By: Victoria A. Brownworth
I watched President Obama’s State of
the Union address along with 33 million other people last night. The
SOTU is like the Super Bowl–it’s one of the top-rated TV shows of the
year, broadcast on 14 different networks. At 65 minutes, Obama’s speech
wasn’t the longest (Bill Clinton still holds that record) or the
shortest (Ronald Reagan holds that one), but for those of us who were
waiting to hear the President talk about certain issues, it was the most
frustrating.
If there was one theme that Obama kept returning to it was jobs.
Obama mentioned women in the workforce, but not these statistics: With
unemployment rates remaining virtually unchanged for the past three
years, women over 40 represent the largest demographic among the
long-term unemployed. Latina women, single women and African-American
teenaged girls have the highest rates of unemployment, according to
Department of Labor statistics.
In addition, President Obama glossed over
these DOL facts: 71.9 million women are employed or looking for work,
representing 58.6 percent of all women aged 16 and over.
But the likelihood of women getting
well-paid full-time work is far less than it is for men. According to
the DOL, women are nearly twice as likely as men to work part time. Not
because they want to, but because they can’t find full-time work. The
number of women in part-time employment is double that of men and triple
for women over 35.
The DOL notes that "more women are
currently working part-time than were doing so prior to the recession,
reflecting the increase in women working part-time because they can’t
find full-time work.
One in five women
working part-time are doing so because that can’t find full-time work.
Prior to the recession, less than one in ten women working part-time
were doing so because they couldn’t find full-time work."
President Obama also failed to mention
the most important employment issue for LGBT people: The Employment
Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA).
In a speech where the President said he
would sign executive orders to raise the federal minimum wage for
workers "feeding our troops," there was no mention of signing ENDA into
law via executive order. In fact, there was no mention of ENDA at all.
Yet every day LGBT people are at risk at their jobs. In my state of
Pennsylvania alone there have been a dozen well-publicized firings of
lesbian and gay teachers for being gay in the past year, including two
teachers who were fired because they married their long-time partners.
Obama’s emphasis on "it’s time" to
address issues of women in employment did not include lesbians. Nor did
it include the actual numbers of what the gender wage gap means for
women who represent more than two-thirds of those living at or below the
poverty level in the U.S. Women make about 77c for every dollar a man
makes for comparable work. But those numbers don’t tell the whole story:
Women with the least education–a high school degree or GED make only
50% of what men make with a similar education. And women with PhDs also
only make 53% of what men make with PhDs. And while the President had
invited the new CEO of General Motors, Mary Barra, to be present in the
audience and pointed her out during his speech as the first woman to
head an automotive company, he didn’t mention that only five percent of
CEOs in the U.S. are women.
Lean in for that news, Mr. President.
The pay gap is huge. Per year it’s an
average of $11,000. That amount is also the poverty level, which makes
it pretty succinct: the difference in wages is often the same as the
difference between poverty and not. And the pay gap widens as women get
older, according to the DOL. But the average woman will lose a half
million dollars in income over her working life compared to men in the
same job.
A half-million.
Shouldn’t the President have noted that fact?
President Obama also neglected to mention
the anti-gay problem with the Sochi Olympics as he bragged that
American athletes would be "bringing home the gold." On Monday the Mayor
of Sochi said there were no gay people in his city. Is that because
they have all been arrested? Last Friday, Jan. 24, Russian President
Vladimir Putin told ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos for an
interview with ABC’s
This Week that gays coming to the Olympics
needed to "leave the children alone," repeating the faux meme that
lesbians and gays are child molesters.
Obama also lauded U.S. efforts to work
with various governments in Africa, but failed to note that both Nigeria
and Uganda have just passed laws making it illegal to be gay or lesbian
and making consensual lesbian or gay relationships punishable by
imprisonment or death.
The President spent about 15 of the last
minutes of the SOTU speech talking about withdrawing from Afghanistan
and lauding our military. He pointed to Sgt. Cory Remsburg, who had been
horribly wounded on his tenth–tenth–deployment to the war. Remsburg got
shrapnel in his brain from an IED and has endured two dozen surgeries.
His heroism brought the audience to its feet for a full minute and a
half of applause.
But what the President didn’t mention was
that Remsburg is far from singular. One in five veterans of the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars has suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI). Most
are permanently disabled.
The President also failed to address what
is happening to women in the military–rape is at an all-time high and
female veterans are the most likely to be living in their cars and not
have a job when they leave the military.
In
2013, right after he was re-elected to his second term, President Obama
announced in his SOTU that it would be the "year of the woman"–that it
was time for women to be brought up to the same level of equality as men
in the workforce.
But President Obama has fewer women in
his second-term cabinet than any of the last three presidents and had to
be forced to nominate Janet Yellen as the new Chair of the Federal
Reserve. Obama only chose Yellen after Larry Summers, the controversial
former President of Harvard University who famously said women weren’t
up to science and math. What example does that set?
So in the 2014 SOTU, Obama put women
front-and-center again–sort of. But if he didn’t even mention ENDA or
the perils for women in the military or the widening wage gap for women,
how much is he actually willing to do for women and LGBT people that
moves past speechifying lip service?
SOTU speeches are notorious for being
long on plaudits and short on substance. But as Democrats applauded and
Republicans scowled, lesbians all over America were probably wondering
the same thing I was: When will you speak for us, Mr. President? Because
our lives are still very much on the line, just as our wounded warriors
have been.
Victoria A. Brownworth is an
award-winning journalist, editor and writer. She has won the NLGJA and
the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary
Award and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She is a regular
contributor to
The Advocate and
SheWired, a blogger for
Huffington Post and a contributing editor for
Curve magazine and
Lambda Literary Review. She won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for historical/cultural fiction for
From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth. Her novella,
Ordinary Mayhem, won Honorable Mention in
Best Horror 2012. Her novel,
After It Happened will be published in fall 2014. @VABVOX
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