Womenstake, NWLC's Blog

Calling all bloggers! On Equal Pay Day – April 9, 2013 – the National Women’s Law Center will be hosting our annual Blog for Equal Pay Day blog carnival. And we want you to participate!

This June, it will be 50 years since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act into law. And today, women still make just 77 cents for every dollar a man makes — that's nearly $11,000 in lost wages every year.

That’s why we’re asking bloggers to participate in this year’s Blog for Equal Pay Day by answering the question, “What would you do with your $11,000 in lost wages?” in your blog posts, but you’re also welcome to choose an alternative topic. Please feel free to include policy analysis, personal experiences, reports, graphs, etc in your blog posts as well!

NWLC will collect and publish links to the blog posts on Equal Pay Day (April 9, 2013). Click through for all the details you need to get involved in the blog carnival.

Traveling on subways in NY, I often saw ads asking if a woman was “alone, scared, pregnant” and suggesting she call a Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) hotline for help. Spread throughout the city, these seemingly-innocuous English and Spanish ads often faded into the background—designed to capture your attention only if you, a friend, or family member needed help.

Since one in two pregnancies across the U.S. is unintended, women daily face a need for reproductive healthcare that might prompt them to call one of the 2,500 to 4000 CPCs located across the country. Unfortunately, instead of offering transparent, unbiased, comprehensive information that allows a woman to make her own informed choices, CPCs adamantly advocate against abortion regardless of the woman’s life and health circumstances, and needs.

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know we just launched a toolkit that helps women who have been deceived by CPCs’ harmful tactics to file complaints and seek justice. What you may not know, is that CPCs have been deliberately targeting women of color in urban communities.

This post is the sixth in a series of weekly posts containing tax information and filing tips. Check back next week for our next post, or click here to read past posts. 

Taxes. Just saying the word can make people groan. But the reality is, this time of year can actually bring good news to low- and moderate-income families all over the country. Federal tax credits such as the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (worth up to $2,100), the Child Tax Credit (worth up to $1,000 per child), and the Earned Income Tax Credit (worth up to $5,891), can give a boost to families whose incomes are too low to owe taxes. 

One family in Dallas took advantage of free tax preparation at a United Way VITA site and was rewarded for their effort. They qualified for the federal EITC and received nearly a $6,000 refund! Less than two weeks later, the refund was in the family's bank account and helped to pay for things that the family really needed: children's clothes, a crib, and a new car.