On May 11, The Urban Institute and Washington Area Women’s Foundation hosted the second annual Stepping Stones Research Briefing, an event bringing together researchers, supporters of The Women’s Foundation, Grantee Partners, and members of the community to discuss some of the latest research on issues facing women-headed families in the Washington region.
The idea of holding a research briefing grew out of a challenge from The Women’s Foundation to encourage and promote public policy research with a “gender lens.”
Since the very beginning, The Women’s Foundation has been committed to basing its strategies and grantmaking on solid information. Starting with The Portrait Project: A Portrait of Women and Girls in the Washington Metropolitan Area, and continuing with its commitment to informed grantmaking and results-based evaluation, The Women’s Foundation has sought out and used high quality data and research to inform its actions.
And so, the Stepping Stones Research Briefing was born!
The first two briefings have been a great opportunity to showcase some of the outstanding research being done on issues of importance to women in the region. But, doing research with a gender perspective means more than just comparing women with men. As The Urban Institute’s Margery Turner put it in her welcoming remarks, "We did not want to simple-mindedly run everything separately on the basis of gender, but rather to think about the ways in which taking a gender perspective might generate new insights coming out of research and new ideas on the implications of research for policy and practice."
Over the next few weeks, some of the researchers who participated in the research briefing will be writing their own blog entries, sharing with you additional insights from their work.
Their presentations touched on three policy areas:
- Financial education and wealth creation – Megan Gallagher and Oramenta F. Newsome discussed the opportunities and challenges for increasing wealth in women-headed families through homeownership.
- Child care and early education – Jesse Bailey, Elaine Weiss, and Gina Adams presented both local and national perspectives on strategies to increase access to quality child care, a vital support for single women with children in the workforce.
- Microenterprise development – Nancy M. Pindus, Telaekah Brooks, and Roxana Moayedi described the barriers to women trying to start their own businesses, including perspectives from local women entrepreneurs, and some of the assistance that is available to help them succeed in the business world.
Like you, I will be looking forward to hearing more about the exciting research that was presented at the research briefing.
But, for those of you who can’t wait, you can listen to the entire set of presentations through a series of audio files available on the Urban Institute Web site.
Peter Tatian is a senior research associate in the Urban Institute’s Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities. (The views expressed here are his own and should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.) Peter plays a crucial role in the development and success of the Stepping Stones Research Briefing.
For an additional perspective on the Stepping Stones Research Briefing, check out Lisa Claudy Fleischman’s post, "Learning Through a Gender Lens."
