Con­gress­man John Lewis from Atlanta recently held a “Can­did Con­ver­sa­tion” with Women of the 5^th Dis­trict. Pat DeWitt, state Pub­lic Pol­icy chair, and Diana Witt, Pub­lic Pol­icy chair from the Atlanta branch, attended to rep­re­sent AAUW. The speak­ers were author­i­ties in their fields and had much to say of inter­est to all of us.

Dr. Bev­erly Tatum, pres­i­dent of Spel­man Col­lege, mod­er­ated and intro­duced the panel mem­bers: Cyn­thia Pierre, Regional Direc­tor of the Atlanta office of the U. S. Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion Office of Civil Rights; Julie Hotchkiss, pol­icy advi­sor and research direc­tor at the Fed­eral Reserve Bank in Atlanta; Por­tia Wu, Vice Pres­i­dent of the National Part­ner­ship for Women and Fam­i­lies; and Stacy Abrams, House Minor­ity Leader for the Geor­gia Gen­eral Assem­bly and State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the 84^th House District.

Dr. Pierre served as a rep­re­sen­ta­tive for the White House Com­mis­sion on Women and Girls, speak­ing on the land­mark report “Women in Amer­ica: Indi­ca­tors of Social and Eco­nomic Well-Being,” which you can find at http://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/cwg/data-on-women. There is much infor­ma­tion in this report that is rel­e­vant to the pay gap. For exam­ple, Pierre men­tioned that women con­tinue to be con­cen­trated in a small num­ber of tra­di­tion­ally female occu­pa­tions. In 2009, nearly one-fifth of all women were employed in just five occu­pa­tions: secretaries,registered nurses, ele­men­tary school teach­ers, cashiers, and nurs­ing aides. Health issues that affect more women than men include dif­fi­culty walk­ing, obe­sity, and depres­sion. Eigh­teen per­cent have no health insur­ance. A sur­pris­ing fact is that the num­ber of women under cor­rec­tional super­vi­sion, in prison or com­mu­nity super­vi­sion, increased 121% between 1990 and 2008. In 2008, 206,000 women were incarcerated.

Dr. Hotchkiss fol­lowed this infor­ma­tive pre­sen­ta­tion with a report on the effect of the reces­sion on men and women. Although men lost jobs at a much faster rate in the early months, lead­ing to the term “Man-cession”, women’s jobs have rebounded more slowly, sug­gest­ing a “He-covery”. She dis­cussed the pay gap, point­ing out that men and women still tend to work in dif­fer­ent sec­tors. The Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics pre­dicts that eight of the top 10 job cat­e­gories for the near future will be female-dominated ones, but only two of these earn above the median salary.
Por­tia Wu gave a call to action, remind­ing the audi­ence that although the Lilly Led­bet­ter Fair Pay Act was passed in 2009, there are still loop­holes in the equal pay laws. We need to see that the laws we have are enforced, while advo­cat­ing for the pas­sage of the Pay­check Fair­ness Act. We need to fol­low the class action suit Dukes vs. Wal-Mart. AAUW LAF is sup­port­ing this case; learn more at http://aauw.org/act/laf/cases/DukesWalMart.cfm.

Finally, Rep. Abrams declared that women need to start tak­ing more of an inter­est in taxes! For exam­ple, a con­sump­tion tax falls harder on those with less income, and the wage gap means many of these are women. When peo­ple talk about elim­i­nat­ing pub­lic sec­tor jobs, we should remem­ber that 20% of female work­ers are in the pub­lic sec­tor, and they have fam­i­lies. We should demand trans­parency from gov­ern­ment: that means ask­ing what the model for pro­posed changes is based on. When tax cuts are pro­posed, ask “Is it for me? If not, for whom?” To become more lit­er­ate on tax issues, she rec­om­mended the book Taxes Are a Woman’s Issue: Refram­ing the Debate by Mimi Abramovitz (you can find it on Ama­zon.)

Con­gress­man Lewis him­self had words of encour­age­ment, start­ing with “Speak up! Speak out! Be not afraid to con­tinue to push and pull!” He seemed to agree with the AAUW slo­gan, Equity is Still An Issue.