A Feminist To-Do List for the Biden-Harris Administration

I have been counting down to January 20, 2021, for the last four years.

And though I am still shaken by the recent attack on our democracy, I cannot help but feel a twinge of hope as well. With President Biden and Vice President Harris at the helm and with Democratic control of Congress, we can begin to stem the pain of the last four years, fight this pandemic, and rebuild the country to be equitable and just for all women and girls.

And I am starting to feel joy again. My heart has been yearning to sing Madam Vice President, three words that I had never been able to utter before and cannot get out of my head now. Three words to repudiate every time I was told growing up that only boys were allowed or that what I wanted to do or be was not appropriate for a girl. Three words to say to my daughters to give them strength and to validate their dreams.

To be clear, the country is not turning into utopia on January 20. Women and girls, especially Black and brown women and girls, suffered immensely over the last four years but have been marginalized and dismissed for generations before that. This pandemic hasn’t helped either. The National Women’s Law Center analyzed the latest jobs report, and we found that all of the jobs lost in December were women’s jobs. More than one in 12 Black women ages 20 and over (8.4%) and about one in 11 Latinas (9.1%) remained unemployed. For Asian women ages 16 and over, the share of unemployed workers who had been out of work for six months or longer was a startling 44.0%. But it has been a long time since we have been in this position to dream and build, a far cry from the sheer terror of the last few years. The list of what the new administration and Congress should do for women and girls is long, but we can start with six things:

1. Providing COVID relief. The first thing on top of any agenda must be further relief from the devastating pandemic and its accompanying economic collapse. The recent bill passed in December is a start, but families and communities are still struggling immensely. Women, especially Black, Indigenous, Latina, Asian American, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women, are the front-line workers responding to COVID-19, but are also more likely to lose our jobs and more likely to be pushed out of the labor force altogether. We need to do more — provide more direct assistance, paid leave, extended unemployment benefits. We must also support our small businesses, state and local governments, and our child care providers. Vaccines must also be administered equitably and be made accessible to the most hard-hit communities.
2. Ensuring fair wages. Even before the pandemic, the economy did not work for everyone. Stock prices may have been soaring, but that did not reflect reality for many families who saw their costs going up far faster than their wages. Black and brown women, in particular, found themselves disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs and being paid far less than men for similar jobs. We can go far in addressing this by raising the federal minimum wage to $15, including for tipped workers, and closing the race and gender wage gap by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act. The incoming administration does not need to wait for Congress to act, though. The Biden-Harris administration can raise the minimum wage for all workers, including tipped workers, on federal construction and service contracts to $15 an hour and can require federal contractors to disclose their race and gender wage gaps on publicly accessible websites.
3. Strengthening protections against workplace sexual harassment. More than 15 years after Tarana Burke coined the phrase and more than three years after millions of women joined their voices together in a crescendo of “Me too,” there has yet to be broad federal legislation passed to address workplace sexual harassment. That must change. Last Congress, Senator Patty Murray and Representatives Katherine Clark and Ayanna Pressley introduced the BE HEARD Act, a groundbreaking and comprehensive bill to address and prevent all forms of harassment in the workplace. The bill would extend protections against harassment and other forms of discrimination to all workers, promote transparency and accountability, and require and fund efforts to prevent workplace harassment and discrimination. Congress must pass this bill.
   
4. Restoring civil rights protections for survivors in schools. While women were saying “Me too,” Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos was tearing down protections for sexual harassment survivors in schools. In 2020, she announced a new Title IX rule that among other things, allows schools (and in many cases requires them) to dismiss sexual harassment complaints if the student was sexually harassed in the wrong place, asked the wrong person for help, or hasn’t suffered enough by DeVos’ standards. The Biden-Harris administration must stop enforcement of this rule and issue a new Title IX rule addressing sexual harassment in schools that responds to the needs and experiences of student survivors.
   
5. Protecting and expanding access to reproductive health care. Across large swaths of the country, people are unable to access essential reproductive health care, including birth control and abortion. This is compounded by the COVID crisis and underlying systemic racism, jeopardizing people’s health, economic security, futures, and lives. Voters want the president to take action: The National Women’s Law Center’s election eve poll showed over half of voters overall agree — and 73% of those who voted for President Biden strongly agree — that the next president and Congress should create better policies to protect and expand access to reproductive health care, including abortion. The Biden-Harris administration must first reverse the damage of the last four years — including identifying, reviewing, and addressing the harmful regulations, guidance, and policies of the Trump administration. But that is not enough. The Biden-Harris administration must also set the stage for policies that ensure that people can access the reproductive health care they need, when they need it, without discrimination, stigma, or barriers.
   
6. Passing universal child care. There is a very simple fact that businesses and lawmakers seem to finally understand during this pandemic — parents need child care in order to work. But the pandemic has decimated the child care system and is threatening to wipe out half the child care slots in the country. The system was strained even before the pandemic, though — it was so underfunded that it served only one in six eligible children. I dream instead of universal child care. I dream that all families can find and afford high-quality child care at a setting of their choice, that child care professionals would all be paid living wages, and that care is provided for children up to 13 years of age. We need a big, bold new child care proposal that would fulfill these ideals and more, but we cannot get there if we do not stabilize the child care system now. The next COVID relief package must provide at least $50 billion in stabilization funding for the child care sector.
   

There is a lot of hard work ahead, but I welcome the joyful and hopeful work of building the vision we want for our country.