Wisconsin

The Wisconsin Assembly is considering a bill that would undermine women’s ability to control their reproductive health. AB 216  targets both access to abortion AND access to contraception—a move that a member of the Committee on Health reviewing the bill described as “ironic.” I would add ‘poorly informed, contrary to reason, and designed to undermine women’s ability to control their health care decisions.’

If passed, the bill would weaken women’s reproductive health in two ways:

1. It would ban insurance coverage of abortion for state employees.
2. It would allow certain kinds of bosses to take away women’s access to insurance coverage of birth control.

On April 17, women’s earnings from 2011 and 2012 will finally match their male counterparts’ 2011 earnings. Yes, it takes women a little over 15 months to make the same income that it takes men to make in 12. How is it that in 2012, women are still only making 77 cents to a man’s dollar? We have been fighting for equality for so long! We have had success – like the Equal Pay Act and, more recently, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. But we still have a long way to go.

We have even further to go now that the Wisconsin legislature and the Governor of Wisconsin repealed the state’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act, which beefed up the penalties for pay discrimination and the relief available to victims. This means that if a woman in Wisconsin finds that she is being paid less than her male counterpart, she has fewer remedies and less relief available to her than she did before.  And given that pay discrimination is hard to identify and hard to challenge, that’s definitely a step in the wrong direction.

The Wisconsin Restaurant Association was among the supporters of the repeal, which is pretty unsettling to me. Currently the tipped minimum wage stands at $2.13/hour, where it’s been stuck since 1991. Women make up two-thirds of employees in tipped jobs. Read more »

The National Women’s Law Center hosted a daylong seminar in Washington, DC welcoming 18 state advocates from 10 states across the country to launch a new project, State of Women. Read more »