President Biden’s Build Back Better plan, which bundles together a host of social and climate programs, is unraveling. Although it passed the House, key Democratic senators are refusing to support it, which effectively dooms the plan in a 50-50 Senate. Yet grouping together the social policies proposed in the bill remain urgent for women, and especially Latina and Black women in the workforce.
Grouping together policies that explicitly respond to Latina and Black women’s specific vulnerabilities in the workforce can alleviate their acute economic distress, which have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. My research indicates that women of color are advocating for linking social policies such as caregiving support and paid leave together to help them recover from the pandemic. As Democrats consider taking apart the bill and addressing each issue piecemeal, they may lose the enthusiastic support of Black and Latina women and risk leaving them further behind.
Women of color were shut out of the workforce at higher rates during the pandemic
The pandemic hurt all groups of working women, but hit Black and Latina women the hardest. As 2021 started, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black women’s unemployment rate was 8.5 percent, Latinas’ was 8.8 percent, while the rate was 5.1 percent for White women. That’s partly because Black and Latina working women are concentrated in industries that shut down during the pandemic, such as hospitality, restaurants, retail and education. The layoffs in these industries — coupled with existing policy deficits in health care, retirement and paid leave — helped push women of color out of the workforce.
While unemployment rates have dropped over the past year, Black and Latina women remain unemployed at higher rates than White men and women. Employment rates for Black and Latina women are nearly 10 percent lower than they were pre-pandemic.
How I did my research
To find out whether social policies clustered together would help address these disproportionate outcomes, I conducted a survey experiment between November 2020 and March 2021 with Women Employed. Women Employed is a nearly 50-year-old nonprofit organization based in Chicago that advocates for city, state and federal policies to address unfair working conditions, educational disparities and economic inequality among women, particularly women of color. Its leaders often reach out to their thousands of supporters to sign online petitions to support these policy agendas.
Before this study, Women Employed generally sent out petitions for single-policy initiatives. To research how support, especially among women of color, would vary if they were asked about “a multi-policy initiative” (i.e., policies grouped together) to address overlapping issues such as unaffordable child care and paid leave, I conducted an experiment.
The survey experiment included 755 Women Employed supporters, including email subscribers, event attendees, partner organizational staff, donors, board members and social media followers. Among those who responded, 32 percent identified as Black or Latina. While not representative of the national population, these respondents do represent a subset of women active on the issues of economic inequality that Black and Latina women face.
Participants were randomly assigned to read about either one policy or about several grouped as a multi-policy initiative. All these appeals included the organization’s logo and a message that said covid-19 is especially hard for “women that are most marginalized in the workforce (i.e., women of color, low-paid workers, immigrants).” Those who were asked to support just one policy read about either caregiving or paid leave, while the other half of respondents read about both issues.
After reading this appeal, respondents were asked whether they wanted to sign an online petition to ask members of Congress to expand the Heroes Act, a pandemic relief initiative, by including the single policy or multi-policy initiative that they had just read about.
Build Back Better would have offered pre-K and child-care funding. But states might not sign on.
These women were far more enthusiastic about the two policies together than about either policy alone
No matter what race, ethnicity, class or gender, 80 percent of respondents who read about the multi-policy agenda agreed to sign the petition. Meanwhile, only 25 percent of those who read about a single policy agreed to sign the petition. These results were statistically significant.
Black and Latina women respondents were especially motivated. Not only did more of them sign online petitions when the two issues were linked, but they also were more willing to say they would call their legislators, attend political events, sign additional petitions and raise funds. That wasn’t true for other groups, including White women.
While every demographic among Women Employed’s supporters were more mobilized by grouping caregiving and paid leave together than by either policy separately, Black and Latina women were especially active supporters. In other words, research suggests that Build Back Better’s multi-policy approach is exactly what these women of color are advocating for.
What do Black and Latina women want?
Latina and Black women are concentrated in what have been considered “essential” occupations — jobs at high risk for coronavirus exposure that lack safety net policies like paid sick time. When I asked survey participants what issues they experienced during the pandemic, Black and Latina women reported that the top issue at work was virus exposure.
Many Black and Latina women navigate jobs without flexible work schedules, paid leave or affordable child-care options. That leaves them highly vulnerable to financial instability, poverty, illness without health care, and homelessness. No single policy alone can address the ways in which they are positioned among these issues.
Multi-policy initiatives, this research suggests, better represent the interests of Latina and Black women that are marginalized in today’s economy by their race, class and gender. As the Build Back Better bill hangs in the balance, so do the economic futures of Black and Latina women.
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Margaret Teresa Brower (@MargaretTBrower) is a postdoctoral fellow with the Inequality in America Initiative at Harvard University. She studies racial, gender and class inequality in America.