Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant

Elizabeth Yates joined NWLC in 2010 as the Program Assistant in the Education and Employment Program. Previously, Liz was as a Legal Assistant in the Family Law/Domestic Violence Unit at the Legal Aid Society of the District of Columbia, where she worked directly with low-income women in the District.  Liz graduated from Tufts University with a major in International Relations and a minor in Latin American Studies in May of 2008. As a student, Liz completed internships at the Economic Opportunity Institute and at the Inter American Foundation.

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My Take

Over 6,000 New Sports Opportunities Possible for Girls!

Posted by Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant | Posted on: July 05, 2012 at 03:19 pm

In November 2010, NWLC filed 12 complaints with the U.S. Department of Education, pointing out that twelve school districts across the country were failing to provide equal athletic opportunities for girls, in violation of Title IX. This effort was part of a national campaign, Rally for Girls Sports, to raise awareness about the barriers girls face in in high school sports.

This week, we all had a lot to rally around. The U.S. Department of Education announced that they reached settlement agreements with four of the districts, all of which reported that they were not offering sports opportunities in equal numbers to boys and girls. In Deer Valley, Arizona; Houston, TX; Wake County, North Carolina; and Columbus, Ohio, disparities between the percentage of sports opportunities offered to boys and girls translates into 6,000 lost opportunities for girls to play sports.

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Tags: Athletics, Title IX, Athletics, Education & Title IX | 1 comment

Sex Discrimination in the Workplace Persists, Despite iPhones

Posted by Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant | Posted on: June 05, 2012 at 01:55 pm

Yo, how hysterical is the Internet?  Have you seen the photo with the “Brick” iPhone case?

One of the reasons those memes are so funny is because they often depict people from another time - a period in history so many of us are familiar with only through a series of distant  images and associations drawn from movies, attic magazines, older relatives and our favorite substitute teachers. But THEN memes show these historical figures saying things exactly the way we would today!  LOL!  The Internet is so crazy!  It’s too much!

Except when it’s not.  In the case of fair pay, the irony is unfortunately too real.  Many of us think of sex discrimination as something that happened in the old days when women wore watches and talked on phones with cords, (Ok, ok, yes, we still do that today and maybe that woman is not actually from the ‘80s, but with fashions coming back these days, it’s hard to tell, and you get the point.).  Yet it’s still happening today, even in the age of iPhones and Blackberrys.

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

Baby Talk Counts

Posted by Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant | Posted on: February 28, 2012 at 10:36 am

It’s a proven fact that the mere presence of babies can turn normal, functioning adults into blabbering idiots who suddenly feel the need to gesticulate wildly and constantly shift voice intonation while describing something as simple as “that big doggy over there!” But new research suggests that exactly what we blabber may be influenced by the sex of the young child we’re blabbering at – details that could have a long-term impact on child development.

In a new study at the University of Delaware, researchers found that parents talk about “number concepts” twice as much to male toddlers as to female toddlers. According to the study: “For cardinal-numbers speech, in which a number is attached to an obvious noun reference — ‘Here are five raisins’ or ‘Look at those two beds’ — the difference was even larger. Mothers were three times more likely to use such formulations while talking to boys.”

The study was based on observations of parents speaking to their children aged between 22 and 27 months, meaning that girls may be exposed to less math than are boys before they are even able to count to “ten” – imagine the size of the gap that exists by the time they are eighteen and signing up for Calculus!

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Tags: Child Care & Early Learning, Early Childhood Education, STEM, Wage Gap, Prekindergarten, Education & Title IX | 1 comment

Another Meat Packer Gets Caught with Rotten Hiring Practices

Posted by Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant | Posted on: October 21, 2011 at 02:00 pm

100 years ago, the American meatpacking industry was exposed for subjecting workers to the nightmare that was work in the stockyards: filthy, exhausting, humiliating, and deadly dangerous. Today, working conditions for meat packing laborers are vastly improved, but it looks like industry leadership still needs a shove when it comes to running a fair and equitable place of employment.

For the third time since February, (see here and here), a meat packing company has been found in violation of federal civil rights law requiring that federal contractors not discriminate on the basis of certain protected classes, including sex and race.

Yesterday, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, the division of the Department of Labor charged with enforcing non-discrimination law against federal contractors, announced that Caviness Beaf Packers Ltd. was found to have discriminated against over 700 job applicants based on their sex and race. As part of the settlement, the company will pay $600,000 and hire approximately 81 of the complainants, as positions become available.

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Tags: Affirmative Action in the Workplace, Employment | Add new comment

Labor Department Files Lawsuit on Behalf of “Bikini Baristas”

Posted by Elizabeth Yates, Program Assistant | Posted on: October 13, 2011 at 04:59 pm

I’m a native Seattleite. Here in the other Washington, I’m constantly asked about two things: rain, and coffee. (Note: I’d rather talk about the departed Sonics, and/or how awesome ferries are. But I digress.) “Are there really coffee shops on every corner?” Yes. “Does it really rain almost every day?” Why do you think we drink so much coffee?

But if the chilly damp of the Northwest explains the local obsession with coffee, it does nothing to illuminate the coffee industry’s newest fad in the region: bikini-clad baristas.

That’s right. The classic drive-through espresso stand has been transformed into an adult-only (in most counties) food service station. Obviously, management is not concerned about clothing their employees in weather-appropriate attire.  Yet, in at least one chain of stands, management hasn’t been concerned with paying them correctly either.

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Tags: Department of Labor, Employment | Add new comment