Womens Chair's blog

When given the task of writing about how jobs and the economy relate to women's issues, I first thought it might be fairly telling to look at the unemployment numbers for men versus women. And yes, without considering any outside factors, things look great! The unemployment rate is over 2% lower for women than for men age 20 and older. Women tend to work in fields like health care and education, which are less changeable even during hard economic times, whereas those that men are employed in, such as manufacturing and construction, are hit much harder.

Happy Primary Day!

Not surprisingly, but still refreshingly, Obama’s proposed 2010 budget looks pretty good for women. Featuring moderate increases in money allocated to global health, family planning, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the most exciting part has got to be the complete cutting of funds to abstinence-only education, and putting $110 million towards the new Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative. This funding will go to researching which types of sex education actually work, and which ones—cough, abstinence-only, cough—need to be done away with.