On Aug. 18, we observed the 100th anniversary of women winning the right to vote after more than 100 years of struggle.
Think how different our country would be today if women couldn’t vote.
On Aug. 26 we’ll celebrate Women’s Equality Day, a day to celebrate suffrage but also to re-focus on the need for gender equality. At the current rate of (non) progress, the gender equality gap in the U.S. won’t be closed for 208 years. Yet 96 percent of women and 90 percent of men support the Equal Rights Amendment, which could be the 28th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
An Equal Rights Amendment will fight both unequal pay and violence against women. It would prohibit pregnancy discrimination and many other forms of discrimination. It would no longer allow insurance companies and manufacturers to charge women higher rates/prices than men. It would explicitly guarantee that laws must be written and decided through a gender lens.
It’s past time to give 165 million girls and women in the U.S. their full constitutional equality. This Nov. 3, we have the opportunityto make all U.S. citizens equal under the law. Vote for legislators who will make gender equality a priority. Vote equality!
Edie Lycke
San Luis Obispo
This article appears in Aug 20-30, 2020.
So far as I can observe, there is no remaining discrimination against women. There are differences between lifetime earnings, but they appear completely reliant upon the working choices made by the members of the two sexes. It is clear that in the world of multi million Dollar sports figures, men are dominant; but that appears related to the preference the society has for watching men’s sports which determines the advertising market value of these jobs; not an invidious discrimination. Insurance company rates are set in a market, in which actual risks are used to set premiums. The most severe event in our recent past has been allowing transgender men to compete against women in sports events; one of the perverse “equality” arguments ignoring the differences between the sexes. And, just to leave the record clear, there are TWO sexes, a cold immutable fact, upon which science we need to base our understandings and rules.