This Monday is Women’s Equality Day — the anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing women the right to vote. The following analysts are available for interviews:

YIFAT SUSSKIND
Susskind, associate director of MADRE, an international women’s human rights organization, said: “Women’s Equality Day provides an opportunity for us all to reflect on women’s rights and equality around the world. Four major areas of concern for women that require our attention include the following: Firstly, women throughout the world have been experiencing cutbacks in healthcare services as the U.S. attacks healthcare funding…. A second issue that continues to be huge for women around the globe is a need to develop alternatives to neo-liberal economic programs. Policies that place developing countries at the bottom rung also target women, who tend to bear the brunt of the hardship in struggling economies. Another important issue is that of international justice, the international criminal court. MADRE has worked for women’s equality in this field through the creation of the Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice. Finally, we need to reflect on the effects that growing U.S. militarization has on women throughout the world, and take time to honor the innovative and powerful efforts of women to resist militarization.”
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RICKIE SOLINGER
Author of Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Abortion, Adoption and Welfare in the U.S., Solinger said: “Which women flourished during the economic boom — and which women did not benefit from the high-flying economy of recent times? Today, with the boom behind us, women across the country — especially the ones pushed by welfare ‘reform’ into jobs with extra-low ‘female’ wages, without health benefits, in communities with inadequate day care opportunities — are facing lay-offs, lifetime public assistance limits, and soaring housing costs. Does Women’s Equality Day claim ‘equality’ for middle-class women or for all women?”

RADHIKA BALAKRISHNAN
Associate professor of economics at Marymount Manhattan College, Balakrishnan is author of The Hidden Assembly Line: Gender Dynamics of Subcontracted Work in a Global Economy. She said: “One of the preconditions of women’s equality is a recognition of the paid and unpaid work that women do. Women all over the world are the primary care-givers in a family. We need to understand the relationship between women’s waged work and their unpaid work they conduct in the care economy. Government policy often assumes that the unpaid work that women do is infinitely elastic, so that when governments cut funding for healthcare they assume that women will then take care of the sick. This is also often in conjunction with a need to work longer hours in the wage market as well. Macroeconomic policy has to be understood in terms of both its gendered implications and assumptions. In order to achieve women’s equality, we need to have a global perspective. The work that women do in a small town in Bangladesh will end up as clothing on a poor woman in New York. Advocacy for women’s equality needs to understand not only the problems of the poor in each individual country but how their lives are intrinsically connected through the global economy.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167