for managers to double check and double think how they're paying people within their own businesses is very important and allows women and men to talk about if they're being paid equally for the same job in their workforce without repercussions is very important. But so are conversations like this and they're not enough conversations like this where we say, hey, guess what, 911. There is huge wage and hiring discrimination going on. So when you leave here today, I'm an action woman. I challenge everybody here to maybe post something on Facebook or on Twitter or share it in your social media networks about what's going on because part of the solution is talking about the fact that it's happening so that we can address our own internal, each of us hold including me implicit bias and then also fight externally for policy change. All right, well, let's take a, or did you wanna say something, Bridget? I was gonna say something really quickly. You know, on the question of bias, that sort of unconscious bias, there are programs starting up on bias disruptors to train people to see it. One of the things that you need to do is retrain your brain in terms of what you see and kind of disrupt the sort of the stereotype in terms of the images that you have around you. Other places that have made changes off, obviously when you look in Europe, some of their policy solutions would not work here. They have a higher representation of women in politics, for instance, because many governments or parties have adopted a quota system. But what that does, I think what we can learn from, that's a very controversial issue when we've talked about it here in the United States. But what you can do is you look at how much effort they put into finding and cultivating the candidates. That's something that you can do here as well without a formal policy quota. The last point that I wanna make on that is when you look at gender neutral practices and hiring, retention, promotion, and also just the way you award things, there was a really interesting study that in the sciences, American women in science did, and that when they taught different societies how to award grants and research grants and awards on a gender neutral basis, where you have those two equal pieces of paper and you take the gender out of it, once they taught them how to do it on a gender neutral basis, the number of awards that went to women, the research grants that went to women really skyrocketed. So I think there's real power in learning how to do that. Okay, let's take a question. Hi, thank you so much for your speaking and for everything that you said today. I was wondering, you talked a lot about how childcare is unaffordable. Why is it so expensive and has it become more expensive over time? Well, I'm sure the other panelists are gonna wanna weigh in on this. You know, one of the things is that we just haven't ever adopted any kind of formal system and one of the things that was so interesting to me when I was doing the research for Under the Bus was to look into some of the history of our childcare policies. And the only time that we actually adopted some kind of a national childcare policy was during World War II. And it was for a very brief moment when there was a recognition that, well, guess what? Women actually are needed desperately in the workforce. They were going into factories for the war effort. And very unhappily, people thought at the time that some of those people were mothers and as a result, there needed to be something besides leaving their kids at home alone, which was the only other option. So there was this very small, underfunded, not well managed federal childcare policy. And it was as soon as men came back from the war and women were sent home again and there was no need for any childcare. In the 70s, there was another effort around the time of the ERA, which is very instructive because the same groups that came together to fight the Equal Rights Amendment came together to fight against this more recent effort to have a national childcare system was sort of an expanded head start but was going to be available to families in a broad income bracket to sort of have something like an extension of a regular public school day to allow people with young children, women with young children to be in the workforce. But then there's the Phyllis Schlafly and other groups. There's one that I thought was the most interesting was called the 4Ws, women who want to be women. And they absolutely torpedoed and this piece of legislation got President Nixon to veto it and so forth. But what I think this really opens up is a very interesting question. And one of the reasons why I think we don't provide any kind of real childcare system is that there is a real gap. African American women, as Valerie has said, have always been in the workforce in very high numbers. And we have just not really cared that much as a nation what happens to their children. And I think that's reflected in the policies that we have and one of the reasons that this group of white women in the 70s was able to beat back the childcare was because white women weren't supposed to work. They were supposed to be the stay-at-home moms. The Leave It to Beaver model was worked only for white families but African American families, families of color generally never had that option. So I think one of the reasons it's so expensive is that we've never formally tried to sit down and adopt a national policy. We don't have a strong support for it. We don't have any kind of national requirements for training. There was the Washington Post did an incredibly wonderful, scary, sad series on childcare in Virginia that showed that I think it was since 2005 or so. There have been 60 children that have died in childcare in Virginia because there's no regulation, barely regulation, of childcare facilities. There's no training required for the caregivers. They're in places without fire alarms or sprinklers and things like that. And it was nine in the last year alone. So I think it raised an interesting issue. I think it's because we haven't tried to sit down as a nation and figure out what it is we need to address the fact that, guess what, women are working. And if we don't provide childcare, some of those kids are just gonna be left alone or gonna be put in these facilities that are so substandard that we should be ashamed. I wanna let the other panelists answer this question but I also wanna challenge the frame of the question because we want women to be paid enough to live on and most childcare providers currently are women. So I'm not sure that we should be asking, is childcare too expensive? I would argue it's probably not expensive enough because I would like the women who are everybody who works in childcare to get paid a whole lot more than they do now for taking care of our most precious commodity, right? Do our other panelists wanna jump in? I was just gonna say that there was a study done recently that largely women who work in childcare and in caregiving roles, they're making poverty wages and that hasn't changed in decades. So to that point, I think that's something to be really mindful of and yet at the same time for parents, regardless of where you are in the socioeconomic status, trying to afford childcare is very difficult. In 30 states, the cost of infant care is more expensive than a year of public university like we had said before. So why? Why is it so expensive? It's really bodies. When you have an infant, you can't have 10 or 12 infants in one person taking care of them. You need a lot of people there. So you need people and that's what makes it, that's what makes it a lot of what makes it expensive and unfortunately, like you say, probably not expensive enough. And I agree with what Liz is saying in that one of the great ironies is that childcare is expensive but the people who provide it don't make enough themselves to live above poverty. But I think it's also important to recognize when we talk about the cost of childcare, we do have the issue of labor. You need people to provide childcare, the liability associated with caring for someone's children but also we have to recognize that there are different options that parents face. So when we talk about expensive childcare, that's typically the childcare that people who work professionally can afford to pay. Women who are working part-time or are working for minimum wage aren't paying for that childcare. So what kind of care are their children getting? They're opting for things that are more affordable or less expensive at the expense of having access to quality childcare. So I think childcare definitely has to be a national priority and that it's something that should be universally available to all women regardless of where you work or how much you earn. And I wanna add a little bit of a flip on the frame. I completely agree with everybody on this panel, 150%. But I wanna address the question of why is it so expensive and flip that frame to be, why aren't we making that investment? Because one of the things that's important in our country right now when we look at public policies, we're looking at how much money do we spend or save in the next quarter or year? Childcare is expensive for parents, for taxpayers in the next quarter or year. But what it has is an incredible return on investment, a jaw-dropping return on investment. Recent studies just found that for every $1 that taxpayers put into childcare, high-quality childcare, we're getting $8 back. $1 in, $8 back. For a high-risk child, we're getting more than $20 back for that $1. Now, that is an important reason to flip the frame. Why are we getting that money back? We're getting that money back because those children who have high-quality, affordable childcare, have fewer grade repetitions later in life, have less interactions with the criminal justice system, and need less government entitlement programs as they grow older. It's penny-wise impound foolish for us as a nation to not address the childcare crisis, the childcare emergency in our country. It's also absolutely ridiculous to have that cost go on the workers, and many of the workers are moms, they're earning an average of under $18,000 a year, and on moms. And that's where the costs are now. And that cost on moms, that cost on workers, is hurting our economy in the long run. So one of the challenges that we together have as a movement is to figure out how to translate that flipped frame to our public policy discussion. To let elected leaders know that, hey, there's a huge return on investment, let's look at it this way in this flip frame, and let's make that investment right now for today and for 10 years, 20 years, 100 years down the line. That's great. Caroline, did you have one more? I just had a little footnote, which is, I think, follows very nicely from what Kristen and Valerie in particular said about the low-wage workers and childcare, is that the Department of Labor, which tracks childcare arrangements, actually has a category they call self-care, which I just made me wince when I read it. Those are the kids who get left alone. And that's something that I think, as Kristen rightly says, those children at risk, not to put just a dollar figure on it, but it's obviously a moral challenge to us, but if you're just looking at the dollar costs, extraordinarily high to our society to let those kids be in self-care. Yeah, that's great. Add one last thing to that, and I'm sorry, but to go back, since a lot of what I was talking about was attitudes, here we are, if you've been reading the stories in the post of the family in Silver Spring, the middle-class family in Silver Spring who let their kids walk home a mile from the park and are under investigation by Child Protective Services on the one hand, and then on the other, you've got all sorts of families in Southeast and Anacostia and all sorts of low-income areas, and those kids, that's what they do all the time, and there's no investigation there, and there's no public outrage. So we really have serious schizophrenia, real double standards in our society for who can and should do what when it comes to mothers and families. Yeah, that's great. Who is next? Hi. I share a household with a trans woman, and the amazing thing about the Affordable Care Act is transitioning was covered, but now that she's presenting as female, we've noticed a definite hit to our income, and what's left out of all of these economic studies is how discrimination against trans people is sort of left out of the picture. I never hear it brought up, and I should think she's a better worker now that she's comfortable in her own skin, but what happened is she worked for one of the infamous big box retailers as a man, and she was taught in the ways of the corporation to keep their boot on the nexa women, so to speak, but then not every state has trans employment protection, so when she started presenting as female, she lost that management job. When did it coming out to DC, and after a period of unemployment, she got a government job, but she's under such pressure to prove herself, she feels like she can't even take a long launch to come to something like this, and I think it's even worse for trans women of color and trans women in the service industry, so to speak, so my question is how do we get trans women included in economic studies and fix this disconnect? I mean, now people are getting proper trans-related healthcare, but what good does that healthcare do if you can't have decent employment? Yeah, and I know as an API, we have a challenge with this, which is the government, we don't carefully yet have good numbers, so the data samples that we have and everything with us comes back to the data, usually the sample sizes are very small, so it's a real challenge. I think, I don't know if anybody else wants to comment about the clear gaps in protection, but there's also what we call a data problem. Well, I'd just say one of the things that your question highlights, which is very profound, but it's just sort of the way that we as Americans look at our workplace protections. The basically you, the employer, it's at will, as we call it, the at-will employment relationship, so basically only if there are these certain protections that the law has enacted, are you protected? For all other reasons, the employer can fire you. It's a completely different way of looking at the workplace and the rights of workers than in other countries say in Europe, and so I think it just, it betrays the kind of mind frame of Americans. We have to keep fighting and fighting for new groups to be added in, instead of thinking about the workplace as someplace that every worker, where every worker should be protected and shouldn't be discriminated against in any way particular to their particular category. Great, does anyone else want to say anything? I just wanted to add that the data question is a huge one and it's particularly when caregiving comes into the mix. So right now the United States Census doesn't track unrenumerated labor, so that's unpaid labor, so that's caregiving of anybody younger or older. And this is a big deal because we are only, and I'm gonna share this with the room because this is the Lincoln, tracking families in terms of who's in the labor force and who is the stay-at-home parents in the shadow of a married spouse's income. So we don't see at all anybody who's in a partnership that is not legally married and what's happening with that family. We know that families with a stay-at-home parent are seven times more likely to live in poverty, but we don't know where those parents are or what the patterns are in terms of what's happening with those families and the census is used actually not just for data, it's used to do things like site bus stops and grocery stores and figure out where we're doing jobs. So that's important, but then we roll over the New York Times recently, not recently, about a year ago, did a study of who has stay-at-home parents. They kind of backwards did the data. And what was really interesting and this relates to your question is that families with two dads were the most likely to have a stay-at-home parent. Families with a man and a woman were middle and families with two women were the least likely and that's because they're getting the double wage hit when you have two women. So the question you're asking is so important and is embedded in our need also for data to look at when, where and how people are having families and how we can build the best policies that reflect the contributions of those families because all of our families are contributing a tremendous amount to our country, not to mention our social security hopefully when we hopefully retire, but much, much more, but also the needs of those families, of all families. So thank you for your question. And I enjoy being able to share that point because I'm like, hey, we need this data. So good point. Yeah, next question. Hi, I'm Nicole Rogers. I've met some of you before. My work is in the area of culture change and thinking about how we think about good families in this country and how that's changed over the past 50 years. And I wanted to bring in a question about the changes to family structure with who's in the home in the past 50 years and how that's impacted policy. One of the things we know obviously is that there's more single parents and particularly single mothers that ever before, all those single can mean a lot of things, obviously. And you already mentioned, Kristen, the 41% of non-marital births. What I'm curious about is I've always had a sense that one of the problems in terms of actually creating a great policy environment that is family friendly is that we have, I think at this stage allowed for a cultural conversation about single mothers, particularly where we've essentially accepted that they have made bad decisions. We have allowed them to be shamed. This is particularly true of women of color. And yet if you actually look at, and if you look at attitudes from like Pew Research, people are not comfortable with single mother households. If you talk to economists, sociologists, people will basically tell you marriage as an institution is not coming back in the way it has been. It is just not. It's 50% of the adult population is married. Marriage is essentially disappeared as a institution. It's certainly a lifelong institution for people who are poor. So on the one hand, we have this situation where people aren't comfortable with single parents largely. And I'm not sure what we're doing to address that piece. And then the other hand, we know that that's not about to change anytime soon. So I guess what I'm curious about is what do we do for those families beyond policy? How do we change how we think about the value and the contribution of single parent homes particularly in a way that doesn't reinforce this idea that they're not going to be okay with society will not accept them until they play by the rules of having a married spouse before they have children and being financially stable before children because we know that's not realistic for everybody right now. And it probably isn't ever gonna be the sort of cleaver, leave it to be ever model we've talked about because as you said, that was an aberration of sort of a 15, 20 year post-World War II period for middle class white people. So how do we help do that piece of the movement together? Yeah, it's a great question, especially with the president chiming in on some of these issues yesterday. Yeah. As some sort of magical solution to poverty. Does anyone wanna, Kristen? I think one of the ways that we help address what is family is to share our own stories and to share the stories of the people who we work with and we see each day. So at Moms Rising, we bring in thousands and thousands and thousands of stories and then we deliver those stories to leaders, to the media, and we share them with each other. So one of the important things is that we find that people often who are struggling to make ends meet think it's their fault. We have a culture of rugged individualism in the United States of America that we are flat up against when we talk about family economic security policies that boost our families and boost our economy and sharing our individual stories. When we first started doing it, I thought, okay, that's not really gonna work. Like that's kind of cute and nice and you know, it's kind of nice fluffy reading. Maybe I didn't really think that much. I'm over exaggerating, but I have seen the power of a story to change elected leaders minds. We talked a little bit about the barrier of leadership. Only 18% of our Congress are women, fewer than 20% of media executives are women, fewer than 20% of Fortune 500 company executives are women. Most of them aren't moms, right? We talked about the maternal wall. So many people are actually clueless. So sharing our stories helps elected leaders, helps media, helps all of us understand that we have a pattern going on in our nation that we have to address and not, you know, lame moms, which is how it's too often framed as you so eloquently said, but I do think that that is incredibly powerful. You know, I was just, there was that really incredibly sad story last year about the mother who was working at McDonald's, couldn't afford childcare and left her, had her kid in the park across the street and she'd check up on the kid every, as much as she could and she gets arrested. And that plays exactly into what you're saying in terms of the sort of framework that we have about single mothers. I do think, although there's a lot to be done on attitudes, I do think, I mean, as sort of as a policy person, I think policy can help push attitudes as well as the other way around. And to the extent that there was affordable childcare, that that woman could have taken her child there and had some decent care. She would have been able to be more focused at work. Maybe she'd be able to get an education. Maybe she'd be able to get out of McDonald's and go to a place where they paid her more than the minimum wage. You know, and I think all of those things work together. And once I think single moms have that ability to kind of shift their economic situation as well as not being accused of putting their children at risk, even though they might have to because of their financial circumstances, I think that then attitudes can move. And I just, I think, you know, looking at in many countries in Europe where they actually have fairly low marriage rates, but have stable families. They're not, people don't get married as much, but they have the ability to have the financial supports and often have long-term partnerships instead. I'd like to think that part of that is because of the policies that allowed people to make the choices that they want rather than just changing the attitudes and then getting the policies. Yeah, that's been my, when I've argued with you about this, that's always my contention is if really the problem is, you know, non-marital births then just look at all of these, you know, European countries, Nordic countries that we consider, you know, sort of other first world countries that we think do good stuff and they have much higher non-marital birth rates than us, but they don't pathologize the people in it. Well, there's a lot more here. We just have a few minutes left, so I wanted to give each panelist just a quick second to wrap up and any final comments. Oh, Brigid wanted to say something. I'm sorry. I wanted to say something about, I went to just that. Okay. So are we wrapping up or are we? Whatever, you have a minute. You can say whatever you want. Okay, so I just wanted to make another point about policy and attitudes and how they do influence and enforce each other. One in particular, when we think about when this country went through welfare reform and decided that mothers needed to go to work, poor mothers needed to go to work and earn money as opposed to, again, the assistance that they needed. But one of the challenges in that was that in having to meet that work requirement, it limited the time that they had available to go to school, get additional skills and training that would help to raise their wages. So in many ways, this whole attitude of, this rugged self-reliance and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, really is sort of like Brigid's words, schizophrenic in terms of how we view policy and what we think is important. But the other point that I wanted to make was going back to the issue of policies and what it takes for pay equity. I think when we talk about pay discrimination in the workplace, the burden is really on the employee to prove that that's happened to them. And the way that our policies have been set is that it's really difficult to do that. You talk about people not being able to share what they make on the job, but also just in terms of, again, the data that we collect. The studies that Caroline referenced in Minnesota and Ontario are like shining examples of places where that quality at level of data was available so that those kinds of comparisons could be made. I was on a panel a few years ago where we had months of discussion about how can we collect the data that we need so that we can address pay discrimination more effectively at the end of it. We produced the report. I don't know that it's really gone anywhere since then. So we really need to have the political will to address these issues and to invest the resources that it takes to get the data, to make the policy changes that are necessary to addressing a lot of these issues. Okay, perfect segue to Kristen. Did you have one final comment? I guess my final comment is I'm very thankful to be here today, to be fighting with all of you to get this information out, to be talking with all of you about what's going on. And I think it's time for us also to fight together to flip the frame, to not talk about helping people, to not talk about handouts, drives me nuts. What we need to talk about is boosting our families and our economy. We have so much data about how these policies help our economy thrive, help our businesses thrive. I could bore you for hours with the data. But we rarely talk about it. So we need to at the same time as we share our stories, share our experiences, make sure that we're sharing in an empowered frame of we together and we together building our nation for the better so that we can break through the barriers and break through these policies being used as partisan footballs, which they do and they are, even though across the nation, Democrats and Republicans alike are struggling, I'm using the struggle word, see how hard it is, are dealing with these issues. But I think it's up to all of us to flip the frame and make sure we're talking about this in an empowered way that boosts us all. And that'll leave you with that. Bridget. Well, if we're gonna talk about policy and I do wanna leave, I do wanna leave you with some hope. In my book, I had asked two questions. Why are things the way they are and then how can they be better? And I did some traveling and looking for bright spots. And I will tell you, in terms of policy, I think one of the brightest spots out there is when you look at parental leave, that you look at men. And you give men solo parental leave. Because when you do that, there was a really fascinating study in Iceland and also a recent one in Quebec, that when you give, they call it a daddy quota. Because many different countries have tried to boost men taking parental leave, they've given more money and that hasn't worked, they've given more time and that hasn't worked, men haven't taken it. Because that ideal worker, that notion that a good father provides and works those long hours is very powerful still across the world. And so they came up with these use it or lose it idea. So that a mom would have a certain amount of time for leave, a dad would have a certain amount of time, and a family would have a certain amount of time to share. And if the dad didn't use his portion, the family lost it. Well, that really boosted take up rates. And what they found is that in these studies in Iceland and Quebec that I'm talking about, after three years, the reason why that's so important, even if it's just a short period of time or if it's intermittently, but that time alone, developing your role as a caregiver as a man, three years later, the couples who live together or cohabit are fully sharing childcare. Women and mothers have more time at work. The burden of childcare and housework, which women are still bearing twice of here in the United States, that's also lessened. It's much fairer. And I think that's another piece that we've got to talk about on the work and life side is how to make both of them fair. So I found that profoundly helpful. Thank you, Caroline. All right, well, first I just want to thank you, Liz and EPI for hosting us here today and for my fellow panelists for being so inspiring. I've learned so much today. I don't really have too much to add, except to say what a pleasure it has been to dig more into these issues as I was writing under the bus to have the opportunity to learn more as scary as some of it is, but to be inspired by having colleagues such as those on the panel who we can all hopefully get together. What I'd like to say is instead of leaning in, let's lean together and think about how we can address these workplace issues that really face more and more of us, even though the ones who are most affected right now are women and low-wage women and moms in particular, but as a society, we all will benefit from those changes. And I would just like to add one foot to Bridget's point, which was one of my favorite stories around Scandinavian countries and their sort of efforts to push men to taking more childcare was that in Finland, they had an ad campaign with billboards and other types of advertisements that said, men, on your deathbed, do you wanna say, boy, I wish I'd spent more time with my boss? And I think tongue-in-cheek, but I think the clear message is that I hope men will take and that women and families will benefit from is that family time is beneficial for everybody and that I have some of my colleagues in here that I know you wanna spend more time with your boss, but I hope we all wanna spend time with our families and that that should be valued and it's also a value for our economy and our society. Well, thank you so much. This is a great panel. I really appreciate all of you being here. This was videotaped and it'll be on our website. If you wanna share it with your friends, just go to epi.org. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you.