AAUW Dialog

What a wonderfully ambiguous question. Have I read what yet? The latest best-selling novel?  Walter Cronkite’s autobiography?  That romance novel stashed under the nonfiction pile next to my bed?  Your favorite blog of the day? How about the 450-page Shriver Report?

There’s a great reason for each and every one of us to read The Shriver Report — A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything — it provides insight for and about working women in America today, and we need all the understanding we can get. I liked this statement from the “Preface”:  

When we look back over the 20th century and try to understand what’s happened to workers and their families and the challenges they now face, the movement of women out of the home and into paid employment stands out as a unique and powerful transformation.

And this one from “The New Breadwinners”:

Women now, for the first time, make up half (49.9 percent as of July 2009) of all workers on U.S. payrolls. This is a dramatic change from just over a generation ago: In 1969, women made up only a third of the workforce (35.3 percent).

Some stats, taken directly from the report that jumped out at me:

• Women now constitute just over a third of engineers (35.9 percent in 2008) and lawyers and judges (36.5 percent), under a third of physicians and surgeons (31.8 percent), and nearly 4 in 10 managers (38.2 percent).
• Still, women remain the dominant workers in traditional female occupations, making up 97.8 percent of all preschool and kindergarten teachers, 97.3 percent of dental hygienists, 96.3 percent of all secretaries and administrative assistants, and 95.5 percent of all child care workers.

I guess it’s only fair that I answer the “Have you read it yet?” question. No, I have not read the entire report, and when I did a thoroughly impromptu, nonscientific study of women who I thought probably had read it, I couldn’t find one individual who had read it. (I asked women outside of our office — since we’re AAUW, I thought that might skew the results.) Well, that’s not fair. Most women had, like me, read the “Executive Summary” online via www.awomansnation.com or watched the news coverage, especially that on Shriver’s old stomping grounds, NBC.  One woman at Lafayette Park in front of the White House said she had bought it, but had not yet read it (hmmm … ).

Is it important that we all read the entire report? To be honest, I don’t think so, not if you are the average person who barely has time to read labels in an attempt to serve healthy food to yourself or your family. But I do think it’s important, at the very least, to read the online summary, read essays from  insightful women, search under A Woman’s Nation and see what other’s have to say about the report, and check out AAUW’s policy recommendations based on the report. Take action, too; urge your senator to support the Paycheck Fairness Act.  Ignorance so often gets in the way of truth; if we don’t understand the state of the working woman in America today, who will?