Child care remains an issue for working mothers, and it was a key theme of the round table on Thursday. Nearly 400,000 childcare jobs have been lost since the start of the pandemic, Ms. Harris said. The closure of small businesses and the loss of millions of jobs have created the perfect storm for women, especially for black business owners, she added. “The longer we wait to act,” she said, “the harder it will be to get these millions of women back into the workforce.”
The government aid proposal would provide about $ 130 billion to help reopen K-12 schools, a key component of child care. But how and when to do so – and how to explain the decision to Americans – is a stumbling block for the president and his advisers.
President Biden has promised to reopen as many schools as possible in the first hundred days of his government, a promise questioned by teachers’ unions, which wants to ensure safety measures before schools reopen. On Thursday, me. Harris limited her comments about schools, saying the plan would ‘provide funding to help schools reopen safely’. Mrs. Harris said in an appearance on the program “Today” on Wednesday that “teachers should be a priority” to receive vaccinations.
Several representatives of women’s advocacy groups joined the call with Ms Harris, including Fatima Goss Graves, president of the National Women’s Law Center. She said the vice president did not have a “fine detail” regarding the reopening of the school, but that the group emphasized other topics, including the importance of direct payments to struggling family members.
“People are barely holding it together now,” she said. Goss Graves said. “I was delighted to hear that she urgently understands and speaks about the implementation of this investment.”
As the pandemic continues, the statistics for women are indeed bleak.
A report published last year by researchers at the University of Arkansas and the Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California found that female employment began to decline almost immediately once the coronavirus took hold last spring. Since then, the researchers found, women have had a heavier burden than men with childcare.
Non-college educated women and women of color were out of proportion. Another report, published this fall by the Brookings Institution, showed that nearly half of all working women have low-paying jobs. Black or Latina women are more likely to hold these positions, and it is in sectors, such as food and travel, that they are least likely to return to a degree of normalcy soon.