Return to Talking Points>>

Women and Opportunity

From The State of Opportunity in America Report

The Opportunity Agenda has released The State of Opportunity in America, the first national report to measure how opportunity is faring in the United States.  The report assesses the level of opportunity for all in our nation, with special attention to women and other groups who have been denied full opportunity. 

American opportunity means that everyone should have a fair chance to achieve his or her full potential.  Ensuring that fair chance requires equal treatment, economic security and mobility, a voice in decisions that affect us, a chance to start over after misfortune or missteps, and a sense of shared responsibility for each other as neighbors and fellow Americans.  The report assesses opportunity along each of these core American values and offers solutions to eliminate barriers so that everyone in our country has the chance to live the American Dream.

The report finds that, despite some areas of progress, opportunity is at risk for all Americans.  The traditional steppingstones to opportunity—an affordable home, a college education, a decent job at a living wage, access to quality health care, and economic security—are moving farther and farther out of reach for everyday Americans.  Findings and recommendations of particular relevance to women include the following:

Opportunity for women has expanded in certain areas.

• The proportion of women enrolling in college nearly doubled between 1967, when only about one in five women age 18 to 24 was enrolled in college, and 2002, when nearly two in five women were enrolled in college.¹  
• Rates of matriculation for African-American women have nearly quadrupled over the past thirty-five years—from 10% in 1967 to 37% in 2002.  But Hispanic women continue to have the lowest college enrollment rates (24%) of women of any racial or ethnic group.²
• Women are voting at rates that are increasingly higher than that of men.³
• Over the last thirty years women have been elected to local, statewide, and national offices in growing numbers.  Today, 12 of the nation’s 100 largest cities are led by women mayors and over 16% of cities with populations over 30,000 are led by women.⁴  
• Women hold 15% of the seats in the U.S. Congress, and nationally women hold almost 26% of statewide elective offices and 23% of seats in state legislatures.  But these gains still leave women underrepresented relative to their proportion in the overall population.  And women’s gains in attaining elective office in the 1970s and 1980s have leveled off, and in some cases have declined slightly.⁵

Women continue to face multiple barriers to opportunity.  Many of these barriers are increasing and cannot be overcome through hard work and perseverance alone. 

• Women are over 20% more likely than men to live in poverty, a gap which has remained relatively stable for nearly four decades.⁶
• Women age 35 to 44 are twice as likely as men to experience severe housing cost burdens. One in four single mothers spends more than half of her income on housing, compared to one in ten single fathers.⁷
• More than 2.1 million people are currently incarcerated in the United States.  The rate of incarceration for women increased more than twelvefold between 1970 and 2003.⁸ 
• Domestic violence is the largest single cause of injury to women age 15 to 44, constituting 20% of nonfatal violence against women in 2001.  Almost 5.3 million incidents of domestic violence occur each year among women age 18 and older.  An estimated 1.5 million women per year are victims of rape or sexual assault by a domestic partner.⁹

Exclusion based on gender persists, stifling the opportunity of millions of Americans.

• A study of employment discrimination in 1999 revealed that women faced a 23% chance of discrimination across all occupational categories reviewed.¹⁰
• Women of color have been affected most by the sharp rise in imprisonment of women convicted of drug offenses, even though rates of drug use among women of color are equal to or lower than rates among white women.¹¹
• Women earn 81 cents for every dollar that men earn, based on an hourly wage comparison.¹²  
• Women remain concentrated in traditionally female jobs such as service sector, clerical, and administrative office positions, and that is especially true of women of color.¹³
• A 2005 study found that women are grossly underrepresented as news sources.  More than three-fourths of news stories contain male sources, but only one-third include a woman as a source.  And reporters are three times more likely to cite two or more males than two or more females in news stories.¹⁴  

Bold action by our government and national institutions is needed to expand opportunity for all.  The report urges our nation’s leaders to:

• Assess the impact of public policies on all dimensions of opportunity, by requiring Opportunity Impact Statements for all publicly funded projects. 
• Train Americans to adapt to a global economy, evolving technology, and an increasingly diverse population—with particular attention to groups of Americans who face the steepest barriers to opportunity.
• Modernize safety net programs that help people meet their basic needs and become economically secure.
• Renew a commitment to human rights in the United States, by vigorously enforcing existing civil rights laws and implementing a new generation of human rights laws.
• Prioritize crime prevention and rehabilitation over incarceration.

Returnt to Talking Points>>

Endnotes

1.  U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Survey, Table A-5, “The Population 14 to 24 Years Old by High School Graduate Status, College Enrollment, Attainment, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: October 1967 to 2002,” www.census.gov/population(3 August 2005).
2. Ibid.
3. U.S. Bureau of the Census, “Reported Voting and Registration, by Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex, and Age, for the United States” (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, November 2004).
4. Center for American Women and Politics, “Women in Elective Office, 2005,” www.cawp.rutgers.edu(31 August 2005).
5. Ibid.
6. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2004, Current Population Reports (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005).
7. The Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, “The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2004,” www.jchs.harvard.edu(11 July 2005).
8. P.M. Harrison and A.J. Beck, “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2004,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, April 2005); Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 2003, 31st Edition, 2004, www.albany.edu/sourcebook(21 September 2005).
9. P. Tjaden and N. Thoennes, “The Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence: Findings from the National Violence Against Women Survey” (Washington, D.C.: Department of Justice, 2005); American College of Emergency Physicians, Domestic Violence, www.acep.org(4 November 2005); Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Intimate Partner Violence: Fact Sheets,” October 2005, www.cdc.gov/ncipc(4 November 2005).
10. A.W. Blumrosen and R.G. Blumrosen, The Reality of Intentional Job Discrimination in Metropolitan America–1999, June 2002, www.eeo1.com(23 June 2004).
11. American Civil Liberties Union, Break the Chains, and The Brennan Center for Justice, Caught in the Net: The Impact of Drug Policies on Women and Families, March 2005, www.brennancenter.org(29 October 2005).
12. Economic Policy Institute analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data, 2005.
13. U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Women of Color: Their Employment in the Private Sector, July 2003, www.eeoc.gov(21 September 2005).
14. Project for Excellence in Journalism, The Gender Gap: Women are Still Missing as Sources for Journalists, May 2005, http://www.journalism.org/gender.pdf(11 August 2005).