I have been there. Waking up early, even hiring an early babysitter to help me get my son ready on time so we could both go to school and work. My husband is the primary breadwinner in our home. He often had to travel for work, so the burden was on me. I recall the stress of it all - arranging someone to pick up my son when I could not, managing logistics, and making payments. It was hard earned money lost.
Across history, women have fought for the simple freedom to move through the world without restriction. Women conquering wild spaces is not a new story. For 150 years or longer, women across the globe have led expeditions, first ascents, and feats of endurance-often quietly, often in the shadow of a male companion, frequently unrecorded or misrepresented in their own stories.
"This is a moment where corporate America is backsliding on women," Sheryl Sandberg, the former Facebook executive who founded Lean In, tells Axios. Despite years of corporate pledges to advance women, 54% of HR professionals surveyed by the group now say women's career advancement is a priority at their organization - and that falls to 46% for women of color. That marks a sharp drop from 2017, when gender equity surged on to corporate agendas after Donald Trump's election and 88% of companies told Lean In it was a high priority.
There is hope. Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its coalition partner, the Japan Innovation Party (JIP), have released an agreement that pledges to "substantially expand" grants for scientific research and to "establish a system granting legal effect to the use of maiden names". Both are promising for researchers, but the future of Japanese science will depend on how these policies are implemented.
This year, the number of women in the workforce has fallen by 500,000, while the number of men rose by nearly 400,000. That statistic tells us something is very broken. We've built systems that aren't working, and women are bearing the brunt of it. I believe that if we're bold enough to rethink how work works-if we make it more flexible, more fair, more inclusive-then we're not just helping women. We're unlocking opportunity for everyone.
The San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women is needed now, perhaps more so than ever before in its history, and we urge members of the Commission Streamlining Task Force to maintain it as a standalone body with its full powers intact. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, California women who are full-time wage and salary workers still earn significantly less than men.
