Even with so much attention focused on the Oct. 1 launch of the health law's state insurance exchanges, one of the Affordable Care Act's most controversial elements is still percolating through the nation's legal system.
The gaps between the number of girls enrolled in the District’s traditional high schools and the number who actually play sports ranged from a low of 5 percent at majority-female Banneker to 19 percent at Wilson to 26 percent at Ballou and Roosevelt, according to 2010 data, the latest available, that the National Women’s Law Center obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
But Dania Palanker, senior counsel for the Washington, D.C.-based National Women's Law Center, says she's worried that incentive programs may adversely affect women, minorities and low-income workers because they have a higher incidence of the targeted health conditions and more socioeconomic obstacles to overcome to meet program goals.
Recent research shows that enrollment in high school vocational programs has dramatic effects on students’ likelihood of graduating from high school—especially boys. But efforts to engage more boys in career and technical programs face a formidable challenge.
Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment of the National Women's Law Center, said the ruling gives Rick's and other adult entertainment facilities the opportunity to re-evaluate or to consider their practices for how they label their employees.
As Fatima Goss Graves, vice president of education and employment at the National Women’s Law Center, told RH Reality Check, “Deliberately creating a gender-culture transformation is exactly on point, but I don’t see enough actors in the economy doing this. It probably takes an institution like Harvard to help make the case that this is important for business too.”
Three-quarters of the jobs added in August went to women, said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economic security at the National Women’s Law Center. Most of the new jobs for women in August were in low-wage sectors, though, and men have captured most of the job gains since the recovery officially began in June 2009.
One of the great injustices that still exists is the gender gap between what men and women earn. For every dollar a man earns, white women earn 77 cents, Black women earn 69 cents and Latina women earn just 57 cents.
"What they're trying to do make abortion more difficult to access and unaffordable for women, and this is one of the ways they can do that," said Gretchen Borchelt, director of state reproductive health policy at the National Women's Law Center in Washington. "It's part and parcel of the larger effort to make abortion harder for women to get."
Experts have previously noted that women face discrimination in purchasing health insurance, and will continue to until the Affordable Care Act's provision banning the practice known as "gender rating" comes into effect in January, 2014.
