By Olivia Morgan and Karen Skelton
Fifty years after President Lyndon B. Johnson called for a War on Poverty and enlisted Sargent Shriver to oversee it, the most important social issue of our day is once again the dire economic straits of millions of Americans. The deep and chronic poverty of a sliver of America in the 1960s has given way to a broader financial insecurity now experienced by a third of the country, mostly women and children. The fragile economic status of millions of American women is the shameful secret of the modern era—yet these women are also our greatest hope for change. That is the focus of this report.
The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink asks—and answers—big questions. Why are so many millions of women financially vulnerable, when so many other women are doing so well? Why are so many millions of women struggling to make ends meet, even though they are proudly working so hard and juggling so much? And why are working women more likely to be poor than working men? What is it about our nation—government, business, family, and even women themselves—that drives women to the financial brink? And what is at stake?
To answer these questions, we examined in detail three major cultural and economic changes over the past 50 years:
What we found is that Americans themselves are far ahead of government and business in adapting to changes in the nation that affect women and families. For example, people appear to understand that marriage—though it may offer families the best foundation for financial stability—is no longer the status quo for most Americans. Our groundbreaking polling shows that nearly two-thirds of people surveyed want government and society to adapt to the reality of single-parent families and to support them in all their new shapes and variations.
To forge a path forward that recognizes this reality and more, The Shriver Report brought together the best and brightest minds and challenged them to collaborate with us to develop fresh thinking around practical solutions. What makes this report unique is the combination of its components—academic research, personal reflections, authentic photojournalism, groundbreaking poll results, frontline workers, and box-office celebrities—all together in the same place, all contributing to a single issue of national importance: women and the economy. In The Shriver Report, Davos meets Main Street.
In America, one in three women is living in or near poverty. Forty-two million American women—and the more than 28 million children who depend on them—live on or over the brink of financial crisis. We know these women. They are our sisters, our aunts, and our neighbors. They are our dental hygienists, our restaurant servers, and our receptionists. They are the caretakers of our aging parents and our children. While most of these women on the brink are white, they are every color, creed, and ethnicity. And we should care about their well-being, not only because they make our own lives better, but also because they can make our nation richer and stronger.
The team that built this report produced bold ideas. Taken together, these ideas present a modern social architecture designed to make individuals, businesses, and government stronger, more innovative, and better adapted to the realities of America’s hardworking families.
One of the most important approaches of The Shriver Report is that the change needed for this nation to modernize its relationship with women begins with women themselves. Women on the brink of poverty may be the key to leading our nation to economic prosperity—and the most important first step may be their recognition of their own importance as providers for themselves and as leading players in our nation’s growth. Our poll found that more than 7 in 10 Americans believe women play an essential role in the national economy. Maria Shriver makes the case in her chapter that if we lead with women, we will have a robust nation. If we don’t, we won’t.
And women are a good bet. Women in our poll, despite their financial hardships, are resilient. An inspiring 79 percent of single mothers in our survey believe their economic situation will improve over the next five years. Eighty-three percent of low-income women making less than $20,000 a year told us, “I believe I have the ability to make significant changes in my life to make my life better.”
But girls don’t always bet on themselves—or recognize the stakes. With that in mind, we developed Life Education, or Life Ed: a call to women and girls to get smart. The schoolyard rhyme lays out the old life order: First comes love, then comes marriage, and only then comes the baby in the baby carriage. Today, the most important lesson we can impress on girls to keep them off the brink is “college before kids.” These girls are likely to become their own and their family’s most important resource as caregiver and breadwinner, and they need to see themselves that way while they’re still young and invest in themselves as future providers. With the clarity of hindsight, women in our poll identified leaving school early and not putting a higher priority on their career and education as the biggest regrets in their lives.
Led by Anne Mosle and Ascend at the Aspen Institute, The Shriver Report has developed a blueprint for this new Life Ed curriculum to teach girls how to meet the demands of the modern era. Fifty years ago, they were taught home economics, or Home Ec, because sewing, cooking, and managing the household were understood to be the ways in which they would interact with the economy. Life Ed draws on years of prior research, along with focus groups conducted for this Report, to identify knowledge and skills crucial to today’s teens: self-esteem, education, mentors and networks, and financial savvy.
With the benefit of experience, 39 percent of the women on the brink polled said they wished they had delayed having kids or had fewer children. Nearly half (47 percent) of single mothers polled said the same—a significant number, and a painful confession. As Ann O’Leary details in her chapter, “Marriage, Motherhood, and Men,” it must be a national priority to reduce unintended and unplanned pregnancies. We hope that Life Ed will be one of the tools that teaches future women the critical importance of developing their own skills and knowledge first, before parenthood, so that the “baby carriage” comes when the baby’s parents are prepared for parenting and its challenges.
Women can’t do it alone. Mothers are breadwinners or co-breadwinners in two-thirds of American families, and their success depends upon a workplace that supports their dual roles. During much of the 20th century, the idea of a “family wage” led many employers to provide greater compensation to male breadwinners than to married mothers and other workers not caring for family members. Today, employers need once again to adapt to support their changed workforce—to lift up the nation’s new providers. Ann Stevens, director of the Center for Poverty Research at the University of California, Davis, drew on the expertise of Ellen Galinsky and Families and Work Institute’s concept of Effective Workplaces—plus new research conducted for this Report—to create an index of workplace policies that are the most significant factors in the well-being of low-wage women workers and the success of their employers. Together, we present a Thrive Index for businesses, a first-of-its-kind compilation of questions for employers to identify and adopt the best workplace policies that most effectively support low-wage women workers.
While a college education is the surest individual path to financial security, our economy also depends on low-skilled workers, as Heather Boushey describes in her chapter on women and the economy. Over the next 20 years, the greatest growth will occur in job sectors that do not require postsecondary education—fully one-third of all U.S. jobs. These low-wage jobs are largely in the care and service industries on which the rest of the economy depends. We need people to fill these jobs, yet we cannot continue to consign tens of millions of women and families to jobs with low pay and few benefits, leaving them teetering on the brink of poverty. So we must also transform our workplaces, so that even the lowest-paying jobs can be balanced with family obligations and educational opportunities, becoming steppingstones to a brighter future.
The public is well ahead of policymakers on many of these issues. In our poll, the most popular policy changes for both the public and private sector explicitly attempt to accommodate work with family life. Melissa Boteach and Shawn Fremstad’s rigorous analysis of public solutions identify many policies that the government should adopt to benefit low-income women and provide a stable economic grounding on which families can build. Ninety percent of Americans, including 88 percent of Republicans, support “ensuring that women get equal pay for equal work in order to raise wages for working women and families,” the most popular public-policy proposal tested in our polling. Overwhelming support also exists in this country for paid sick leave, which was identified by low-wage women in our poll as the single most helpful policy their workplaces could adopt.
Women doing it all are often carrying the weight of an entire family as both breadwinner and caregiver. Lists such as this one, written by Crystal Thompson of Chicago, Illinois, are how many busy mothers organize the appointments and responsibilities of a regular week. {BARBARA KINNEY}
But Washington has proven increasingly sclerotic and dysfunctional. We cannot ask millions of women in poverty and on its brink to wait for action from Congress. Inspired by the success of Gov. Butch Otter’s program in Idaho and building on Maria Shriver’s pioneering work with WE Connect in California, we worked with the Corporation for National and Community Service, or CNCS, VISTA, and LIFT to develop the Shriver Corps, a new pilot national service project dedicated to building pathways to prosperity for low-income women and families by simplifying and modernizing the process by which they access benefits, training, and other services.
Shriver Corps members will develop and implement volunteer-training programs and build local services and partnerships to help families access resources that will put them on sounder economic footing. At the same time, Corps members will design and develop new pilot programs to deploy throughout six target regions across the country. Through this three-year partnership with CNCS, the Shriver Corps will build capacity to lift untold numbers of women and families off the brink of financial insecurity.
Why does this matter? It matters because millions of resilient, hardworking women will strengthen our nation’s economy and our children’s future. It matters because America wants to be competitive in a global economy, and it has disadvantaged itself by sidelining women. It matters because pervasive insecurity and economic hardship are the single most common American story today.
Millions of women on the brink know more about stretching a budget, not wasting a dime, and investing in what matters than many of the people who make 100 times more money than they do. They are tenacious and entrepreneurial. The American spirit lives through them.
Yet too many of the nation’s institutions are still based on assumptions from half a century ago—assumptions that don’t respect women’s work, don’t support their ambition, their careers, and caregiving roles, and don’t respond to their occasional and temporary, yet essential, needs.
The Shriver Report reveals this quiet reality: The people who we expect to raise us, care for us, and work to support us are too often left unsupported and uncared for. As more women have joined the paid labor force, a portion of the work they do without pay—cooking, cleaning, and caregiving—has been outsourced to paid caregivers. But perhaps in part because it continues to be seen as “women’s work,” this work is undervalued. The typical child care worker, for example, makes only about $9.50 an hour.
In the first and second Shriver Reports, we celebrated women as half the workforce for the first time in our nation’s history, and as the primary caretakers for an aging population struggling with Alzheimer’s and other debilitating diseases that require round-the-clock care. We proclaimed that A Woman’s Nation “changes everything.” The fact that women are half of all workers and primary caretakers does change everything, but not necessarily for the better. We as a nation have not come to terms with what it actually takes for women working in poorly-compensated jobs to meet these demands.
Not only do the extraordinary contributors to this special report distinguish it from any other report of its kind, but—for the first time this year—our report is being amplified through an unprecedented complement of diverse media. To bring emotional counterbalance to our academic research, Maria Shriver brought our work to the iconic documentarian Sheila Nevins at HBO, who agreed to fund a film in conjunction with this report, bringing to life the challenges, hopes, and reality of women living on the brink. At the same time, we are once again partnering with NBC News for a week of special coverage across multiple programs. Atlantic Monthly is bringing the report to life by convening thought leaders in Washington, D.C., to discuss the report’s findings and implications. Our website, www.ShriverReport.org, brings the report to life as a new digital home for these special Shriver reports and a place to publish people reporting from the front lines. Our all-female team of award-winning photojournalists also brings the report to life, having crisscrossed the country to capture images of women living on the brink. Finally, university professors around the country will use The Shriver Report as a text to teach a new generation of students and future leaders.
Many American women have grown increasingly powerful. Still, there is much to be done to achieve equality. We cannot hope to provide equal opportunity to rise when a third of our nation struggles for footing on financially shaky ground.
To strengthen the foundation for women, we argue for A Woman’s Nation Reimagined. In a reimagined nation, political, business, media thought leaders, and women themselves all understand what it means for women to be both driving the economy and caretaking. Collectively, the nation makes adjustments that provide women a solid foundation, so they can push back from the brink and thrive.
Dee Saint Franc and her daughter, Azariah, always keep each other laughing, despite the difficult circumstances keeping them on the brink. {BARBARA RIES}
At the end of this Report, we provide a list of 10 things we all can do individually to collectively help our nation push back from the financial brink.
Women have long led transformational change in this country, from the fight to abolish slavery to the fight for women’s suffrage, from the push to obtain college degrees to the push against the glass ceiling. Having upended the nation’s social structure, we can change the nation’s laws around paid sick days, pay equity, and child care. We can change the way businesses accommodate mom breadwinners. And we can change the way girls are educated about their important role as providers.
We can do this. And we must.
Learn more at www.ShriverReport.org.