Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

by Lauren Seemeyer

With Mother’s Day around the corner, it’s hard to turn on the TV, walk into a store, or surf the internet without hearing just how to “let Mom know she is really special this Mother’s Day.”  We are bombarded with images of pink roses, gold necklaces and smiling women, but have you ever stopped to think which mothers these ads are featuring?

For the 5.2 million mothers living in poverty (that’s less than $15,735 a year for a family of three), a bunch of flowers or box of chocolates won’t begin to cut it.  There’s no greeting card that will whisk away the worry of choosing between putting a nutritious meal on the table or keeping the lights on.

So what about the moms who are struggling to make ends meet?  What do they really need this Mother’s Day?

by Jocelyn Samuels

You may recall that five years ago, right around the last round-number anniversary of Title IX, the Bush Administration launched an all-out attack on Title IX’s athletics policies, convening a commission that was stacked with opponents of Title IX and that was urged to recommend ways to dilute schools’ obligations to provide equal athletics opportunities for their female students.  This Administration effort was defeated by the groundswell of opposition that your voices produced, demanding that Title IX be kept strong.

You may also remember that, having learned its lesson about trying to make unpopular policy changes in public, the Administration next tried an under-the-radar approach instead.  Without public announcement, and late on a Friday afternoon in March 2005, the Department of Education issued a policy “Clarification” that opened a huge loophole in Title IX compliance standards for schools trying to avoid providing additional sports opportunities for women on their campuses.  Once again, your activism has helped to blunt the impact of that Clarification, producing, among other things, an NCAA recommendation to its member schools that they not use the Clarification to measure whether they are providing equal opportunities for men and women.

But now the Administration is at it again.

By Fatima Goss Graves

Once again extremists are attacking established and proven gender equity programs, arguing that girls no longer face obstacles in education and that boys – and only boys – are in an education crisis.  As usual, these attacks are based on myths that perpetuate dangerous stereotypes.  Worse, they treat education as a zero-sum game in which girls’ gains can only come at boys’ expense.

Myth: Girls are reaching their potential in school while boys are not.

Fact:  Not all boys are achieving their potential in school, and that is a critical problem that must be addressed. But the same is true for girls. Take high school graduation rates for example.  No one would say that a 72 percent high school graduation rate for girls is a measure of success  --even when compared to the even more disappointing 65 percent for boys.  And it is disturbing that, by several different measures, African American, Hispanic and Native American high school graduation rates for both boys and girls hover around 50 percent. These numbers highlight that policymakers must address the needs of all students at risk.

Myth: Scientific studies have proved that gender gaps in educational achievement are due to innate physiological differences between girls and boys.