Washington Area Women's Foundation

Looking Toward the Future With a Gender Lens

Power10girlforWebI know it is Women’s History Month and that we are celebrating how our history is our strength.

But I have been thinking about our present and our future. And I am feeling cranky because I am tired of:

  • Reading articles about Social Security that do not acknowledge the reality that most people receiving Social Security are women. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 52 percent of Social Security beneficiaries were women in December 2008, compared to 40 percent who were men (the remaining 8 percent were children).
  • As research from our 2010 Portrait Project revealed, the majority (57 percent) of our region’s population over 65 is women. We also learned that older women are slightly more likely to be poor than all women in the region and that poverty rates are exceptionally high for women 75-84 in the District and Arlington County, where 1 in 5 is poor.
  • Learning about new research around children and youth, only to find out it does not address any gender differences. For example, Kids Count research does not break down its data by gender.
  • Hearing from government agencies and community-based organizations that they need help re-designing services to respond to the particular needs of women or girls – because those needs were not considered during program design. This still happens, even after 20+ years of literature about the need for gender-specific programs and services and the availability of effective models in many areas of practice.
  • Seeing advocacy campaigns focused on reducing poverty that do not acknowledge that the majority Americans who are poor are women and their children. As our Portrait Project showed, women in every jurisdiction in our region have higher poverty rates than men and women-headed households have the highest poverty rates of all.

I wonder how we can really understand tomorrow’s challenges to the success of women and girls if we don’t have the right information about what happened yesterday and today.

Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at Washington Area Women’s Foundation.