March is Women’s History Month! March is also the month that CRSJ will host its first Economic Justice Summit at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC on March 30th and 31st. The Economic Justice Summit is the culmination of our Section’s year-long theme and focus, on economic justice issues that are inextricably connected to our broader civil rights agenda. As I have repeated throughout this bar year, a civil rights agenda without an economic agenda is like trying to clap with one hand.
As we celebrate Women’s History Month, it is important to shed light on the sad reality that there are economic disparities that still exist for too many women in the United States and around the world. These disparities were exasperated during the height of the COVID pandemic and now as a result of last year’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson.
For example, in April 2021, the ABA Commission on Women in the Profession hosted a virtual panel discussion that emphasized that from February 2020 (the month before the pandemic shut down) the unemployment rate among White women was 2.8%, among Hispanic women 4.9% and for Black women 4.8%. By November 2020, the employment rate among these three categories had nearly doubled to 5.4% (White women), 8.2% (Hispanic women) and 9.0% (Black women).