The National Partnership for Women and Families has released a fact sheet on the state of family-friendly policies that affect the economic stability and well-being of women and families — and the news isn’t good. The wage gap, discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, a lack of paid family and medical leave and paid sick days, unpredictable scheduling and hours, and stagnant wages continue to keep women, particularly mothers, from realizing their economic potential.

For International Women’s Day and the “A Day Without a Woman” strikes occurring across America, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has compiled together 5 important facts to know about women and the economy:

1. Hispanic women will wait 232 years for equal pay, if current trends continue.
2. Equal pay would cut poverty by more than half for working women and grow the U.S. economy.

A new PrioritiesUSA poll from Global Strategy Group and Garin Hart Yang provides important insight to two voting groups that were critical in the 2016 election: “swing voters” who supported Obama in 2012, and Trump in 2016, and “turnout voters” who voted in 2012, but stayed home in 2016. The research included a survey of 801 Obama/Trump voters, and focus groups in key swing states.

New research published in the Washington Post confirms one of the worst-kept secrets in politics: Voter ID laws suppress minority voting.

“When we compare overall turnout in states with strict ID laws to turnout in states without these laws, we find no significant difference. That pattern matches with most existing studies. But when we dig deeper and look specifically at racial and ethnic minority turnout, we see a significant drop in minority participation when and where these laws are implemented.

Hispanics are affected the most: Turnout is 7.1 percentage points lower in general elections and 5.3 points lower in primaries in strict ID states than it is in other states. Strict ID laws mean lower African American, Asian American and multiracial American turnout as well. White turnout is largely unaffected.

These laws have a disproportionate effect on minorities, which is exactly what you would expect given that members of racial and ethnic minorities are less apt to have valid photo ID.”

 

“At least 16,400 Texans who voted in the November election wouldn’t have been able to cast ballots if the state’s voter identification law had been in full effect, state voting records show.” This report from the Austin American-Statesman is a chilling reminder of what experts agree is the true intent of such laws: disenfranchising voters.

“Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir said the volume of the declarations validates the concerns that the law’s opponents raised. “The voter ID law was going to take away the legal right to vote of 2,300 people” in the county, she said. The voters who signed those declarations, she said, “tended to be poor, tend to be elderly — maybe they weren’t born in a hospital or had other extenuating circumstances.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office has defended the law, didn’t respond to a request for comment.”

However, former Texas Secretary of State Carlos Cascos, an Abbott appointee who stepped down after the November election, admits that the law would have prevented voters from casting their ballots: “Asked if that meant those voters would have been disenfranchised, Cascos said, “I would agree. That is a way to look at it.”

“And, he observed, the number of potentially disenfranchised voters “might not be important for a presidential race or a statewide race, but it very well might matter for local votes, where there can be really small margins.”

“At the end of the day, we want to make sure every qualified Texan who can vote should be allowed to vote,” he said, “(16,000) people wanted to vote and got to vote, so that’s great.”

Full story in the Austin American-Statesman.

The numbers are in: “The Women’s March of 2017 was the largest protest in recent history, bringing together over 500,000 people in DC- the location of the flagship march, and over 2.9 million people nationwide.”

Their findings “suggest that the Women’s March has potentially lit the political fires of a new generation of activists and reactivated the political activism of others. Indeed, a third of the participants reported that the Women’s March was their first time participating in a protest ever. For over half of the participants (55.9%), the March was their first protest in 5 years (including those who had never participated before).”

A new study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) and Oxfam America finds that more than one in four employed women in the United States are concentrated in low-wage “women’s work”—such as teaching young children, cleaning, serving, and caring for elders—jobs that are done primarily by women, pay less than $15 per hour, and provide few benefits.

Our sister organization, Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund, and Democracy Corps surveyed 1,300 voters between Nov. 7 and Nov. 9, 2016, including an oversample of 200 Rising American Electorate voters and 200 battleground state voters (AZ, FL, OH, IA, NC, NV, NH, PA, VA, WI). Select highlights are below; you can read the full survey here.

Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight sums up the current polling:

We could be looking at the largest gender gap in a presidential election since at least 1952…The last time women favored either party’s nominee by more than 20 percentage points was in 1972, when Republican Richard Nixon crushed Democrat George McGovern among both sexes. The only Democrat ever to win women by more than 20 points was Lyndon Johnson in 1964.”