District of Columbia

Yesterday I got to see how local government can provide tools to help fight for a level playing field in athletics. Together with the Sankofa Project, the Center was proud to be recognized for their work on a bill introduced by D.C. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie with unanimous Council support.

The proposed legislation would require D.C. public schools to disclose certain key athletics equity data by gender on an annual basis, such as

• enrollment and sports participation numbers by gender and race;
• coach-to-athlete ratios;
• compensation, qualifications and duties of coaches;
• funding sources and spending;
• scheduling and post-season play;
• training and academic support; and
• quality of facilities and equipment.

Under the bill, all of this information would be required to be publicly available on the city’s website. Read more »

Girls in the District of Columbia are being shortchanged when it comes to opportunities to play sports and benefits such as coaching, facilities and equipment, in violation of Title IX. That's what we said in a complaint filed yesterday with the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR). 

Information provided by DCPS pursuant to a FOIA request shows disparities of over 10 percentage points and as high as 26 percentage points between girls' enrollment and the share of athletic participation opportunities provided to them in the majority of the district's 15 public high schools. These gaps mean that DCPS would need to provide almost 700 additional athletic opportunities to girls to provide parity. The Center's complaint requests that OCR investigate all District public high schools and require them to treat girls fairly. 

Check out the following snippets from the Washington Post, which published a story about the NWLC complaint: 

• Daja Dorsey, who graduated from Ballou in June and played basketball, volleyball, softball and ran track, said the boys' football and basketball teams got more intensive coaching, more attention from recruiters and scouts and more college scholarships than the girls' teams. "It was a whole different approach for the boys," she said. "I wouldn't have minded that." 

It's a fitting question to ask this week, which marks the 75th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the landmark law that established the first federal minimum wage. And it's a particularly important question for women, who make up nearly two-thirds of minimum wage workers nationwide.

The answer, though, depends a lot on where you live. A majority of states follow the federal minimum wage, which is not scheduled to rise even though it has been stuck at $7.25 an hour for almost four years — and for tipped workers in states that follow the federal standard, the minimum cash wage has been frozen at a shockingly low $2.13 per hour for more than 20 years. But in states like Washington, Colorado, Ohio, and Vermont, the minimum wage will automatically rise in January 2014 to keep up with inflation, and minimum wage increases recently enacted in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island will also begin to take effect in 2014. 

To make it easy for you to find out what’s happening with the minimum wage in your state, the National Women's Law Center just released this handy interactive map. 

You can click on any state to see its minimum wage and tipped minimum wage, along with the share of minimum wage workers who are women, the next scheduled increase in the minimum wage, and any recent action on the minimum wage in the state legislature.  Read more »

Stop the restrictions!

Tell your Representative to oppose the effort to limit access to abortion for women who live in Washington, D.C.

With only a few days left until August recess, this is what they are prioritizing — an anti-abortion bill that the Senate will never consider? Well, the House of Representatives is at it again and this time, just to add insult to injury, they are going after women who have no voting representation in the House.

Tell your Member of Congress to oppose the D.C. Abortion Ban and stop your Representative from making decisions for women about their reproductive health.

H.R. 3803, also known as the "D.C. Abortion Ban," would ban almost all abortions in Washington, D.C. for women starting at twenty weeks post-fertilization. The legislation seeks to ban abortion after twenty weeks regardless of a woman's situation and without exceptions for rape, incest or to protect a woman's health.

Last week, the House Judiciary Committee marked up H.R. 3803, a bill that would ban most abortions at twenty weeks post-fertilization in the District of Columbia. This bill targets women in D.C., women who have no voting representation in Congress. The bill is blatantly unconstitutional as it bans abortions pre-viability and fails to provide any health exception pre- or post- viability. And it has no exception for rape or incest survivors. It’s a bill that basically says: no, we really don’t care about the women who would be affected by this bill.

As with the mark-up of CIANA, the mark-up of H.R. 3803 was incredibly frustrating to watch as the Judiciary Committee rejected common-sense amendments, including an exception to protect the woman’s health and an exception for women who have cancer and “need life-saving treatment incompatible with continuing the pregnancy.” Read more »

“It is unconscionable that someone would come into my city from the outside and try to impose a law that doesn’t represent the best interests of anyone, especially families like mine. This proposed law is downright cruel, as it would inflict pain on the families, the women, and the babies it purports to protect.” –Christy Zink

It’s round three in the Judiciary Committee. Last Thursday, Trent Franks (R-AZ) held yet another hearing on yet another bill that is aimed at denying women access to a constitutional right. This time the bill in discussion, the D.C. Abortion Ban (H.R. 3803), seeks to impose a ban on almost all abortions 20 weeks post-fertilization. The only exception to the ban is to save the life of the mother, and even that exception is restricted to when the mother faces physical life-threatening problems (being suicidal is apparently not life-threatening…). It is unconstitutional because it bans abortions pre-viability and fails to include any exception for health.

Oh, and did I mention that the bill only affects D.C. (a population who has no voting representative in Congress)?

The hearing began with a brief tangling over whether the only popularly-elected official for DC would get to testify on a bill that only affects DC. After the kerfuffle ended (with Rep. Franks again refusing to allow Rep. Norton Holmes to testify), the four witnesses gave their testimony. Read more »