LAWCHA and the Gender Policy Report

LAWCHA members and other labor scholars have been important contributors to the Gender Policy Report (GPR), an interdisciplinary project sponsored by the Center on Women, Gender, and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota. Inspired by the attention that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy brought to issues of gender equity and fairness in the presidential campaign of 2016, the center’s director, Christina Ewig, sought to sustain that momentum after the election of Donald Trump by bringing scholarly research and analysis to bear on the gendered effects of policy proposals and developments. The goal was to be nonpartisan and evidenced-based while distilling scholarly research into short and accessible essays with clear links to contemporary policy debates. Launched on the day of President Trump’s inauguration, the GPR has produced and disseminated more than one hundred essays, podcasts, and dialogues that have reached more than fifteen thousand individual visitors to its website and more than thirty thousand views over the past year. Twenty-eight faculty curators, from a range of disciplines, lead twelve research areas.

Labor historians have been most centrally engaged in the Labor and Family section of the GPR, which is curated by a team of scholars at the University of Minnesota including economist Colleen Manchester, public policy scholar Carrie Oelberger, anthropologist Karen Ho, and me, historian and LAWCHA vice president. In launching the section, the curators noted that Trump had campaigned for president as a champion for the “working class,” yet he framed that agenda in narrow terms that did not address the full diversity of working people in the United States today. For example, while the administration promised to develop a policy for paid parental leave, it initially restricted the program to women in ways that would deepen gender inequalities in pay, employment, and promotion. Likewise, the administration promoted trade policies and deregulation aimed at expanding traditionally male employment sectors such as mining and manufacturing, while it dismantled programs aimed at improving wages and working conditions in service, retail, and government jobs that are filled overwhelmingly by women and workers of color.

Given Trump’s emphasis on deregulation, much of the analysis featured so far in the GPR has focused on the reduction or elimination of policies rather than on new proposals. Essays on food stamps, workplace safety and health, and international trade all demonstrate that deregulation has left workers more vulnerable to discrimination and deepened inequalities based on gender and race. While the GPR focuses primarily on federal policy, essays have also examined state and local policies that were likely to inform the administration’s approach. Summing up Trump’s first hundred days, curators noted that in addition to the narrowly gendered conception of the workforce articulated during the campaign, the administration was marked by internal conflicts that prevented it from implementing many of its objectives.

Contributors to the Labor and Family section have come from a wide range of disciplines, and labor historians have been critical to its success. Historical sociologist Evelyn Nakano Glenn provided an interview on the feminization of care work and its relation to labor and immigration policies in the United States, and historian Bryant Simon drew on his research into the 1991 chicken-processing plant fire in Hamlet, North Carolina, to explain how deregulation has renewed a cycle of outrage and neglect stretching back to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire eighty years earlier. LAWCHA member Lane Windham drew on her book Knocking on Labor’s Door to explain why labor law reform was particularly important for women workers. In a “Gender Policy Dialogue” on the teacher strikes that erupted in West Virginia and other states in the spring of 2018, Jon Shelton, Jessie Wilkerson, and Elizabeth Todd-Breland highlighted how those conflicts stemmed from gender inequalities in that predominantly female workforce. When first daughter Ivanka Trump unveiled the administration’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, Eileen Boris detailed how it built on, but often failed to learn the lessons of, a long history of efforts by wealthy nations to “practice foreign policy by targeting women.”

The 2020 presidential election offers a renewed opportunity for policies...