Alison Channon, Program Assistant

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My Take

My Teenage Run-in with STEM Stereotypes

Posted by Alison Channon, Program Assistant | Posted on: June 21, 2012 at 01:34 pm

I was born almost 16 years to the day after Title IX was passed. So this week, as both the law and I celebrate birthdays, I’ve been thinking about what Title IX means to me as a young woman very fortunate to have grown up in a Title IX world.

At first, I started thinking about my mother who graduated college in 1972, the year Title IX was enacted. How would my mother’s high school and college experiences have been different had the law been in place? Would she have played basketball instead of being a majorette? When the University of Pennsylvania mistakenly sent her a male dormitory form, would my grandmother have been afraid her acceptance would be rescinded when she called to ask for a female dormitory form? Would my mother, who graduated at the top of her high school class, still have been tracked out of physics and advanced math? No, probably not.

And then I thought, as much as Title IX has done for women and girls in my lifetime – I played youth soccer (terribly), I studied advanced math and science in high school, I have plenty of female friends studying or working in STEM fields – the stereotypes that make Title IX so important are still alive and well.

That brings me back to my first day of geometry when my male teacher told us that the girls might have a harder time with the material since studies showed that men were better spatial thinkers than women.

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Tags: Title IX, Education & Title IX | Add new comment

Paycheck Fairness Makes the Political Personal

Posted by Alison Channon, Program Assistant | Posted on: May 31, 2012 at 03:14 pm

To flip an old phrase, the political is personal. And as a young woman in the beginning of my professional life, the Paycheck Fairness Act is very personal.

For those of you who don’t know, the Paycheck Fairness Act is a bill that would strengthen the Equal Pay Act by prohibiting employers from retaliating against employees for sharing information about their wages, improving data collection and enforcement by government agencies, closing loopholes that courts have opened in the law, and making it easier for employees to come together as a group to challenge discriminatory pay policies.

Apologies if that sounds wonky, but I promise you, these policy changes can have personal impact. Check out the wage gap in your home state (I hope you’ve had the chance to look at our beautiful state by state fact sheets on the wage gap). These female cents on the male dollar figures - 77 cents nationally, 76 cents in my home state of Illinois, 91 cents in Washington, DC - aren’t just arbitrary numbers. They translate into real money that never finds its way into your bank account simply because of your gender.

Did you know that a typical woman loses out on $431,000 in earnings over a forty-year period? That’s less money to pay back student loans, buy a house or car, send children to college, save for retirement, go on vacation, contribute to charity, or simply buy Ben and Jerry’s when it’s not on sale!

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Tags: Equal Pay, Paycheck Fairness Act, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

Mothering on Nickels and Dimes

Posted by Alison Channon, Program Assistant | Posted on: May 12, 2012 at 02:35 pm

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My whole life, whenever I would thank my mom for doing something for me (or on those few occasions when I might grumble that she was being a little overprotective), she would always respond, “that’s what they pay me for.”

What she was really saying is that picking me up from school in the middle of the day because I was sick, or helping me with homework assignments, or asking if I was eating enough calcium (yes, Mom) was all part of being a parent. But I know that no one ever paid my mom to mother, even though it is hard and extremely expensive work.

So while there was no motherhood bureau paying my mom for raising her daughters, her employer was paying her a living wage with benefits.

Unfortunately, not every mother receives a living wage or benefits like paid vacation time to attend parent-teacher conferences and school plays, or health insurance to care for themselves and their children. Between the gender wage gap, the concentration of women in low-paying jobs, and a slow economic recovery for women, too many moms are parenting on nickels and dimes.

The millions of women who lived in poverty in 2010 aren’t thrilled about it, neither are the hundreds of thousands of women who lost their public sector jobs in the last two years, but a large portion of Congress doesn’t seem to care about struggling families.

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Tags: Budget, Family Support Programs, Federal Budget, House of Representatives, Poverty, Data on Poverty & Income, Employment, Tax & Budget | Add new comment

Forget "Slash-onomics," Investing Is Better for Kids

Posted by Alison Channon, Program Assistant | Posted on: March 29, 2012 at 03:05 pm

The winter before I graduated college, my mom took me shopping for a job interview suit. We settled on a great black suit. It was beautiful, but a bit pricey. I told my mom I was worried about the cost but she said, "Alison, you need this suit for interviews. This is an investment in your future."

My mom understood that even five months before I'd don my cap and gown, purchasing a nice professional suit wasn't wasteful spending, but a wise investment in my future. And she was right — I found a job!

Over the past year, it's become clear that many in Congress aren't following my mother's "invest-onomics" philosophy and are instead proponents of what I'd like to call "slash-onomics."

Nothing sums up the stark differences in these opposing viewpoints like a quick comparison of Congressman Paul Ryan's budget proposal for FY2013 and Senator Tom Harkin's newly introduced Rebuild America Act.

Let's look how each piece of legislation might affect the Child Care Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Head Start, two programs that help nurture low-income and at-risk young children and provide for their social and cognitive development in their critical early years.

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Tags: Child Care & Early Learning, Federal Budget, Child Care Assistance, Head Start, Tax & Budget | 1 comment

Across the Pond, Austerity Hurts Women Too

Posted by Alison Channon, Program Assistant | Posted on: March 08, 2012 at 05:01 pm

Tuesday, the New York Times published another article in its “Female Factor” series entitled “Women Bearing the Brunt of Austerity in Britain.” As you might imagine, reading it was like déjà vu. In the United Kingdom, like in the United States, budget cuts have caused stagnant wages and layoffs in the public sector, and cuts to vital programs like child care and pensions. And unsurprisingly, women are hit hardest.

Over the course of the recovery in this country, which officially began in June of 2009, we’ve reported on the public sector job losses that have especially hurt women. Our most recent numbers show that women, who make up 57 percent of the public workforce, have lost an even larger share of the hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs lost during the recovery.

Like American women, British women are overrepresented in the public sector – they comprise two-thirds of the workforce – so they are more likely to be affected by public sector cuts. The British government’s Office for Budget Responsibility predicts the public sector will likely lose an additional 710,000 jobs in the next five years, which will hurt women’s employment further.

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Tags: Budget, Child Care, Family Support Programs, Federal Budget, Public Sector, Family Tax Credits, Poverty & Income Support | 2 comments