The Times-Picayune has a story about a study (pdf) from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research which shows that, as bad as everybody has it in New Orleans, women have it that much worse:
When it comes to economic opportunity in post-Katrina New Orleans, women, particularly African-American women, have been largely ignored, according to a report on the local labor market released Friday.
Because of the acute shortage of affordable housing across the flood-ravaged Gulf Coast, the study also found that few single-mother families have been able to return.
According to Avis Jones-DeWeever, the institute’s director of poverty, education and social justice, the storm made an already-bad situation worse for the women of New Orleans.
“Research suggests that long before Katrina, women were living at the bottom,” she said, “earning significantly less than men in the city at the same level of education, and earning significantly less than their female counterparts nationwide.”
And since the storm, data collected by the institute shows that men are benefiting more from the rebuilding effort than women, Jones-DeWeever said.
Consider some statistics:
The statistics in the study are disheartening, said state Rep. Karen Carter, who took part in the institute’s midday news conference.
“This report is quite tragic,” said Carter, D-New Orleans. “It’s unacceptable. Women vote. Women pay taxes. And women deserve better. The city will suffer if immediate action is not taken. It’s a crisis within the crisis that people are dealing with in their everyday lives as they try to rebuild.”
And that rebuilding is projected to take 10 to 15 years. One common theme of the report is that women must be given opportunities to participate in the rebuilding and trained and encouraged to take those opportunities, particularly in the high-paying construction trades.
H/T: Broadsheet.
This is a really great – and necessary – posting. Glad to see it. The Opportunity Agenda – in conjuntion with the Ms. Foundation for Women – has also done work in this area, and I’d like to point people to two resources.
First, a video that we produced about women in New Orleans that features Sara Gould, President of the Ms. Foundation.
You can watch the video here, and you can grab it to post on your own website via our YouTube channel.
We also have a variety of fact sheets about conditions in the gulf, many of which feature statistics on low-income women and women of color. You can find them here.
I hope people find these useful.
Mike Connery
Web Editor
The Opportunity Agenda
Last night, NBC Nightly News did a report on how domestic violence has become more of a problem in New Orleans post-Katrina. Two domestic violence shelters were wiped out, and the domestic violence unit of the police force was cut in half. The various stresses caused by the hurricane (job & housing issues, insurance company headaches, etc.) have caused some men to take out their frustrations on their wives, and now it has become even harder for women to leave.
If you go to the NBC News web site, you can watch video of the report. Right now it’s the first item listed under “NBC Video: Nightly News.”
I know this isn’t directly related to the labor issues in the post, but it is another way that some women have it worse in New Orleans right now.
One of the things that made me feel better about getting married in New Orleans is the fact that $12.50 of the $27.50 marriage license fee, goes to fund domestic domestic violence education in the parish where the license is purchased. Thanks for the links, Mike. And I encourage everyone who has HBO to check out Spike Lee’s show about Katrina tonight and tomorrow night 9pm ET/PT. I admittedly haven’t seen it, but I’m delighted to see what he has to say about everything.
That sounds like a good idea in principle but may be trickier to implement quickly. Many of the highly paid jobs in construction (site manager, plumber, electrician, engineer) take a fair bit of training and/or experience to attain.
While we should obviously make sure that women are not prevented or deterred from seeking the appropriate traiing and/or experience to get those jobs in the future, there’s no real way to make an “instant electrician”. So it may take a few years. Of course women could join in the work crew like everyone else. But that’s pretty brutal work and not all that highly paid in comparison.
Construction crew work also tends to be pretty physical, involving a decent bit of brute force. Carrying 80 pounds bags of cement ot multiple sheets of plywood up a ladder one-handed is a tricky business. This might cause problems for some (by no means all) women. I think the disparity in physical size and strength is much smaller than the current statistics would indicate, though, so it shouldn’t become an issue for a while (if ever).
One thing that jumped out at me about those statistics was the huge income disparity between the income ranges.
That means, the lowest-earning women made 75-85% of the lowest-earning men made, but the highest-earning of the high-earning women only made 48% of what the highest-earning men made. At the other end of that range, the disparity is a more modest 77.5%.
In other words, New Orleans has a huge glass ceiling problem.