The Impact of Women Leaders during Uncertain Times
June 27, 2003
The year has been one of economic and military turmoil. Through my work at The Women’s Foundation, I have seen larger foundations cut their grantmaking to nonprofit organizations. On a daily basis, I watch as many of these community-based organizations struggle to survive, some not making it through the year. The state has cut $1.2 billion from education and public health care and women bear the brunt of the hardship that results from these cuts. In California, 37 percent of single women and their dependent children live in poverty.
There is some good news. Within the corporate world, more women are holding executive level positions. Women now hold 15.7 percent of corporate officer positions in Fortune 500 companies. Yet women of color represent only 1.6 percent of corporate officers. At 1.6 percent, invisibility is the reality.
More visible are the estimated 1.2 million businesses owned by women of color in the United States, which employ more than 822,000 people and generate $100.6 billion in sales. California boasts the greatest number of minority women-owned firms in the United States. Yet even with the growth in these businesses, in cities such as San Francisco few government contracts are awarded to women-owned companies.
We must ask ourselves: Are these firms being started by women who have hit proverbial glass ceilings and, out of frustration, started their own businesses? Or have issues such as language barriers or caring for the elderly and the young kept them out of the more traditional workforce in the first place?
As we look at those who have succeeded, we also need to look at the Asian Pacific American immigrant women who are at the bottom of the economic ladder. Poverty rates in this community can be as high as 63 percent, and the rate of Limited English Proficiency is over 70 percent in certain Southeast Asian communities.
We know that there is a wide gap between affluent APAs and those living in poverty. APAs occupy the extremes of the spectrum. We are simultaneously more likely than whites to have earned college degrees and to be educated to a lower than ninth-grade level. As the “model minority,” APAs have had to earn higher test scores to enter academic institutions because there are now “too many of us” in higher education. Yet many of us suffer daily on the bottom rung of the economic ladder, in dead-end, low-wage jobs.
Women of color are more likely to earn minimum wage and work in unsafe conditions as garment workers, domestic workers, home care workers and in hi-tech sweatshops. Only one-quarter of immigrant workers had job-based health insurance in 2000.
In our own backyard in Silicon Valley, workers in various industries are exposed to dangerous chemicals. Piecework, or home work, where assembly is done in workers’ homes, reflects both manufacturers’ demand for cheap labor and the large number of desperate APA immigrant women who suffer from employment discrimination, lack of on-the-job training and the dire need to supplement their meager incomes.
An APA woman, Elaine Chao, was recently appointed as U.S. secretary of labor. Are we working with her to address the needs of immigrant APA women?
This past year witnessed the passing of Patsy Mink, U.S. congresswoman for 24 years and one of the authors of Title IX of the Education Act, which mandates gender equality in any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Scholarship money for women has increased from $100,000 in 1972 to $179 million today. Three thousand women participated in sports in 1972. Today, three million do. Patsy did make a difference.
Although the numbers are miniscule as of yet, there are a number of promising APA women who have been elected to local and state office and who may be in the pipeline to run for federal office. This January, Mee Moua became the highest-ranking Hmong politician by joining the Minnesota State Senate. The first woman majority leader in the California State Assembly is Wilma Chan.
The goal of having more women and men of color in office is that they may help to create a foundation and a framework for achieving equity. It is clear that in low-income communities of color, the question is how to eradicate the structural barriers that impede the full development of all people.
So my role is to be a part of the new and emerging California and beyond — a California that needs to examine and address all the many identities of its residents and all the many needs that must be met. To ensure that more money and attention is going to communities now when they need it most and to be a voice to raise questions and to provide possible solutions.
To be a voice that says that in California, the number one agricultural producer and exporter in this country, it is not okay that 40 percent of Latinas, 30 percent of Native American women, and 25 percent of women of African descent are food insecure. To say that it is not acceptable for women over the age of 65 to be more than twice as likely to live in poverty. To say that we know who is being excluded at the border and who is kept in detainment at Guantanamo Bay without being charged for a specific crime. To ask that if we were to create a “usual suspect” category based on race, why didn’t our nation put an effort around incarcerating young angry white men such as Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombing or those of Columbine High School? To ask why looking askance at APAs in Silicon Valley after the Wen Ho Lee case was tolerated, or believing that excluding all Asians from Berkeley was a solution to SARS. To say that it’s not justifiable for gay youth to be two to three times more likely to attempt suicide.
My role is to say that all of these things matter. To say that gender and ethnicity and sexual orientation and race matter. And to say that we need to create a new paradigm that addresses all of these identities. We need to create a new movement where the moral center is not defined by how well and how long we fight for our own rights, although that is extremely important. The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.
Patti Chang is the president and CEO of The Women’s Foundation. The original version of this article was delivered in a speech to the Pacific Asian American Women Bay Area Coalition on May 14, 2003.
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