The moderator for the next panel, I'm going to introduce Sarah Gonzalez Bocinski.
Sarah Gonzalez Bocinski is director, economic security for Survivors Project at the Institute
for Women's Policy Research where she oversees the development of training, tools and curricula,
and provides technical assistance to domestic and sexual violence programs and justice system
professionals on strategies to better address the intersections of survivor economic security
and safety.
Sarah specializes in the creation and implementation of employment focused curricula, as well as
fostering comprehensive community-based support strategies.
Sarah has presented at national and regional conferences for domestic and sexual violence
advocates and criminal justice professionals.
Prior to joining IWPR, she worked at Wider Opportunities for Women, where she advocated
for policy that is promote economic security for women and girls in the District of Columbia.
She received her BA from Colgate University and Masters Public Policy from the Georgetown
Public Policy Institute.
Thank you.
Thank you everyone.
Good morning.
It's a pleasure to see you all here today, and I'm thrilled to be moderating this panel
on gender violence and Title IX, an issue that is obviously near and dear to my heart,
so I'm thrilled to be working with these wonderful women here who are going to share fantastic
information with you.
So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce everyone.
We'll go ahead and each speaker will have ten minutes, will do a short moderated discussion
with me, because I'm certainly going to have many questions for the panelists.
And then we'll turn it over to the audience for Q&A.
So first I'd like to introduce Susannah Baruch.
She's a consultant, focused on women's health and genetic policy.
She was previously the law and policy director at the Genetics and Public Policy Center,
where she worked on reproductive genetic technologies, including preimplantation genetic diagnoses.
She led the Center's work in genetic discrimination laws and policy, including the Genetic Information
Nondiscrimination Act.
Previously, Susannah served as the director of Health Law Policy at the National Partnership
for Women and Families, where she testified before the senate on genetic discrimination
legislation and founded and created the coalition for genetic fairness.
She also spent several years on Capitol Hill working on a range of women's reproductive
health and discrimination issues for Representative Nita Lowey.
Susannah holds a JD for the University of Chicago Law School and a BA in History from
Yale College.
She is the outgoing chair of the Wellesley Center for Women's Counsel of Advisors.
Welcome.
Thank you.
We are also joined by Jessica Davidson.
Jessica Davidson is the managing director of End Rape on Campus.
She is a graduate of the University of Denver, where she worked as student body vice president
and gained national attention for her innovative programs and policy reform.
Jess worked in the Obama White House in fall of 2016 as an intern in the front office team
as a senior advisor to the President with Valerie Jarrett.
Jess was named an It's On Us White House Champion of Change in April of 2016, and an honor that
was given to ten campus leaders across the United States, and she's now an advisor to
the It's On Us Project.
Thank you, Jessica.
And Nan Stein, for over 30 years Nan is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley
Center for Women at Wellesley College and conducted research on student-to-student sexual
harassment in K-to-12 schools, teen dating violence, sexual harassment and gender-based
violence.
As a former middle school teacher, drug and alcohol counselor, a gender equity specialist
with the Massachusetts Department of Education since joining Wellesley in 1992.
Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Justice, the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Education.
She has authored many book chapters, law review, academic journals, as well as commentaries
in the mainstream media on educational press, often serves as an expert witness on Title
IX and sexual discrimination harassment suits.
Her work has been recognized by several federal agencies, including the White House.
In 2007, she received the outstanding Contributions to Education Award from the Harvard University
Graduate School of Education, where she received her doctorate.
So, welcome to our panelists.
I'd like to open it up by turning it over to Susannah.
Thank you very much.
I remembered how to turn my mic on.
My first test.
My field is in women's health, and I think I was placed on this panel, in part, because
of the broader topics of today's conference is meant to address, which is women's health
and safety and wellness.
And we've heard a little bit about that this morning already from our keynote speaker and
from the previous panel, and I want to sort of broaden our perspective a little bit.
I have worked in women's reproductive health and related issues for almost 25 years in
Washington.
And one of the things I would say is that, as human beings, we're actually able, amazingly
enough, to sort of hold different beliefs in our head at once, two different ideas.
Psychologists talk about this as cognitive dissidence sometimes, and I sort of want to
ask us to engage in that a little bit today, because in today's policy climate I think
it's impossible not to spend most of our time trying to fight back what's happening.
And at the same time, I think it's equally important that we think more broadly about
the world we would want to live in and the place we are actually trying to go in the
long run.
This too shall pass can be the mantra of the day, even when it doesn't feel that way, and
I'm going to sort of ask us to engage in that a little bit today.
There is no way to describe what's happening now, other than seeing women's health as being
targeted pretty directly.
There have been, as everybody here knows, proposals that target women's access to health
care, which includes access to contraception, abortion services, maternity care, cancer
screenings, STD treatments, osteoporosis screenings and well-women exams that, in an ideal world,
include screening for domestic violence.
We also know that all populations that might be a bit more vulnerable -- low income women,
immigrants, domestic violence survivors, women of color, elderly women, LGBTQ women -- all
of these women will be hit particularly hard, and we have to keep that in mind.
But we're going to spend plenty of time just looking around the room.
I know we are all going to spend plenty of time fighting those changes.
And I want to ask you to think about what it would look like to create a broader possibility
for women's health and wellness.
I want to talk about research related to women's health.
Back in the 1990s I worked for Representative Nita Lowey, and we used to talk a lot about
women's health research.
She was fighting very hard, even then, to make sure that women were included in research.
Too often research of clinical research only applied to male patients, and we would joke
that, you know, even the lab rats were male.
Now that was 20 years ago.
But it turns out it was no joke, because it was 2014 before NIH researchers were finally
told that they had to make sure that their experiments using rats or pigs or dogs needed
to include both males and females.
Now I want to say the reality is that well-meaning researchers had to deal with aspects of biological
sex differences that were, to them, essentially inconvenient.
The hormones of menstrual cycles made it more difficult to tease apart cause and effect,
to look at side effects, to understand what women's, patients' experiences would actually
be.
But, inconvenient or not, every one of us deserves to be included in and benefit from
high quality equitably designed medical research.
So I want to say that, even in the face of unprecedented proposed cutbacks in access
to healthcare and in health research, we need to continue to work to make sure that research
is inclusive and equitable and that human beings of all sexes and genders and races
and ethnicities benefit from the medical breakthroughs that we're seeing.
Now communities of color have very real concerns about being research subjects.
Distrust of the medical system is entirely understandable, given the history of coercive
practices, and there's a lot of that history.
We have a long way to go before it is actually a comfortable thing for everyone to trust
the system and volunteer for a clinical trial, or even try a new therapy in our own pursuit
of health and wellness.
But what sense could it possibly make to have a system that excludes entire groups from
research, which essentially guarantees that the excluded groups won't be able to benefit
from the knowledge that we're all seeking.
And I want to focus, because it's a particular interest of mine, on a particularly hard case,
which is the lack of inclusion of pregnant women in medical research.
So for pregnant patients -- and some of you may have experienced this -- good information
about the risks and benefits of medical treatment during pregnancy is hard to find, and patients
are typically told by healthcare providers that, given the limited research, the best
approach is to just say no to all medications, no matter what the mom's need might be.
But we know that moms and newborns alike are healthier and better off after appropriate
disease management during pregnancy.
But at the same time, because of the unwillingness or inability, because of laws and restrictions,
to include pregnant women in clinical trials, it's a hard issue to get to the bottom of.
And the result is that common conditions that women struggle with, such as diabetes, HIV,
hypertension, psychiatric conditions, and autoimmune diseases are often poorly managed
during pregnancy.
Depression and anxiety, in fact, are showing up as by far the most common example of conditions
that make women feel backed into a corner during pregnancy.
And we know that choosing to go off medication in an effort to protect a pregnancy, and,
thus, being depressed and anxious during pregnancy are a recipe for disaster.
It's a situation ripe for problems and it increases the risk for postpartum depression
as well.
And a few years ago, in a project I worked on, I had the opportunity to interview some
women who had gone through this dilemma firsthand.
And what I've come to think, and it's something that echoes some of the comments this morning
already, is that in an age of revolutions in data sharing and social media and being
watched in our every move, most women felt, quite rightly it seemed to me, that it seems
absurd to argue that we can't study pregnant women and their experiences more.
If a doctor or a practice saw hundreds of women a year who were deciding whether or
not to stay on a particular medication, couldn't what those doctors observed or what their
women's experience was at least be discussed or collected.
And I think the reality is that women in all situations, in all walks of life, in all communities
understand that the science and evidence that we are engaged in is important to their own
health and wellness.
The issue isn't whether women are going to benefit from these advances.
The issue is really how we are going to make it happen.
So I want to say two quick things more about pregnant women and the research that it would
take, because I think it will illustrate that these are hard dilemmas that are faced.
To really understand what's going on during pregnancy there are both sort of political
and societal barriers in our way.
We know remarkably little about the early embryonic development that happens in a pregnancy
and there's a lot of reasons for that.
It's hard to study.
But one of the reasons it's hard to study is that since 1996 there has been an amendment
to the annual Appropriations Bill in congress that prohibits federal funding from being
used for early embryo research.
And as a result, we know much less than we could, not just about pregnancy but about
helping women become pregnant, about new methods of contraception and about early techniques
of abortion.
We need to think of a long-term strategy to get rid of that federal funding limitation.
And the last thing I would say we need to do more about in thinking about the specific
problem is hormones.
And as a perimenopausal person who is finding this process very shrouded in impenetrable
mystery, this is an area ripe for more research.
If you want to know how and why pregnant women are affected differently by medication or
how and why women generally are affected by medication and treatments, you need to think
about hormones.
For women who are considering taking hormones, either for contraception or because they are
trying to become pregnant or because they are considering becoming egg donors, or they
are considering the new technique of freezing your eggs in order to delay childbearing,
which is sort of being offered up as a solution to the work/family balance problem, or wondering
about hormone replacement therapy, all of these areas of medical science lack the sort
of basic understanding that we need to know about the benefits and risks of adding hormones
to our systems.
So I've taken us a long way from Trump Care which we'll talk about, I'm sure, at another
time.
But I wanted to say I think the cognitive dissidence is necessary for all of us to keep
of our energy and our passion for doing this work, to be able to think more broadly about
the big picture and imagine what the future might hold us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Now I'd like to turn it over to Jessica Davidson, who is the assistance managing director of
End Rape On Campus.
Thank you so much.
Good morning.
So, after taking that kind of wider view of women's issues and health, and this intersection
that will be discussed on the panel today, I'm going to take a more narrow view on Title
IX and campus sexual assault, because that's the nature and premise of my organization.
And I have a very interesting view of the past five years of the Campus Sexual Assault
Movement, because I was a first-year student at the University of Denver in 2012 before
the hunting data had come out, before it was common knowledge on college campuses that
students have Title IX rights.
When I entered I did not know what -- I mean I knew what consent was, but I hadn't actually
heard it in an educational context, either in my high school or in my university setting.
I did not know what Title IX rights were and what they meant for me as a young woman start
on a college campus.
All I really knew about preventing sexual assault for my friends and I was to walk home
in a group when going home from parties or bars, which is not exactly a great solution.
So it was in 2012, and I like to couch the stages of the movement by talking about a
particularly interesting experience, leaving my campus and coming back six months later
and feeling like I was on two completely different campuses.
So, in the spring of 2014, I studied abroad -- or excuse me I was get ready to study abroad
in South African.
And there was a case of a campus sexual assault involving a very prominent athlete on my campus,
and we were watching a student, the victim, being just absolutely torn to pieces on social
media, on an anonymous app called Yik Yak.
People were writing her name on walls on campus.
It was horrifying watching people tell her that she needed to leave because she was standing
up for herself as a victim of a violent crime and trying to pursue her Title IX rights as
a student on campus.
Then in the fall of 2014, the Obama White House launched the It's On Us campaign, and
the film, the "Hunting Ground" was starting to get talked about quite a bit.
When I came back in January of 2014 I was on a completely different campus from the
one that had been pushing this woman out.
We had a screening of the "Hunting Ground."
That was the only time I've ever seen a room, you know, on my college campus be standing
room only.
I ran for student body vice president, and every student I talked to said, "Okay, well
what are -- you know, what's going on with the sexual assault thing?
I keep hearing a lot, but I don't really know what all of this means."
And by the time that I started as student body vice president, more than 200 students
had come to me and said we really need to do something about this.
And I was on a campus of 5,000, so it was pretty significant for a relatively unactive
campus.
And I started to realize that over the course of the White House It's On Us Campaign, over
the course of this public awareness coming to students about what their rights were,
we had really created a space on campus for students to come forward and say this happened
here, this happened to me, I know that I have rights and how can I pursue them.
And the way that that emboldened students was truly incredible, to take power back over
their education.
And we look at Title IX at my organization and campus sexual assault as a health issue,
and also as a civil rights issue.
And having those dual perspectives really, I think, helped students to feel empowered
to take control of their experience after its happened to them.
This is particularly poignant in the space of campus sexual assault or sexual assault
in general, when the crime is, by nature, taking power away from the victim.
It is designed to remove autonomy and agency and the movement around Title IX and campus
sexual assault, over the last five years in particular, has given a lot of power back
to the victims of this crime.
So, to give kind of that background on how we've seen the movement, I'll now add my role
into it.
So I was student body vice president from 2015 to 2016, and I was doing this work on
my campus, and to further exemplify the space that had been created for students, I wrote
a piece in the Huffington about my own experience with campus sexual assault and how it could
be used to illustrate the need for better consent policies, particularly affirmative
consent, which is the idea that only yes means yes instead of no means no or silence means
yes.
Only an affirmative yes means yes.
And so I wrote this piece, and it was under the -- I talked about the policy by telling
a story of how my assailant had said, oh, you know, it was a fun hookup, and I used
that idea of saying maybe he doesn't know.
He did know.
But that wasn't particularly relevant for the story.
What I was saying was that we have such bad definitions of consent on college campuses
that people can get away with believing or pretending that they don't know that they
have committed a crime or that a crime has been committed against somebody.
The article went absolutely viral.
So here I am, a student vice president just trying to get 200 or 300 students talking
on my campus about this, and next thing I know, I'm on the front page of the Huffington
Post.
And seeing how many people nationally reached out to me and were saying this happened to
me too.
We're not talking about this.
We're saying I don't know who to go to, but this happened to me as well.
I saw another example of how many students were really waiting for the floodgates to
unleash.
They were right behind the gates waiting so that they could come out and speak about this
and talk about it.
So that's kind of how I got involved in the national scene and recognized by the Obama
White House and then went on to intern for senior advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett
and her front office team there and got involved in the national scene.
And when I got involved in that national scene I started talking to two women named Annie
Clark and Andrea Pino about their work and similar experience of coming forward and telling
their story.
And if you're familiar with the "Hunting Ground," you're familiar with them and their work,
and then having it just take off nationally.
And so what we see is students really do want to talk about this.
Students do want to address it.
They want to have power over this issue and they want to try and eliminate it on their
own campuses.
So, through getting connected with them and continuing this work on a national level,
I then came to become a part of the End Rape On Campus team.
And End Rape On Campus was formed out of, you know, another -- if my story is a singular
example, take hundreds of thousands of those and the experiences of all those, and End
Rape On Campus is what we created to give students a launching pad to come to, to talk
to, to help further this movement.
And so End Rape on Campus addresses sexual assault with three buckets.
The first is survivor support.
Last year we spent time within person or did phone calls with more than 800 survives directly.
We also provide support for secondary survivors, so families, parents, loved ones, and we do
everything from just picking up the phone and saying we believe you, we support you,
you're not alone, and sometimes that's all they want.
They just want somebody to say, hey, I'm with you and I'm in your corner.
Everything from that to helping them file federal Title IX complaints and query act
complaints.
We run the gamut with let thing survivor choose what they need for themselves and for their
family to regain agency.
The second bucket that we work on is prevention through education, and we do quite a bit of
speaking engagements.
Our staff of five reach more than 40,000 people in person last year.
We visited 29 states, three countries, and 44 campuses.
So we spend quite a bit of time on the road, and we find that this is incredibly important,
not only for survivors to have experts in the field and people that are advocating for
them come to the campus and speak in person and see their campus, invest money in this.
It's empowering for survivors, but it's also important for students who have not directly
been touched by the issue or don't know that somebody in their life has been directly touched
by the issue and they want to get involved but they're not certain how.
And so when we do those speaking engagement, sometimes it's with other survivor, sometimes
it's with general audience.
Sometimes it will be fraternities who know that they need to address the issue but they're
not sure quite how.
And then the third bucket that we work on in is policy reform.
We've been involved in everything from writing the Campus Accountability and Safety Act to
helping advise campuses on their own internal policies, to helping with state legislation.
We actually just had two very big wins in Texas that we're excited about, and also preventing
bills that would harm survivors from coming through legislatures.
We also just did that in Texas, or if you've been following Georgia House Bill 51 you're
also familiar.
So I'm going to kind of stop there.
I'm really excited to take questions.
But I wanted to give my perspective on what we do and my experience and how I've kind
of witnessed this as a student and now as an advocate, and I'm very excited to be here
today.
Thank you so much for having me.
I'm going up here.
Thank you, Jessica.
And finally, we have Nan Stein who is the senior research scientist at Wellesley Centers
for Women at Wellesley College.
Thank you.
Hi.
I am the embodiment of climate change, having allergies in the spring for the first time
in my life.
And I'm way postmenopausal, so I'm not getting this confused with menopause.
So if you hear me coughing, I'm not sick, this is just climate change coming through
me.
Before I get to the substance of my talk, I want to go through -- I want us to go backwards
in time, more than 35 years, and to give some historical context to the problem of sexual
harassment in K-12 schools.
In thinking about the women lately from Fox news who have spoken out about sexual harassment,
or not so long ago when the women from Wal-Mart stood at the Supreme court and sued, I'm powerfully
reminded of the origins of locating and identifying the problem of sexual harassment and sex discrimination.
I would not have found my way to this problem in the late 1970s were it not for the larger
feminist movement that identified the structural inequalities and injustice of sexual harassment
and sex discrimination in the workplace.
As labor historian, lawyer and Smith College Professor Carrie Baker has written in her
book, it's called "The Women Movement Against Sexual Harassment."
The movement against sexual harassment had several -- it emerged from multiple feminism.
One was African American women who initiated most of the precedent-setting lawsuits, filing
employment discrimination cases with the EEO offices in the early 1970s, and turning to
civil rights organizations for assistance.
The early sexual harassment plaintiffs were the first to conceptualize sexual harassment
as sex discrimination under Title VII, thus fundamentally shaping the movement of sexual
harassment by grounding it in Title VII sex discrimination law.
Additionally, women who entered non-traditional and blue-collar jobs, such as the mines of
West Virginia and Minnesota, the shipyards of Jacksonville Florida, and police forces
and construction sites all over the country broadened the definition of sexual harassment
to include hostile environment, not just from supervisors but also from coworkers, as they
endured sexual abuse and physical violence in attempts to push them out of the workplace.
Moreover, women in the pink-collar sector, typically female occupations like clerical
workers and flight attendants, also joined the movement of women's rights in the workplace
and raised the issues of sexual exploitation in the workplace, sleep with me or you'll
lose your job or get a better shift.
And if you remember the movie, "9 to 5" with Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin,
they weren't making this stuff up.
These women fought to be treated as professionals rather than as convenient nearby sex objects.
And finally, white middle class women in Ithaca, New York, who formed an organization called
Working Women United, and in Cambridge Massachusetts where I live, the Alliance Against Sexual
Coercion formed the first organizations to work on sexual harassment.
These women used feminist theories to analyze sexual coercion in the workplace and organize
speak outs, surveys, newsletters, and frequently spoke to the media.
And last but not least, the feminist lawyers including Ruth Bader Ginsberg, when she was
head of the ACLU Women's Rights Project, litigated the early sexual harassment cases and participated
in developing public policy on sexual harassment and establishing the rights of women in the
workplace.
And I want to give a shout out to the National Women's Law Center.
I think there are two people here -- are you here the National Women's law Center?
Yea.
Okay.
So their instrumental work in fighting sexual harassment in schools, and particularly Verna
Williams and Debra Brake who used to be there, who are now law professors, who argued the
first case to reach the U.S. Supreme Court in the K-12 arena in 1999 -- and I went to
the oral arguments -- and won it five to four, with Sandra Day O'Connor writing the majority
opinion.
That was the Davis case that involved a fifth-grade girl who was sexually harassed by a fifth-grade
male classmate.
In 1978, when I was a new state employee of the Massachusetts Department of Education,
and I like to say, hardly a feminist advocacy organization -- I learned fourth-hand of a
situation that was taking place among six of our student employees who worked in their
own student service center.
It was a glass-enclosed office in downtown Boston under the nose of the Massachusetts
Commissioner of Education.
There were four girls and two boys, and one of the boys was making it difficult for the
girls to work.
He told dirty jokes, spoke of his imagined or real sexual conquests, would corner the
girls up against the wall.
They were creeped out by this guy.
They couldn't concentrate on their work.
They dreaded coming to work and encountering him, and they didn't know what to call this
problem.
It sounds like sexual harassment in the workplace; right?
But nobody in their had the power to fire, hire promote, nothing.
They were all, you know, equivalent kids.
So a group of us who worked at the Department of Education decided we would conduct a survey
-- I was a graduate student at the time -- of Massachusetts high school kids; urban, rural,
suburban, public, private, and parochial, to determine the extent of the problem.
Next, we created a curriculum.
Various versions of it came out in '79, '81, '83, and '86 -- all of these are on my shelves
at Wellesley -- pulling together guidance counselors and teachers throughout the state,
and we called it "Who's Hurt and Who's Liable: Sexual Harassment in Massachusetts Schools."
Now we made up the liability part because there weren't any court cases yet.
But we just knew that there would be.
And 20 years later, the Supreme Court agreed with us.
So, which brings me up to the present, more or less.
In 1995, I wrote an article called "Sexual Harassment as a Public Performance of Gendered
Violence," and it was Harvard Educational Review.
And there were four key points that I made in 1995; that sexual harassment in schools
is behavior that happens in public with witnesses and bystanders, some of who are adults.
Secondly, when sexual harassment occurs in public and these interactions are not interrupted,
then permission to proceed is granted and the conduct becomes normalized and legitimized.
Third, from student narratives the students sounded to me like battered women in training,
because I was doing a big survey through "Seventeen" magazine with a colleague, Nancy Marshall,
at Wellesley, and it was in the September '92 issue of Seventeen magazine, and 4,300
girls wrote back.
Now magazine surveys are not scientific, but neither is a lawsuit.
It's a sample size of one.
And I decided in 1992 that I was going to find lawsuits that sounded like the girl,
what the girls were saying, and I had no trouble finding parallel kinds of lawsuits.
So I can't read it, because I see Dana flicking these numbers at me.
So, but girls learned that nobody intervenes on their behalf.
No one believes them, and if they speak up they're interrogated or blamed.
They learn to adjust their behaviors in an effort to change the harasser's behavior.
And for boys it seemed like permission to proceed, because the behaviors went unsanctioned.
And for boys who were not harassing, when they see the boys who are harassing, getting
away with it, they might think that they're supposed to engage in this kind of behavior.
Why not since nobody's getting in trouble.
But boys who observe sexual harassment will often indicate that they find it scary, troubling,
and disruptive to educational environment.
So if you can get away with it in public then what's to stop you from doing it in private;
right?
So it just became this link, which I ended up later doing years of research on teen dating
violence and sexual harassment as the precursor.
But the fourth point that I made in '95 was that when teachers teach about sexual harassment
directly and in engaging ways that kids begin to notice it, they'll talk about it, and they
may even intervene in it.
Now we're going forward to 2017.
Before I head into sharing some of my concerns, which I hope Dana will let me do.
I want to give a shout out and acknowledge now President Obama and Vice President Biden
for setting up the Office of the Special Advisor for Violence Against Women.
It was in the White House, they reported to Vice President Biden, and Lynn Rosenthal,
who held that job for six years, is here, so I think we owe Lynn a debt of gratitude
for -- I hope she'll continue to be the exile office,
you know.
Or the shadow government like the way they do in Britain.
So I had about six points -- I'm going to try and say them really fast -- that garden
variety sexual harassment is gone; that now it's more violent and it's happening at younger
ages.
I wrote in a law review article in 2005, starting to detail how the sexual harassment didn't
look in 2005 like it did in the '80s and '90s.
It was getting younger and more violent; that incidents of sexual harassment are misidentified
and mislabeled by school personnel, they ignore it, minimize it, or cast it as bullying, a
more palatable term to the public and one that doesn't put school administrators at
risk for a federal lawsuit.
Three, that the number of complaints about sexual violence in K-12 schools made to the
Office for Civil Rights has been growing.
The numbers now as of May 3rd were the 148 -- 148 open cases, when three years ago when
I filed a FOIA request -- that's the Freedom of Information Act -- to OCR, there were 25
cases pending with OCR.
Fourth, the definition of sexual harassment is not open to invention or substitution.
I see school administrators calling it -- they invent these classifications, inappropriate
touching, inappropriate sexual contact, or, you know, my nemesis, bullying.
Fifth, that most bullying products and interventions do not cover sexual harassment or gender violence
and will do nothing to reduce it.
Bullying products are just filled with distortions and inventions of behavior that ought to be
named as sexual harassment, and yet they're called bullying.
And six, that federally sponsored surveys provide spotty and insufficient information
about sexual harassment and gender violence in schools.
They use a definition in these surveys -- these are federal surveys that principals fill out
-- that do not correspond, either to what the Supreme Court said as the definition of
sexual harassment or the Office for Civil Rights.
They have made up a definition.
I'm going to read it to you.
"Unsolicited offensive behavior that inappropriately asserts sexuality over another person.
This behavior may be verbal or non-verbal."
This is, like, preposterous to me.
What does asserting sexuality have to do with asexual assault; right, or sexual harassment?
This is the definition that is in all these federal surveys that collect information about
sexual violence and gobs of other behaviors in schools, and that the data that that they
do collect when they aggregate gender violence information with physical violence so that
a fight on the playground gets aggregated into the same category as sexual violence;
thus, kind of washing it out and minimizing it.
So I'm ending now, Dana.
Finally, if you take nothing else away from my remarks, please let's name sexual harassment
and gender violence accurately.
If it's sexual harassment, let's call it that.
If it's homophobia, let's call it that.
Please stay away from the temptation to impose zero tolerance.
Let's put the onus on school personnel by requiring them to be zero indifferent to sexual
violence and sexual harassment and have a commitment to comment acumen and speak up
when they see sexual harassment happening among students, and please keep the pressure
up on OCR and the U.S. Department of Ed, and activism, Activism, activism.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Let's please give another round of applause for our entire panel.
Thank you very much.
So we have approximately, I believe, half an hour for questions, 20 minutes; okay.
Even less than I thought.
So I'll ask one kind of overarching question real quick, and then I'll turn it over to
the audience.
There's a little bit of a theme of challenging the norms and disrupting them throw throughout
all of your presentations, and I was wondering what each of you might recommend is making
the best case?
What have you seen work?
How can we start to disrupt those norms and make sure women have access by getting data
on women during the pregnancies and making sure that we're -- you've had a lot of success
in the last five years?
It's a very short amount of time to start turning things around on campuses.
What is the best approach for us to consider moving forward?
I think what I have seen in what I'll call the reproductive rights, health, and justice
movements over the last 25 years that has been most disruptive in the best possible
way is a trend towards listening to women and trusting women, and hearing their individual
stories and bringing those stories to the policymakers or whoever needs to hear them.
And I think that's a theme we've heard a little bit throughout today, is that the individual
lives of women are what matters the most, and not to quite literally whitewash those
stories, not to assume that one woman can speak for all women or any version of that
that you might care to come up with, but to make sure that we are all listening to each
other and inclusive in every way.
Absolutely.
Three things come to mind.
The first is what we like to call everyday activism.
In a society that encouraging our citizens to do anything but believe survivors of sexual
violence to ask what were you wearing, did you say no, how many times did you say no,
well why did you go home with them.
Instead of asking those questions, choosing to believe survivors always period, no qualifier,
to believe survivors is actually an incredibly radical act.
And the first time I heard that I was like, "Well, I don't know about that."
That's because in my circles it's not a radical act.
But in our society it is an extremely radical act.
And calling it out when you see other people not doing it, choosing to do it yourself,
stopping yourself from questions when you read articles that could be deciding not to
believe the survivor, but instead just choosing to believe them is actually a form of activism,
though we don't think about it.
Thank you.
The second thing that comes to mind is, I think you hit on it very well with white washing.
You know, many of the stories that we see about survivors of sexual violence or especially
on college campuses, they're people who look like me.
It's the white student body vice president.
And that's not the story of the majority of people who experience sexual assault.
We don't hear very many stories of people of color.
We don't hear very many stories of disabled students.
We don't hear very many students about trans students or homeless students.
We need to start hearing those stories.
And until people are just as angry about those stories as they are the stories of Jane Doe
from the Brock Turner case, until we see that level of outreach for a trans person of color,
we are not where we need to be as a movement.
And the third and vinyl thing, and this is what we all encourage students to do, and
as people who are involved in various touchstones of higher ed, you all have an opportunity
to help facilitate this in your community or encourage students to do so and create
pathways for them, is for students to really do power mapping on their own campuses and
decide how to be activists within that.
For me, and for my campus, the best way to get the administration to listen when I was
trying to get them to change the consent policy, was to write a publicly-facing article that
was outside of our community that would put public national pressure on them.
On some college campuses it's going to be a single donor or a board of trustee member
or a professor, but encouraging students and as an outside member in the community, being
able to help them sort through this to find the touchstone that can be that power point
for them that they can then put pressure on and do good community organizing in order
to put that pressure, that's what's going to create campus change.
And campuses are a microcosm of our national reality, and so when we see students on college
campuses that are putting that pressure on we see national conversation and national
change.
I'm afraid I forgot the question.
But I'm a believer in filing lawsuits and filing complaints with the Office for Civil
Rights.
And I've been doing this project through FOIA requests, which is just, you know, given -- just
made me nuts, because OCR won't give you currently pending complaints.
They'll only give you the resolved ones, which you can find on the Web.
And, actually, I think that there are merits to filing an OCR complaint for kids in K-12,
but it's got to be accompanied by a lot of activism by the parents and by the teenagers.
It can't just be this isolated thing.
See, the difference between the college women and the young -- you know, the kids under
the age of 18 is 12-year-olds are not giving press conferences; right, and college women
can.
They're adults, they can throw their own conference and see who comes.
And so you don't get this galvanization around the preponderance of evidence that looks so
similar across the country because it's held so secretly; right?
It's just really quiet.
And, you know, I could read all kinds of articles in the popular press, that -- you know, the
press -- journalists will often get to the fact that there was a sexual assault at a
school, but then you can't get to the kids or, you know, the parent, unless the parents
speak about it.
So it's very frustrating to see, like, what are the commonalities across the country.
So that's why I believe in lawsuits, because any lawsuit material can come out a lot quicker
than, actually, OCR material.
But you have to find good lawyers and, you know, ones like the ACLU Women's Rights Project
or the National Women's Law Center, you know, the pro bono lawyers, to be able to reach
everybody who can't necessarily afford their own attorney.
The advantage of OCR, or the previous OCR, as we used to know it -- we'll see what happens
currently -- is that it's free.
It you don't have to hire them.
I mean they come free.
And the kinds of resolutions can include things like paying for counseling, paying for alternative
transportation.
So there's a distribution of money.
It just doesn't come personally to the aggrieved person.
But they can stipulate a lot of things.
And then there are the lawsuits that the Justice Department step into, which is like having
the 500-pound elephant show up, or gorilla, whatever it's called.
You know, so when DOJ decides, when the Civil Rights Division of DOJ decides that they're
going to take a case, that makes a world of difference than just OCR, which is the Department
of Education.
So, in any event, I'm not actually a lawyer, but I'm somebody who believes that we have
to kind of shove the law in a lot of other people's faces.
Thanks.
I saw that hand first.
I'm not sure where the mics are.
Hi.
Thank you so much to the speakers, very interesting panel.
I have two questions.
The first one is for Susannah about research.
I found your presentation really interesting, and I'm curious about if there's similar trends
with regards to breastfeeding.
I am the mother of two young children, and when I was pregnant with my first, I was really
surprised on how much the research on breastfeeding is largely behavioral and cultural and not
medical or biological, and how there's a real lack of research there.
And I was wondering if that was just my reading or if that's a broader trend, and if so, why?
My second question is very different.
It's about sexual harassment, and I'm wondering if there's any sort of trend or movement towards
the need to have some sort of reconciliation process for men who were -- who 20, 30 years
ago, it was a different time, maybe they weren't directly involved, but they perpetuated it.
And I'm thinking in particular of Joe Biden and how he's often going around these days
talking about the initiative that he started with Barack Obama and speaking about consent,
and yet, remembering him leading the panel against Anita Hill and just the way he -- the
complete undignified way he treated her, shamed her, and I don't think he's ever apologized
for that, so the need for that to happen.
Thank you.
I think that's a terrific question about breastfeeding.
I think if I were to try to answer it, it would be mostly speculative.
I mean, certainly in the same way that the process of pregnancy creates changes in sort
of our systems, and so any questions about treatment or management of conditions are
sort of wrapped up in the way we as a society sort of imagine the mother as the vessel for
this future child, the same would be true during the breastfeeding process, and I have
to imagine that that affects the extent to which research is happening.
I also think that there's a lot of women for whom breastfeeding isn't easy, and so the
notion of that being a time when you would be doing volunteering to be part of a research
project, that sounds just like an additional challenge to me but certainly one that would
be worthwhile to look at.
I'm interested.
So thank you for asking that question.
I don't know of movements to get retroactive apologies, you know, 30 years later.
Because I would want them from a lot of those senators.
I wouldn't single out Biden, because there was Arlen Specter and there was Simpson from
Wyoming.
I mean, they were all equally bad to me.
And I think that would be a great question to pose to Anita Hill.
I mean, that may be who it matters to the most.
There certainly is a movement of conflict resolution on college campuses.
I'm not exactly a supporter of it, or even in public schools where I've seen it too.
But there are people that I trust, I mean, who I respect on college campuses who are
working on these circles of whatever they call them, you know, to get apologies happening.
I mean, and I think insights that come along with some kind of punishment is terrific.
I don't want this to become the vehicle of exemption for being responsible for your behavior.
So, you know, that's all I know, is that there is, indeed, a trend to work on this now.
What do they call it?
What do they call it?
So, it's called restorative justice.
Thanks.
And, actually, the model that was used in Rwanda after the genocide has been extremely
impactful in communities there.
There are also models of it being done in the United States.
Obviously there are cultural differences.
Organizationally what we advocate for is that the resolution should be survivor led, trauma
informed, and whatever the survivor wants.
And so if a survivor feels that restorative justice would be a meaningful process for
them to heal, then we trust and believe the survivor, that they know what's best for them,
and that they should be able to pursue that.
What that means, though, if that it's going to be offered to the survivor and the survivors
feels it would be meaningful for them and elects to do so, the college campus has to
have the right tools to do this.
And this is not the same as sitting, you know, the survivor and the assailant down and having
a Title IX coordinator moderate a conversation.
That's not restorative justice and we have seen that on college campuses where they try
that.
That can actually be retraumatizing for the survivor and is not a good practice.
There are college campuses where this has been really successful.
And, again, you know, we say that the survivor should get to lead, make the decision and
advocate for what they wish, and we support them in doing that.
And we ask that campuses have the infrastructure to provide that for the survivor.
And being the historian on this panel, so Janet Reno, who was Bill Clinton's attorney
general, was very into peer mediation.
And so high schools all over the country had these peer mediators who were trained.
And they would do exactly what you said they shouldn't be doing.
The peer mediator would get the two parties involved and try to negotiate this, and the
adults would be outside the room.
Give me a break, you know.
Because this would deteriorate into a popularity context.
It would deteriorate into shouting.
And so, you know, also you had to question who were the kids that were choosing to become
peer mediators; right, and why; right?
So, you know, this is before the term restorative justice was used.
It was called peer mediation.
And there was money put into under the Clinton Administration, who did a lot to militarize
high schools, by the way, and put cops in schools was under Bill Clinton, not social
workers in schools, it was police in schools.
So, in any event, peer mediation was sort of the soft side of that.
But I don't hear much about that anymore.
I do want to push back that and clarify a little bit, though, because I think even though
peer mediation in high schools and middle schools may have been an attempt at restorative
justice, that's not true restorative justice.
And what restorative justice means, for those in the room who are not familiar, is that
both parties get to decide together what the victim of the crime needs in order to move
forward and have, you know, a -- and sometimes it's done with as community with an entire
circle.
On college campuses, we usually see the survivor says, okay, for me to feel better about this
moving forward, you know, my assailant needs to leave my classes or my assailant needs
to apologize to me or needs to -- like what it is, the victim gets to decide and it's
a decision made collectively.
So it's not -- you know, like you said, a popularity contest, peer remediation, that's
not true restorative justice.
[Inaudible].
You've got to go to the other side too.
Because there's a guy with a microphone on the other side.
I wanted to ask the panel, as Jessica kind of alluded to, this question of violence against
women, you know, goes way beyond students and campuses.
So, you know, it's a part of the patriarchal ethos I guess I'll say in this country.
How much of your research, especially Miss Stein or Wellesley, or any of you that can
speak to this, is looking at this question in the communities, particularly in the African
American or Latina, Native American and Asian communities, or within the working class,
how are we looking at this question now of violence against women?
What's your research showing?
Is it up to date on that, and, you know, as policy how it can be addressed?
So I'd like to hear a little bit more about that if people have some thoughts on it.
Thank you.
Well, when you write research proposals you have to be really specific, and the kind of
research proposals that I write and the kind of expert that I am is in K-12 schools.
I have some research projects now in higher education though.
There is an abundance of work about violence against women in the larger community as well,
but that's not something that I've ever done.
I have not done research on this.
I'm 23.
But I think, you know, I can speak to some of what we've seen and what we consider best
practices.
The guidance that the Office For Civil Rights Department of Education has put out and the
way the campuses have adopted that and some of the campuses that we look to now as best,
you know, best practice benchmarks, a lot of predominantly white institutions, and so
the culture on their campus around what they've done, you know, there's procedural things
that will look pretty similar from place to place.
But when we talk about awareness and education and how we're reaching people, a lot of those
best practices taking place from predominantly white institutions are not going to look the
same as on an HBCU.
Or, you know, I come from Denver, Colorado.
It's not a very diverse.
And so what worked on my campus, which only had 4 percent of students were African American,
are going to look extremely different at an HBCU.
Additionally, you know, predominantly white institutions need to be extremely aware of
how those practices and the culture around that can marginalize students of color who
are already more at risk for these crimes.
And so, you know, I think just being really cognizant of who the campus, you know, or
the greater we're talking you're asking for beyond campus, so in a workplace, in a municipal
policy setting.
Whatever it is, I think we really need to be considerate, okay, what are best practices
and then how is that actually realistic in our community.
Community members know their communities best, and so they need to be the ones to look at
these model policies and decide what's going to be best for the community.
And I should add, with our Economic Security for Survivors Project at IWPR, we look at
a lot of the research that's being conducted in the field.
Unfortunately there's not a lot of data out there that really looks at the needs and the
best practices around marginalized communities, and we know those needs and remedies need
to be different.
There are other factors that are contributing to greater economic insecurity when we're
talking about specifically our project, but distrust of police officers for example, there's
a lot of other factors that make violence different.
And without having that voice from those communities or not having a better sense of what's really
working for them, it's really hard for us to move forward and really inclusively address
violence at its roots.
I'm going to go way back.
Sorry, Alex, making you walk.
So, on my college campus, like many, the administration has not been a consistent resource for survivors,
many of my friends who have come forward have been dismissed or silenced or asked accusatory
questions like what were you wearing, what were you drinking.
In addition to what you said about finding ways to put kind of exogenous pressure on
an administration, what can we as students do to communicate with our administrations
better, what kind of rhetoric, what kind of strategies would you recommend?
Yeah, absolutely, it's such an important question, and honestly the answer looks different for
every campus, every community, every administrator.
I would encourage you to form a coalition with other student leaders and try and figure
out, okay, we have representatives from the student government who have relationships.
We have representatives from -- you know, whatever the power organizations are on your
campus that have different relationships with administrators, figure out who is listening.
There's always, you know, a couple of administrators, a couple of professors who really want to
push this work forward but are not doing it in the forefront, and if none of that works
and you're interested in filing a Title IX case, we at End Rape on Campus can help you
with that.
And, you know, you can file a complaint with the Office of Civil rights and say, "Our administration
is asking survivors inappropriate questions.
Our administration is pushing this under the rug."
That's what that office is there for.
And, you know, a lot of people have questions about what that looks like in 2017 and under
the new administration, and while I certainly cannot speak to the future, we have still
seen case that is are being taken, cases that are being resolved.
We filed a case in September that had resolution in March, and so that is still a viable option.
It may not be one that you trust as much, and it's hard to say what will happen in the
future, but cases are still being resolved at about the same speed right now.
Hi.
I just wanted to say it been a really interesting panel, and it's interesting that in these
areas I feel like an even bigger revolution is needed than in economics and politics.
But perhaps all the revolutions we need are equal.
But I wanted to respond to the person with the question about breastfeeding.
The "Journal of Women Politics and Policy" has a special issue on breastfeeding, and
we have different articles in that are looking at it from different points of view, critical
about the way it is being presented culturally.
And, you know, when you actually look at the research, it's very hard to see any difference
between six months of breastfeeding and twelve months of breastfeeding, and, yet, the Pediatrics
Association, whatever they're called, has recommendation for 12 months and as you know,
we have at best, 12 weeks of leave in this country.
I mean the best we could do, you know, if we really wanted to promote breast-feeding,
which is important for healthy babies and healthy moms, but it's not the only thing
that's important.
Formula feeding works very well when there are various issues for either the mother or
the child is family leave for six months.
What happens, of course, is women stop, you know.
When they have to go back to work, there's so many workplaces that are not accommodating,
and breast pumping is not the same as breast-feeding.
And so, anyway, I just want to say that you might want to look at that special issue,
because there's a lot of viewpoints.
It's a couple of years old, "Journal of Women's Politics and Policy."
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hi.
I'm Teri Bergman from the National Association of Work for Sports, which is totally irrelevant
to being here.
I had a couple of questions.
Sort of when we were talking about Joe Biden, the piece that nobody seems to be paying any
attention to is that he is very handsy.
You see it all the time when he's, you know, with women.
You see it on TV, and no one seems to be suggesting that that's inappropriate, that somebody needs
to talk to him about that.
But what I was really going to focus on is the issue that both of you have, which is
the history of people, say, very famous case of rape at UVA that has -- it backtracked.
Nan, you may not know about this because you're in Massachusetts, but recently we had a case
here in the area where some male students were accused of raping a female student in
high school and that's been backtracked.
I don't know which things are true and which aren't.
But my question is around, you tell me I'm supposed to believe everybody, but it appears
that that isn't always true.
So there's two questions.
Is, you know, the believe everybody but also what is the impact of what appears to be false
accusations on the systems that are developed to help people, whether or not people are
believed, all of those things, we have to talk about that kind of thing and what it
means.
Yeah, absolutely, this is an important question, and a tough conversation.
When people ask me, okay, you know, you tell me to believe survivors, but there are false
cases.
Well, yes, there are false cases.
The FBI has consistently found that between 92 and 98 percent, consistently leading with
98 percent, of all reported sexual assaults, and that does not include the many, many unreported
ones, are true.
So that means between 2 and 8 percent consistently leaning toward 2 percent, of reported cases
are false.
That is the exact same rate as any other violent crime.
Somebody is just as likely to be falsely accused of sexual assault as they are any other violent
crime, but people don't walk around and say, "I'm really worried that I'm going to be accused
at robbery at gunpoint today."
We just don't have that narrative.
And a lot of that is because of the way that we talk about sexual violence, and we sweep
it under the rugs.
We don't have good definitions of consent.
A lot of people don't know what consent is by the time that they start having sex in
high school.
That's a recipe for disaster.
And so, you know, to that end, there is still that 2 to 8 percent, and I understand that
that is looming.
That said, as a society, it is not our place to decide whether or not the survivor is telling
the truth.
That is the job of the system in place.
And every time that we perpetuate this idea because of the regard that false cases are
held in because every time somebody reports, we say, well what about that UVA case?
What about that one time?
You know, my friend was falsely accused.
We defer to that so much more than we do to the 92 to 98 percent of the time that survivors
are telling the truth, and that's the reason why survivors don't come forward.
That's the reason why me and all my peers get death threats for our work.
That's why, you know, survivors get asked what skirt -- you know, how short was your
skirt, what were you wearing?
It's true that between 2 and 8 percent of the cases reported this year will be false.
It is not our place to ask the survivor if they're telling the truth or figure it out.
And I think another point to that is wondering -- one question that always comes up for me,
well, maybe there's a reason for them to recant.
Why are they recanting?
Are their pressures to recant?
And we need to address that as well, because it's, you know, something that's causing great
harm to survivors.
And then there's the public perception as well.
So that's another part of that aspect.
So two more questions.
I'm going to go to the lady in
the blue.
Good morning or good afternoon.
I was just telling the first panelist that I represent probably 5 percent of the Asian
community here this morning, so I'd like to emphasize it.
Thank you.
I come from a subservience I can't country, and going back to what you said earlier about
Senator Biden, the women slaves that came to America, the Japanese government actually
apologized for that.
But because of the subservience of our women, even people that work for a 500 Fortune company,
they don't think that they're being violated, because they're ashamed, and it's whitewashed.
Is there data for Asian women that actually said that they are being sexually abused or
verbally abused?
Thank you.
You'd have to look at workplace studies on that.
I mean, what Jess and I focus on is educational environments.
And there are lots of data.
I mean the federal government did surveys in the early '80s or '90s about workplace
sexual harassment, and it's broken down by ethnicity and rate.
So there is data out there, but it's not what any of us up here study.
I think we should move on.
Yeah.
I know, Linda, you're probably thinking the same thing.
The Asian Pacific Gender-Based Violence Institution.
I believe they're in Seattle.
Thank you.
I believe all it will acronyms get [inaudible].
I believe in Seattle.
They're in Seattle.
They have a lot of great resources for you.
And you might be able to connect with Linda who is right next to you, who have additional
ones.
Thanks.
I think it's important to say that, like, words matter.
So, to your point, Nan, I really appreciated everything that you said, and I was actually
interested that you weren't a lawyer, because I think a lot of times when we talk about
sexual harassment we kind of go to that very narrow definition, and then it leads to exactly
what you experienced when you got all those results from principals that said, oh, well,
it's just bullying and it's just, you know, verbal harassment.
I work on a project, Futures Without Violence, that talks about sexual harassment in the
workplace, but it's the way we talk about it is that it's from a spectrum of sexual
violence.
And I think if we can just take it out of this one little narrow -- and I'm saying this
as a lawyer; right, take it out of that one little kind of narrow kind of lane that are
not minimizing what is really an act of sexual violence, and it's really important to use
the correct words.
Do we have time for one more question?
Okay.
Hi.
So I have a similar question to one that was asked before, about college campuses, specifically,
so this is mostly directed towards Jessica, and I'm going to try and make it as quick
as possible.
Thank you.
But I actually go to a university that seems to be doing a lot of really good things on
the survivor advocacy front, and I just sat on an It's On Us 2.0 task force with our student
union, and we have a well-funded survivor advocacy education group.
But what I've noticed on my campus is that we're talking about consent in the feminist
way, in that it's ongoing, it's continuous, and, most importantly, it can't be given if
one person is incapacitated.
And we count incapacitation by being blacked out by alcohol consumption as part of that.
But then the judicial board that deals with sexual assault cases on my campus continuously
finds that if somebody comes forth who was blacked out, they find in favor of the perpetrator,
and it just seems that their hands are tied, and I feel that we are sort of doing a disservice
by not talking about the fact that somebody cannot be giving consent but still not be
found in favor of in the institutional judicial board case, and I feel very powerless in dealing
with that, and I don't really know how we can best support our survivors when we can't
fix the actual case.
We see this really frequently on college campuses, where one portion of campus typically that
that which provides services to the survivor and the administration, there are lots of
pieces to the campus scene when it comes to sexual violence, and so we see this often,
where they're not all consistently saying the same thing, and that was my issue in trying
to get my campus to pass a different consent definition.
They had a different definition on the health and counseling website as they did the Title
IX website.
That's confusing to students.
We try and use the terminology yes means yes, because we think it's easy for student to
understand.
It encompasses everything that you talked about, and it's also a good way to turn to
the administration and say, "Listen, this is the best way to teach students what consent
is."
We can't teach them that if this is not what you're going to uphold for them, because that's
wrong.
We need to get our definition the same across the board.
Your administration does have the power to change that definition that the judicial board
is using to find that, and I would be happy to talk with you further about some student
activism to get them to do so.
So I want to thank the panel again for this very interesting conversation.
Appreciate all your insights.
Thank you all for questions.
I believe we're turning next.
All right.
Everyone we're going to stay seated a little longer.
We're going to switch -- no.
Now I just want to take a quick moment to introduce Barbara Gault.
Barbara is the vice president and executive director at the Institute for Women's Policy
Research.
Her work covers a wide range of issues, including college access and affordability, job quality,
paid leave, poverty, political engagement, and the need for better early care and education
options for working parents.
She founded and leads IWPR Student/Parent Success Initiative and has authored dozens
of reports and publications.
She had testified in Congress on low-income women's educational access, has spoken and
delivered keynote presentations in venues throughout the country, and appears in a wide
range of print, radio, television, and media outlets.
Prior to joining IWPR, Barbara conducted research at the Office for Children's Health Policy
Research and served as a staff and board member of organizations promoting human rights in
Latin America.
Barbara received her PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and her BA
from the University of Michigan.
She serves on board of directors on the Coalition of Human Needs and is a research professor
in study at the George Washington University.
So, thank you, Barbara.
I'll turn it over to her.
Thank you, Sarah, and thanks to all the panelists who were so informative and inspiring.
My job right now is to introduce Charlotte Burrows, who is currently serving a five-year
term as commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
She has dedicated the vast majority of her career to defending human rights, civil rights,
and employment rights.
She was nominated to the commission by President Barack Obama in 2014, and confirmed by the
senate very quickly that same year.
And as commissioner, among her many accomplishments, she has taken leadership in developing EEOC
proposals to help close the gender wage gap by improving access to employer data on wages
and encouraging transparency and data collection on men's and women's wages.
Prior to her role at the EEOC, she served as associate deputy attorney general in the
U.S. Department of Justice, where she worked on a broad range of legal and policy issues,
including employment litigation, tribal justice, voting rights, and implementation of the Violence
Against Women Act.
It's making me feel encouraged to know that there's someone like this in government right
now.
Prior to that -- oh, there's more, there's even more -- she served as general counsel
for civil and constitutional rights to Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Senate Committee
on Health, Education Labor and Pensions, and was general counsel of the Senate Judiciary
Committee.
Before working on Capitol Hill, she served in the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil
Rights Division, where she became deputy chief of the Employment Litigation section after
serving as a trial attorney and as special litigation counsel.
Before that she served as a judicial clerk for the Honorable Timothy Louis of the U.S.
Court of Appeals of the Third Circuit, and as an associate of [inaudible] and Clinton.
She received her Bachelor's degree from Princeton University and her JD from Yale Law School.
So please join me in welcoming Charlotte Burrows.
Good afternoon.
I am so thrilled to join you for this terrific conference.
Thank you, Barbara, for that generous introduction.
Wisdom would dictate that I just sit down and not say anything else, because how can
you live up to that.
You know, I also want to thank Heidi Hutman [ph].
It's good to see you, and Beverly [inaudible], and Lalie Makaron [ph], and, of course, the
phenomenal staffs at IWPR, the Women's Research and Resource Center at Spelman College and
the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College for bringing us together for this
important, important conference.
It's certainly exactly what I need right now.
When we gather like this to share our experiences and ideas and our hope, we can spark really
powerful change in this country.
And our country needs powerful change right now.
Lately it seems as if every single news cycle brings another announcement about a threat
to women's rights.
So there's a lot we could talk about, but I want it to be very disciplined and respectful
of your time, particularly since between I am between you and lunch.
So I really thought let's not get distracted by all the headlines and focus on what matters,
which is the important thoughtful, and rigorous work that will move our country forward.
So just three things that I want to talk about.
First, the critical importance of research and data for creating sound policy that we
need, those of us in government, that we need as a country to make real change for women;
second, what that research shows about how multiple forms of discrimination are limiting
women's economic potential; and, third, some of what we're doing at the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission to address these issues.
This conference could not come at a more critical moment from my perspective.
It's the perfect time to be talking about the importance of research and data, although
these days it sort of feels like maybe we're living in a fact-free alternative reality.
Don't believe it.
Facts matter.
Evidence still matters.
The work that you are doing matters a great deal, because it challenges the gendered and
racial barriers that limit women's opportunities, and, more broadly, limit our society.
We need evidence-based public policy.
If we stop our research, if we don't collect data, if we don't rigorously analyze it, take
it seriously, we can't understand the problems women face, and we can't find real solutions.
It's fitting that today's program takes place in the conference name for Barbara Jordan
who once said "Education remains the key to both economic and political empowerment."
So that goes, in my view, to the heart of what this conference is about.
And the heart of all our work, not just today, but every day, we must education the public
and policymakers, like myself, I'm one of the, you know, few that have crossed over
into this administration from the past administration, but all of us need that education about the
reality of women's rights so that we can work together armed with knowledge to neighboring
a difference in our economic and political world.
So what does the evidence say about where working women are today?
I purposely am going to start with a little bit of good news.
Since the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was established in 1965, and we collect data,
and have been doing it since '66, we have really helped open doors of opportunity for
women at all levels in the American workforce.
As just one example, the percentage of women employed in senior and management positions
has increased from less than 10 percent in 1966 to nearly 40 percent in about 2013, so
that's progress.
But we all know that progress is not the same as real equality.
So gender discrimination, as well as racial, ethnic, and other forms of discrimination
still hinders women -- women's still equality not only in the workplace but in society.
As long as that continues everybody loses, because we lose the benefit of women's full
talents and contributions.
One important barometer, I think, for the impact of discrimination on women's opportunity
is the gender pay gap.
It's one of the ways we can tell how close or, frankly, how far away we are from actually
realizing women's full potential.
Each of the many forms of discrimination women face impacts their paychecks, either directly,
as in the case of paid discrimination, which is something we've been working at really
hard at the EEOC, or in the case of other forms of discrimination indirectly.
Women who are denied higher training, a deserved promotion, who are steered into lower-paying
job, forced to change jobs because of sexual harassment, or because an employer doesn't
think a mother of young children will work hard enough, and I have to add this, or just
because she's pregnant.
The number of cases we see when a woman comes in and says that she is pregnant and the response
is "You are fired" is astonishing.
I don't know what I expected that to be before I got to EEOC, but it's shocking to me that
anybody doesn't know that it's illegal.
But it happens.
It happens all the time.
All of that an impact on the pay gap, is helping to fuel it.
So I want to talk a little bit about how those disparities are working together and how we
can work against them.
Some the critical research that you and your partner organizations have done shows that
there are still significant pay disparities between, for example, men and women, white
workers and people of color, and especially between women of color and white men who do
the very same job.
And you all are probably familiar with the statistics, the census data showing that,
on average, as of 2015, women working full time outside the home earn just 80 cents for
every dollar earned by men.
In 2015 we saw stats that were even worse for women of color, African American women
earning only about 63 cents, Latinas 54 cents, Asians about 85 cents, and Native American
women were estimated to make just 58 cents for each dollar earned by a white male in
a typical year of full-time employment.
And these pay gaps exist in just about every occupation in every state.
They widen over time.
Thanks to the excellent research by IWRP, we know, unfortunately, that it's probably
going to take about 40 years to completely close those gender pay gaps.
I don't know about any of you, I don't plan to still be working 40 years from now, so
I hope that we at least agree that we need to move a little faster on this.
Some of them, of course, are explained by differences in industry and occupation, but
even when you take these factors into account, even when you control or do regression analysis
for the lawyers in the room and the economists in the room, you end up with unexplainable
pay gaps.
And I want to be clear, in addition to the pay discrimination, another important cause
of this pay gap that we're seeing is the refusal of many employers to hire women into jobs
occupied traditionally by men.
I'm talking about construction worker jobs.
I'm talking about the jobs that are traditionally male, like construction, like manufacturing,
and a lot of our STEM jobs.
We've been working very hard to eliminate steering that is based on sex stereotypes
about who can do what job and what their work is worth.
This form of discrimination has huge economic ramifications.
I'll just give you one example.
We had a case about Outback Steakhouse restaurant, which, you know, you probably heard about
it.
They had a pattern of practice, they'd hire women but not promote them into those higher-level
profit-sharing management positions that are so critical; right?
So, when we got it together and finally got a settlement, it was $19 million that they
had to set aside.
We're not talking about small amounts of money.
And these things are not in the employer's interest.
They're certainly not in society's interest.
We also see all the time that you have these things coming together, the steering and the
pay discrimination, so there are very few employers in these traditionally male jobs
that if they do hire women will give them the same money that her male counterparts
are earning.
Just this week, we announced a settlement, it's a case that I've been watching -- it's
just an individual case -- for a while, on behalf of a woman called Joanna Smith, in
the traditionally male field of civil engineering.
She was hired by Prince George's County of Environment, five years of experience, excellent
record.
Tried to negotiate a salary that she thought would match her experience and education and
was rebuffed.
Two weeks later, they high a male engineer, same position, same duties for more money.
He's allowed to negotiate.
To make it worse, the employer also paid two other engineers, one of whom was junior to
her with less complex duties more than they paid Joanna.
So, not surprising, we were able to win that case.
We got a ruling from the federal judge -- I don't know why it had to go to court in the
first place, but, okay -- that this violated the equal pay Act.
And we resolved it.
We got about $145,000 in damages, but here's the kicker, $25,000 they had to up her salary
for the going forward part.
Imagine what it means to be shorted $25,000 a year; okay?
You know what that means?
That mean you're getting less in social security, you're getting less in pensions, in retirement
savings; right?
If you're at an employer that has a bonus system, you're getting less in bonuses.
What women take home is so important to their families, to our economy, and to the basic
fairness that's at the bottom of everything this country is supposed to stand for, and
I think we do stand for.
So, also, I was able to catch the last conversation about sexual harassment, a big problem.
I know we're running short on time, and I want to just be very clear, this is something
that's also fueling this pay gap; right?
If a woman has to leave, she's denied that promotion because of sexual harassment, we
have got to get our arms around it, and I have to, I cannot leave without saying that
obviously this is an assault on human dignity; right.
Obviously that's the big problem with it.
Unfortunately we have in a lot of our cases involving immigrant and migrant women, it's
actually an assault, a criminal assault by the time it gets to us.
There's two specials that I'll commend to you that PBS has done about EEOC work in this
area.
The titles speak for themselves.
One is called "Rape in the Field" about immigrant worker women.
The other is called "Rape on the Nightshift," about women who are working as janitors alone,
cleaning a floor, and the only person who knows about them is a supervisor who, at least
in our case out in L.A., turned out to have rape conviction, which the employer knew about
before they hired him, so huge problem.
I commend to you, I'm not going to go on about it, but we have two of my colleagues, the
current acting chair who is a republican, but she's very committed to this issue, and
a democratic colleague of mine, Chai Feldblum, who have, together, made a report to the commission
that we have followed up on, so we've got harassment guidance that was proposed for
comment, will be coming out soon.
We also have -- they have very practical suggestions about warning signs and prevention in their
report.
And so it is a very hands-on kind of report.
So I actually, you know, like that report better than our collective guidance, which
is a little bit more lawyerly, but I commend that to you.
The last thing I want to mention, fueling the pay gap, caregiver discrimination.
Caregivers, you know, it's amazing to me that everybody doesn't get that.
But we actually have employers who not only do they not embrace some excellent proposals
that I know you all are championing sick leave, more flexible workplace, but they actually
discriminate against caregivers, making assumptions about who can do what and why.
You know, even before you're hired.
So I just wanted to make sure that you all know that the EEOC has a guidance on this
as well, that talks about when they actually violates your civil rights laws; right?
So, if you assume that you can't promote the woman because she's got a pre-school age child,
it's a problem.
And we've been doing some cutting-edge work in litigation, got a good settlement called
[inaudible], which really sort of was an ADA case, but talked about, you know, you can't
fire a woman, or deny her hire rather, because she had a child with a disability, you know,
more qualified than the people you selected and everything else, but she had a child with
a disability and so you decide she can't do the job.
That was one of our cases.
We also have done some precedent setting work, in the Fifth Circuit of all places, to establish
that discrimination against nursing mothers violates the civil rights laws.
I'm very excited about those cases.
So we are going to continue with this as our top priority, and I want to say we spent a
lot of time last year on a very important proposal to collect pay data so we would have
more information, be more informed, be better able to focus our resources from those employers
that have a hundred or more employees, we have traditionally collected data on demographics,
race, national origin, gender since 1966.
But we decided that what we really needed to add to that was information about salary.
And so we spent a long time, you know, two public announcements, two sets of comments
that we took and took very seriously, a day-long hearing that I was lucky enough to have IWPR
appear at and present testimony and assist us with and came up with a proposal that I
think will work.
It has some detractors.
I've heard some say, "Hey, there is no pay discrimination, so why are you looking for
this and why should employers have to worry about that?"
I'll spare you my response that.
I've already heard people say, "Look, this is never going to -- this snapshot of pay
data is never going to tell you everything you need to know to bring the case; right?"
So let's make the perfect enemy of the good.
No.
I believe firmly that, based on the work that we've done, looking carefully at this proposal
and trying to balance that burden with what would really be useful, considering all the
other information that we're able to get when we investigate that this will be a very useful
tool.
So I hope you'll agree that it's worth having a little bit more information so we can finally
close that pay gap so it's not 40 years but a lot sooner before we have equal pay in the
workplace.
And we're still looking at all those other forms of discrimination too, of course, because
I want to just say we don't have to accept the status quo.
We don't have to accept the assumptions that women have always been paid more.
You've already moved in the needle, you, all of you, by shining a light on the need for
equal pay and equal justice for women.
And putting these issues at the forefront, we can actually have a national conversation,
the kind of national conversation that creates a consensus to have real change.
So, paraphrasing Barbara Jordan once more, I have no doubt that your efforts in educating
the public will lead us to economic and political empowerment, so let's continue the fight,
and I wish you a very successful conference and look forward to future collaborations.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Commissioner Burrows.
It's just so inspiring to see what you've done and what you're continuing to work on
in your position, and to know that you have 20 years left in your career and so much more
to do.
I vote for you.
Unfortunately, the Commissioner does have to leave, so we don't have time for questions.
But we do have time for lunch, so we're going to adjourn here.
And we can talk to each other about the charge that she has given us to continue to educate
and tackle some of these issues that she's raised for us to eloquently.
Thank you.
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