Working Women Under Attack, Again

It's not easy being a working woman. We're paid less than our male coworkers-77 cents to the dollar to be exact, which for professional school graduates adds up to a loss of $2 million over a lifetime. Despite our qualifications and success we have to work twice as hard to rise to the top of America's corporations. We're excluded from informal networks and face stereotypes and preconceptions of women's roles and abilities. Though we make up nearly half of America's workforce and more than half of America's management, professional and related occupations, only two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women.

To most of you, the above figures won't come as a big surprise. Though women have made enormous progress in the workforce in the last half century, at the current rate of change it will take at least a half century more before women attain wage equity and even longer before women hold equal numbers of leadership positions in the world of business. All this despite the fact that companies with the most women represented on their management teams experienced better financial performance than companies with the lowest representation, according to a recent study.

However it may come as a shock that in the face of all these documented inequalities and the economic incentives for overcoming them, the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau, the only federal agency devoted to the concerns of women in the workplace, is under attack by the Bush administration.

The Department of Labor, which in the past has been an ally in protecting the rights of working women, recently cut the Women's Bureau's already meager budget. Congress intended to protect the Bureau and provided more than enough funding to do so, but the Department still choose to single out the Bureau for cuts. This action is unnecessary, unconscionable and unacceptable. It threatens the interests of the nearly 70 million women in the U.S. labor force and jeopardizes programs that play an integral role in promoting flexible work options, mentoring and other policies that have been shown to help women advance at work. Even more disturbing, this is not an isolated incident. It's a part of a larger attempt by the Bush Administration to gradually and quietly downsize the Women's Bureau until it can no longer address the challenges of women workers. Over the past seven years the Administration has scrubbed information about the Equal Pay Matters Initiative from its web site and later eliminated the Initiative all together. It attempted to close all 10 of the Bureau's regional offices and targeted more than half of the career positions in the Bureau's national office for outsourcing. Clearly, the Administration thinks that they can begin to ignore the concerns and needs of working women without us putting up a fight. They were wrong!

Members of Congress and national women's organizations are standing together to demand that the vital programs of the Women's Bureau not be abandoned, while women still face overwhelming and systemic inequalities at work. The Administration thinks it can silence champions for women in the Federal Government. They need to know we won't be silent while our hard won gains are taken away. You can add your voice to the call to protect the Women's Bureau by signing a petition at www.womenwork.org.

It is the focus of my life's work and my greatest hope that some day women won't face challenges like the gender wage gap, the glass ceiling and other forms of gender discrimination at work; but while these challenges still exist, working women need the Women's Bureau to represent our interests and the interests of future generations of women in Washington, DC and nationally.