GENDER EQUALITY

Why Alan Cares

Alan co-founded City Year in order to give all young people a chance to reach their potential, give back and unite in common purpose with others from all backgrounds to solve pressing societal problems. He has been a champion for full equal rights his entire life.

Alan played an integral role in organizing the Women’s March following Trump’s election. He served on the steering committee for the Boston Women’s March and co-founded the Sister March Network so that organizers across the nation and the world could coordinate with one another. By the end, 645 marches were held on all seven continents and more than 5 million people across the globe marched for human rights, dignity, compassion and justice. In Congress, he will leverage this experience as an organizer and coalition-builder to finally get legislation through Congress that guarantees equal rights for all genders.

This generation faces a systemic challenge of continued gender inequality. Over decades, we have made promising milestones in granting equal rights to all genders, from the Nineteenth Amendment, to the Civil Rights act, to the Equal Pay act. But today, we are not where we should be. Alan will champion the cause of equal rights for all and gender equality from day one.

The Facts

  • Today, 57 years after the Equal Pay Act was signed into law, women in Massachusetts on average still make just $0.81 for every dollar paid to men. Black women in Massachusetts make $0.59 for every dollar paid to white men. Latinx women make just $0.51 for every dollar paid to white men.
  • A 20-year old woman just starting full time, year round work stands to lose $407,760 over a 40-year career compared to her male counterpart
  • In 2018, women held 20.8% of the board seats on Russell 1000 companies
  • In 2017, men in the United States had three times more retirement savings than women.

  • From 2018 to 2019, due to attacks on the Affordable Care Act, over 600,000 women lost their insurance coverage which provided birth control at no out-of-pocket cost. This is a troubling decline.
  • Lower-income women in 19 states do not have comprehensive birth control coverage because their state refuses to expand Medicaid, and in seven of those states they have no birth control coverage whatsoever because their state does not have a family planning program.
  • Poverty is a particularly acute problem for women of color, affecting 21.4 percent of Black women, 18.7 percent of Latinas, and 22.8 percent of Native American women, compared to the national poverty rate for white men of 7.0 percent.

For more information, check out this interactive by the National Women’s Law Center.

ALAN'S ACTION PLAN

Alan believes in equal pay not just in principle, but in practice. We need to address the underlying systemic factors that not only prevent women from earning equal pay for equal work, but also unfairly result in fewer women, and in particular women of color, in positions of leadership.

Alan believes in the right to choose. Alan believes that the right to decide to have a safe and legal abortion is indispensable, and that it would be a travesty for the courts to overturn Roe v. Wade and turn the clocks back to a time when abortions were illegal. He believes that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is one that each pregnant person should be able to make, together with their family and doctor, and that this is not a decision to be put in the hands of politicians. Alan strongly supports the principles established in Roe vs. Wade, and will help ensure that they are protected by supporting judicial nominees with the same commitment. In addition to safeguarding this liberty, Alan wants to make sure that people of all income levels, have access to reproductive health care, including services that will help to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. Assuring reproductive health care so that people’s lives and their health are not put in jeopardy is a priority that Alan will uphold.

Alan supports increased funding for Planned Parenthood and reproductive health. He supports the repeal of the Hyde amendment to make services more affordable and accessible to low-income and minority women, as well as expanding education programs to destigmatize women’s health and wellness issues. For more information on Healthcare policy, read Alan’s plan here.

Alan will build a bipartisan coalition behind the Equality Act. It passed the House on May 17, 2019, but is stalled in the Senate. It would amend the Civil Rights Act to “prohibit discrimination on the basis of the sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition of an individual, as well as because of sex-based stereotypes.” If we build a broad coalition behind this issue, we can pass the Equality Act with bipartisan support. For more information on LGBTQ+ equality, read Alan’s plan here.

Alan will include more women of color in the policy conversation about gender equality. Women of color experience some of the most disproportionate outcomes on health, economic security, safety, and equality. We need to work at an interdisciplinary level to combat the overlapping gender, race, and other gaps to ensure our solutions work for everyone.