8/25/2004 By a woman's measure : Republicans and Democrats both want to capture women's votes. Does either party deserve them?
Elizabeth Noll
Editor's note: With the presidential election battle heating up, both Republicans and Democrats are targeting women voters, each claiming their party best represents women's interests. At MWP, we decided we needed to ask, and try to answer, the question: What have they done for women lately?
The result is our two-issue series on political parties and gender politics.
In this issue
By a women's measure: how the DFL and GOP stack up on six key issues important to women and families
Where the girls are: do women's political organizations really have any clout? p. 14
In the next issue
Insider politics: party platforms and support for women candidates
Women of power: a look at those in the forefront and behind the scenes in party politics
Courting women's votes : Candidates could easily develop a "family security" agenda
Somewhere out there, millions of women are running around unregistered, apathetic or disenchanted‹and, potentially, exceedingly powerful.
Nationally, both Democrats and Republicans know that snaring a fraction of the estimated 40 million women who didn't vote in the 2000 presidential election would ensure their victory in November. Given that, you'd almost think the parties would be falling over themselves to show how much better they could make life for women‹offering to reform family leave and child care, promising to establish living wage laws and figure out how to finally close the persistent wage gap under which women continue to earn 77 cents to a man's dollar and swearing to improve the health care system so that women of all ages and incomes have access to affordable, quality care and medication.
Instead, both presidential candidates continue to talk about almost exclusively about the economy and national security. At the state level, Republicans focused last year on reducing Minnesota's $4.2 billion deficit without raising taxes or repealing the $4 billion in tax cuts that had been given primarily to the wealthiest over the previous four years; Democrats, clinging to a scant majority in the Senate and shut out of power in the House and the Governor's office, were essentially relegated to the role of damage control as they tried to hang onto a fraction of basic services for the most vulnerable.
Though both parties like to claim that they're the party for women‹Republicans by virtue of the fact that they recruit women for highly visible positions; Democrats because they're pro-choice and because they're more likely to want to preserve a social safety net‹it's hard to decipher just how devoted either party is to improving women's lot.
Mercy Olson Ward, public policy coordinator of the YWCA of Minneapolis, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, said women are concerned about issues of "family security."
In a legislative survey last year, Olson Ward said, about 500 members (mainly women, mainly from Minneapolis) chose the five issues that were most important to them from a list of 18. The YWCA uses the survey to shape its legislative agenda. In order of relative importance, those five issues were: livable wages, child care, affordable housing, reproductive choice and conceal and carry gun permits.
"These are the issues women tend to be focusing on," Olson Ward said.
So how does the rhetoric of the major political parties match up with what they're really offering women? The Minnesota Women's Press decided to take a look. We chose six issues that, based on our own experience and on the piles of reports and headlines that cross our desks, are issues of particular concern to women: education, child care, health care, pay equity, family leave and reproductive choice. We don't want to imply that these are the only issues women are concerned about‹we know they're not‹but they are all issues that have a dramatic impact on women's lives. Because most of them have been addressed in the Minnesota legislature in the last few years, we have some way of judging not just the words of the major political parties, but their actions.
Education: contentious cuts in the classroom
Education is crucial to a functioning democracy, as this tidbit from Olson Ward suggests: According to the Minnesota Participation Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization to mobilize voters, education is the single best indication of who votes. The voting rate for high school graduates is about 35 percent; for college graduates it's 90 percent.
Legislators on both sides of the aisle agree that education is critical‹at least in principle. "Everybody sees education as among the highest priorities, but where they go with it is a different story," said state Rep. Alice Hausman (DFL-St. Paul).
Nowhere is this more evident than in the assessments of what's happened to education at the legislature in the last few years. In the 2003 legislative session, the state legislature cut $185 million in basic education aid to school districts, including $62 million in special education funds.
In 2004, lawmakers implemented new curriculum standards for science and social studies. Republicans, by and large, are very pleased with the changes.
"We made significant strides last year by instituting rigorous educational standards," said Annette Meeks, acting CEO of the Center for the American Experiment, a conservative think tank, a member of the Metropolitan Council and a state vice-chair of the Minnesota GOP. "Gov. Pawlenty and [former education commissioner] Yecke should be commended for their leadership on this very important issue. Things are better for all Minnesota schoolchildren."
DFLers, on the other hand, are generally somewhere between worried and incensed about the fate of education in Minnesota. State Rep. Mindy Greiling (DFL-Roseville) falls into the latter category.
"They cut education," she said. "They promised they wouldn't and they did. They wrapped themselves in that mantle of not cutting education because it drives the engine of our state Š It used to be that the state paid two-thirds for students in higher education and the students paid one-third‹now, after just a short time, the students pay two-thirds and the state pays one-third. So that's going back on our promise to our citizens on education. I think that's the worst sin of all." Republicans also cut $7 million in early childhood and family education funding, and $3 million from Head Start, Greiling noted.
She reserved some of her wrath for her own party: although Democrats never cut education funding, she said, they never gave it enough. "We haven't done right by early childhood."
Speaker of the Minnesota House, Rep. Steve Sviggum (R-Kenyon), preferred not to dwell on the cuts and instead focus on the fact that legislators increased by $38.5 million the amount of financial aid available to college students through the Minnesota State Grant Program. "There's no doubt that there were some reductions, but we actually increased scholarships and grants by $40 million," he said.
Sviggum maintained that the education cuts helped turn the economy around, and now that the economy's improving, the money will begin to flow back to schools again. "From my standpoint, as we look at the economy coming back, the first monies available, whether that's $100 million or $200 million, will be going to education."
Hausman doubts the Republicans will increase funding for education. "When you have a platform of no new taxes, it's pretty hard to put new money [into] education, and I think that has the biggest impact on the outcome."
Child care: who's looking out for the kids?
Child care was one of the items hardest hit during the Pawlenty administration's drastic budget cuts two years ago: for 2004-2005, legislators slashed $86 million from the sliding fee program, which amounted to a 50 percent reduction in child care subsidies for the working poor.
"We went from the fourth best in the country to the 31st‹we dropped below Mississippi," lamented Jim Koppel, director of the Children's Defense Fund of Minnesota. "We have decimated programs for children. We have cut revenues to the point where we are choking the infrastructure of the country, Minnesota included. We cannot afford the failure. Those are our adults of tomorrow, our workforce of tomorrow."
Republicans argue that even after the cuts, Minnesota families are still comparably well off. "If you look at other states in the region, we're still number one," Sviggum noted. "We're not number one by a country mile, [but] we're number one by a half a block."
Meeks suggests that the whole issue of child care is a red herring and that families wouldn't need child care if the state cut taxes enough. "There's probably a lot of women who'd prefer to stay at home with their kids, but because taxes are so high, the women can't stay home," she said. "Some women, through abandonment or whatever the issue is, have to go to work, and yes, those women are hit the hardest. Those are the people who could benefit from a tax cut more than anybody."
It's worth pointing out that the $1,050 federal tax rebate given per child last year would cover only a fraction of than annual cost of child care, which can easily run $12,000 at a child care center.
Though there are ideological differences between the parties, the DFL's Hausman points out that neither party assigns child care high value. In the crunch, she said, "Child care is always one of the first to go. As a society, we have a hard time giving priority to it."
"Interestingly," she added, "we don't cut money to things like motorized recreation. That special interest would scream bloody murder, so that's one of the areas we wouldn't dream of touching. Both Democrats and Republicans are considering putting more money into this."
Who gets the money, she said, is to a great extent a function of who's willing to get tough. "Child care advocates are too quiet and they're also seen as less powerful. It's who is perceived as most threatening, politically. The owners of motorized vehicles, they do threaten retribution at the polls."
Health care: finding a big enough bandage
Budget cuts pushed through by Republicans in the 2003 legislative session included severe cuts in state health care programs for the poor, which by 2007 will leave an estimated 38,000 Minnesotans ineligible for the state's insurance program. Harsh though they are, these cuts are only part of the health care debacle. The other part is increasing costs, which are currently calculated at $11,000 per year for the average Minnesota household in premiums, taxes and out-of-pocket expenses, and rising about 250 percent faster than wages. Within six years, if costs continue to increase at their present rate, that average household will be paying $22,000 annually, according to a 2004 report by the Minnesota Citizens Forum on Health Care Costs.
Both parties recognize that health care costs are excessive and even damaging to the average worker. Republicans tout health savings accounts (HSAs) as a way to make coverage more affordable: in this system, the responsibility lies mainly with consumers, who are assumed to be able to save enough money to pay for health care when they need it. Democrats are more likely to propose some type of community coverage‹such as John Kerry's plan to cover nearly 27 million of the 43 million uninsured‹but they generally stop short of proposing universal coverage (sometimes called single payer, although the two terms don't mean the same thing). Though this type of system would help more people, it doesn't reform the basic structure and would likely do little or nothing for insured people who are struggling with rising costs of health care and medicine.
"Health care is sort of like education in that everybody says they're for health care access," said Hausman. "The difference you might find is that Republicans might be more open to health savings accounts, which is OK if you have money to put in a savings account. With Democrats you'd probably see much more openness to single payer."
Rep. Lynda Boudreau (R-Faribault) chairs the House Health and Human Services Policy Committee. Boudreau thinks health savings accounts are at least part of the answer. "Trying to implement our HSA programs helps women and all people," she said. "I think there's not enough consumer involvement, as far as determining costs. More competition is the key to having lower prices."
The problem of rising costs might be too big for the state to solve, said Meeks. "I'm not sure what can be done on a local level. For all 50 states, every one would have to say there's been an increase [in costs]. The problem is, what can the state do as one island in this ocean?"
Hausman, on the other hand, sees clearly the players behind the mess. Insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, she says, are much too powerful. They've got so much control that they were able to convince legislators to include in the recent Medicare legislation a provision that prevents the government from negotiating lower drug prices. "It's built in that we're going to protect the drug companies over the consumers," said Hausman. "It's just phenomenal to me that we would do that. There's a preference on the part of some legislators to protect these companies over the interests of the consumers."
What can one state do? The Children's Defense Fund helped to write a bill, introduced in the Minnesota legislature for the first time last year, to ensure health care coverage for every Minnesota child. The CDC calculates that its plan would cost less than what we spend today. "We would no longer cover kids through the employer‹we would have to raise taxes, but employers and families would save money," he said. "In the end it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars less."
Leadership on the bill‹which didn't pass either the House or Senate‹was bipartisan, Koppel noted, and that, he said, is the only way things are going to change. "[The problem is] so permeated and so deep, we really need to start at the beginning. That isn't a partisan issue, that's someone who wants to come up with solutions."
"I don't think you solve a problem by cutting taxes," he added. "I don't think people who need child care and health care can afford either one of those any more than before they got the tax cuts. Hundreds [of dollars] in tax cuts doesn't make them afford the thousands of dollars that costs. And by raising taxes, that doesn't solve those problems either."
Pay equity: one step forward
Good news? It can't be. And yet, there it is. The pay equity reporting requirements for employees of local and state government, which had been weakened in 2003, were reinstated in 2004. Legislators removed the two-year moratorium on reporting and changed the reporting cycle from every five years back to every three years.
How did a legislature deadlocked on just about everything else come to this agreement? According to Chris Hansen, a volunteer lobbyist for the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, the women took over. "It was a gender issue. Whether they were Republicans or Democrats didn't matter. In this particular legislature they seemed to be very polarized on every other issue, so this was rare."
Although agreement also seemed to be a gender issue, she said. "There was very strong support from the DFLers, and the Republicans tended to cite undue burdens on agencies in terms of the reporting requirements."
Hansen cautioned that, despite the rousing success of this legislation, the pay equity requirements apply only to a small fraction of Minnesotans. "That's 10 percent of the employees in the state," she said. "We think this is an issue that continues to need attention. We're looking to expand the impact to the private sector."
In order to do that, the League of Women Voters and 18 other organizations met over the summer to plan what they hope will become a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to educate businesses and other private sector employers on the possibilities of achieving pay equity. They're also going to try to make sure they don't have to keep fighting the same fight year after year.
"We're going to push harder never to have a step backwards, like this was," Hansen said.
Reproductive rights: restricted access
In the survey that the YWCA's Olson Ward cited, reproductive choice has become much more important to members. In the 2001 survey, choice didn't make the top five issues or the YWCA's legislative agenda. In 2003, members ranked it as their fourth most important concern. Last year Gov. Pawlenty signed into law the 24-hour waiting period for abortion, called the Woman's Right to Know Act.
Meeks said the law has had beneficial effects. "I believe that our state has made some positive advances for women who are considering one of the most difficult decisions Š Women's health has been advanced, both mental and physical [by the law]," she said.
Sviggum agreed. "It's a lot better since we've been a little more balanced. [The act] had a 72 percent approval rating ŠIt's not radical at all, [it's] certainly in the mainstream."
A February 2003 poll of 625 Minnesotans by Minnesota Public Radio and the St. Paul Pioneer Press found that 64 percent of those responding thought a woman should be required to wait 24 hours before having an abortion.
Sarah Stoesz, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, challenges that number. That 64 percent approval was based on a simplistic question, she said. She characterized the 24-hour waiting period as "a procedural hoop" that women must jump through to exercise their legal right to an abortion.
"It's simply an effort to create obstacles and to shame and humiliate women,' she said. The law is not what the majority of Minnesotans want, said Stoesz. "The people of the state have been pretty clear about supporting a woman's access to reproductive rights."
This stance hasn't translated into action at the legislature, Stoesz said, because of the rise of the radical right wing in the Republican Party; the undue influence on the legislators of the anti-choice group Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life; and a Democratic Party that whispers instead of shouts its support for choice. "Where I'd criticize the Democratic party is in not being more of a forceful voice on women's issues," said Stoesz.
In fact, she said, there's a movement afoot to try to push the Democratic Party away from its pro-choice position. "What we've seen in the last 18 months is the establishment of [the Minnesota chapter of] a group called Democrats for Life." At the DFL's Duluth convention this year, Stoesz said, "There was an attempt to really soften the commitment to abortion rights. Fortunately it was defeated on the floor."
Family leave: California dreaming
Just last month, California implemented the first paid family leave program in the country: workers can take up to six weeks off, at up to 55 percent pay, to care for a new child or a sick family member. The program is financed by payroll deductions that work out to about $2 per month for most Californians.
Family leave is the one issue of the six that didn't see major action at the Minnesota Legislature in the last two sessions. According to Hausman, that's not likely to change any time soon.
"It's kind of sad because that's almost a nonexistent issue," Hausman said. "Here we don't begin to reflect what other countries do around the world. That's an issue that doesn't even get on the radar screen. I can't tell you the damage that this no new taxes era has done. We don't even have the discussion [about improving family leave] because everyone knows there's no money."
The federal Family and Medical Leave Act requires employers of 50 or more to allow a woman unpaid leave up to 12 weeks; the Minnesota Parenting Leave Law requires employers of 21 or more to allow a woman or man six weeks of unpaid leave. Although today it might seem like pie in the sky to ask for paid leave, it wasn't always so. During the Ventura administration, for three years running, state Sen. Ellen Anderson (DFL-St. Paul) introduced a bill backed by the Children's Defense Fund that would have given women partial wages for 15 to 26 weeks following birth or adoption. The bill, said CDF's Koppel, was based on a program in use at a local company, ECM Publishers‹owned by longtime Republican and former Minnesota governor Elmer Anderson.
"It was a model piece of legislation. I loved it," said Koppel. The DFL-controlled Senate passed the bill as a pilot program, but there was no support in the GOP-controlled House. "That was the closest we came," Koppel recalled.
And it's not just the budget crisis that stands in the way of family leave reform.
Boudreau said she doesn't think family leave needs to be discussed at the government level. "I'm not so sure it's something that requires a mandate by the legislature," Boudreau said. "Most employers are very accommodating when it comes to leave, especially if it's without pay."
Michelle Rifenberg, state deputy chair of the state GOP, agreed. "Benefits such as family leave need to be dictated by contracts between the employer and the employee," she said. "When you start mandating benefits packages, you don't always have the best benefit package for [each] particular family."
Electing women
In the end, neither party appears to be actively looking out for women's issues. Republicans say women would be better served by tax cuts and an unfettered market. Democrats are too often weak or ambiguous supporters of women's issues, more embattled than assertive.
If pay equity is any example, one way to ensure women's rights are protected and their issues advanced is to elect more women of both parties. "I think women's issues are not mainstream," said the DFL's Greiling. "They're kind of side issues. Women have to speak up more. We need more women in the legislature."
Even if Democrats come back into power, she said, "People can't just heave a sigh and expect things to happen. There's a lot of old patterns there. Democrats need their feet held to the fire so they don't go back to the old ways. Constituents need to be involved."
Olson Ward agrees. "I think there needs to be a public outcry. People really need to speak their mind about how much this is hurting us as a society. I think when people start seeing the consequences of the budget cuts ŠThey've shown that food shelf use has just skyrocketed in the well-to-do suburbs. All people need to stand up and share that truth and hear the truth from their neighbors."
