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#53: Equity for all
62 Plays5 years ago
In this episode, podcast series host Jill James interviews Katica Roy, a gender economist and CEO of Pipeline Equity. Why a gender economist? Popular demand! Our listeners frequently reach out asking how more women can be welcomed and encouraged to join the safety and health profession—a STEM field. Katica shares gender and pay equity facts and how they influence STEM. She also covers how women can impact the economic recovery from COVID-19. This is a highly requested episode that you won’t want to miss!
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Transcript
Introduction to Accidental Safety Pro Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
This is the Accidental Safety Pro brought to you by Vivid Learning Systems and the Health and Safety Institute. This episode was recorded on April 3rd, 2020. My name is Jill James, Vivid's Chief Safety Officer, and today I'm joined by Karaka Roy. Karaka is a gender economist and CEO of Pipeline Equity.
00:00:29
Speaker
You heard me right, listeners. Our guest today is a gender economist, not a safety and health professional like the rest of us. So I bet you're wondering why this subject?
Why Gender Equity in Safety Professions Matters
00:00:40
Speaker
Well, the answer is simple. You all requested it. In the nearly two years we've been doing this show, you've likely noticed the deliberate selection I've made ensuring equal representation of male and female voices as guests.
00:00:52
Speaker
You've likely also noticed my female guests often address challenges they face in our profession as well as their successes. Many of our guests have offered advice based on their career experiences, and many have offered ideas as to how each of us, male and female, can open doors and encourage women to join our professional practice, which is a STEM occupation.
00:01:14
Speaker
I've been receiving a steady stream of emails, phone calls, texts from women and from some men asking for advice, wanting to know how to succeed as a woman in this field, how to get a seat at the decision-making table, how to address issues of pay and equity without losing your job, and if you really have to be one of the boys in order to be successful.
00:01:35
Speaker
Now, while our guests can't necessarily answer all of those questions, I have been listening. And it's your questions and interest are the reason why I asked Kadika Roy to be our guest today. So listeners, thank you for those questions. And I hope you find this helpful. Welcome to the show, Kadika. Thank you for having me. So let's set the stage for
Role of a Gender Economist
00:01:58
Speaker
our listeners. What is a gender economist?
00:02:02
Speaker
A gender economist is someone who looks at the economy through the lens of gender, so really looks at economic indicators and data and disaggregates the information by gender. So it's not just women, it's 50% women, 50% men.
00:02:25
Speaker
Interesting. So how does somebody become a gender economist?
Karaka Roy's Career Journey
00:02:30
Speaker
What was your career path that got you here and eventually the founder of a software company, which is Pipeline Equity?
00:02:40
Speaker
Very non-linear. I think, you know, it's been said that most career paths are like a jungle gym and that's true. I, you know, my undergrad degree is in political science with an emphasis in legal studies. Obviously economics is a part of that.
00:02:58
Speaker
But I'm also a former programmer, fluent in four programming languages, UI UX designer and expertise in data science. So I think, you know, kind of a different thread of degrees and experiences that ultimately led me to where I am today.
00:03:17
Speaker
Interesting. Our listeners are very familiar with labor laws as it relates to safety and health in the workplace. Have you had any intersections in your career that kind of launched this for you from a labor perspective?
Fighting for Pay Equity
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, from a labor perspective, not so much from a safety perspective. So I'm actually a breadwinner mom who fought to be paid equitably twice and won. I didn't file a lawsuit or anything. I just, I think given my history in my background in political science with an emphasis in legal studies, understood how to do legal research.
00:03:59
Speaker
and just stood up for myself. So one of those times I was actually on maternity, when I was on maternity leave with my daughter, my boss was optimized, which is a fancy word for fired. But when I came back, I had a team that I was managing and I was a breadwinner mom.
00:04:21
Speaker
And then a day after I came back from maternity leave, I was asked to take on a new team. And then two weeks later, I was asked to take on a third team, which is great. It's great timing, right? Breadwinner mom for a family of four. The only issue was I wasn't being offered any additional pay either for the new teams I took on or any up leveling. So I had a male colleague.
00:04:47
Speaker
who had one team, was one pay grade higher than I was, took on an additional team and also received additional compensation for that new team. Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn't receive anything. So I went to my new manager and HR and said, well, you know, what do you want to do about this? How do you want to, you know, really grateful for the opportunity. It's great timing. How do you want to make me whole on my compensation?
00:05:14
Speaker
And I didn't hear anything, so I thought, well, this has got to be something that makes this illegal. So I went and found the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was actually the first piece of legislation that President Obama signed into law in January 2009.
00:05:30
Speaker
And essentially what it did was change the statute of limitations for equal pay from the, essentially changed it from when the decision was made to every time you pay someone inequitably, the statute of limitations starts over. So I called HR and said, well, this is a Lilly Ledbetter issue. Every time you pay me, the statute of limitations starts over. What do you want to do about it?
00:05:57
Speaker
Oh wow, and what did they say? So they increased my level, increased my pay and gave me back pay. And that was really, you know, I had learned about women's rights and gender inequity when I was in college, obviously as a poli sci major, but didn't really think it applied much. And that was really my first explicit experience with this and thought, oh my gosh.
00:06:21
Speaker
This really does apply today, but it's great that they did the right thing, but why did I have to spend my time researching my rights? Figuring it out, right.
00:06:35
Speaker
you know, how might I make that right? And I think from that point forward, you know, obviously I'd inherited some pay inequities because I inherited two teams and made a commitment that if you worked for me, I was going to do everything in my power to ensure you had both equitable pay and equitable opportunity.
00:06:54
Speaker
Well, congratulations. And your story sounds very familiar to some of the questions that I have been getting over the last couple of years from our listeners. So thank you for sharing that. Certainly a hopeful message, though frustrating to listen to at the same time.
00:07:13
Speaker
So sticking with, you know, gender economy, let's look at what the US workforce looks like right
Women's Representation in the Workforce
00:07:22
Speaker
now. Like what percent of the workforce in the United States represents women?
00:07:28
Speaker
So women make up 47%, well, so this is April 3rd, 2020. We don't know, you know, there's a lot of things happening obviously in the labor force, but they right now sort of pre-COVID, they made up 47% of the labor base in the United States. They actually occupied the majority of all jobs, just over 50%.
00:07:55
Speaker
And while women have been the majority of all bachelor's degree and higher, so their education attainment has been higher than men's for a while now, they haven't been participating in the labor force.
00:08:13
Speaker
However, from 2017 to 2019, women were increasing their labor force participation. And in the first quarter of 2019 actually became the most educated cohort that actually actively participating in the labor force. So there's different elements. There's the 47%. But then when you begin to cull that down, it begins to tell a really interesting story about why gender equity matters and why it matters now.
00:08:45
Speaker
Interesting. Since everyone listening to this podcast is in safety and health, which is a piece of STEM practice, science, technology, engineering, and math, what do we know about women in STEM?
Challenges for Women in STEM
00:09:02
Speaker
Well STEM really has, it tends to get grouped together, but there's really four pieces of STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math. And when you look at science and math, we're almost on par.
00:09:17
Speaker
from an education perspective and labor force participation in science and math. There's probably a few pieces where we could change, but it's really technology and engineering, and those are really two of the fastest growing pieces of STEM where women remain
00:09:35
Speaker
Uh, you know, underrepresented and, um, and we need to continue to focus. It's not, um, it, there's sort of different pieces of that. Some of it starts, uh, when, um, some of it starts in school, right? So my kids are in elementary school and middle school. There are certainly programs we need to do there.
00:09:56
Speaker
But the other piece of it is that not only do we have a lower percentage of women going into technology and engineering, about 50% will actually leave STEM in the first 10 years because of a hostile work environment. So we need to fix it on multiple threads. There's the pipeline coming in, but then there's actually the pipeline that's
00:10:20
Speaker
We need to retain that pipeline. Fascinating. I know where my company is based in Washington state there's quite an active pursuit at that.
00:10:36
Speaker
I think it's the junior high level that they're really working on encouraging kids to get into the technology and engineering like you're talking about, particularly because of the workforce and the type of employers in the state of Washington. So I know that's been an active pursuit there for a long time. I bet other states perhaps have similar initiatives.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, and then we need to actually ensure so that plus we need to ensure that the workplace that they're going into is equitable because otherwise what we're selling them is not the truth of what's what is the reality that many of them face. So could you explain the difference between what pay equity is and gender equity?
Pay vs Gender Equity Explained
00:11:22
Speaker
Sure, so it depends on if you're looking in the, I'll do it from the workforce perspective. There's broader definitions as well. Okay. And I can talk a little bit about those, but.
00:11:33
Speaker
Pay equity versus gender equity. Pay as a component part of a gender equity, if we look at it through the lens of a company, through the workforce. So pay is what you actually get paid, but then there's performance. So how your performance is actually evaluated, what potential track you get on, that is, are you being put in the succession pipeline for future leadership roles?
00:12:00
Speaker
how you're promoted and at what level and how quickly as well as hiring. So there's pay is one of about five component parts. There's also sort of sub component parts off of that in terms of what leadership positions do women actually have because it's not enough just to say, well, the C-suite is 22% women because oftentimes those are marketing in HR roles, which are not often in line of succession for
00:12:27
Speaker
CEO, how many resources do they control that matter? So there's different pieces when you look at it within a company that really make a difference. And then I can talk about it sort of more broadly from a from a larger economic perspective. This is probably a loaded question. I think we have to brace ourselves for what your answer might be. So how many years is it projected to take until we reach pay equity in the United States?
00:12:57
Speaker
Well, in the United States, I can answer more globally than in the US specifically. We can look at it more from an economic lens.
Closing the Gender Equity Gap
00:13:08
Speaker
Economic equality, actually we added 55 years in the last year to economic equality on a global scale and we're currently at 257 years until we reached economic
00:13:27
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah, I guess we have to laugh because otherwise we wouldn't get through the rest of the podcast because we'd be crying. So why 55 years were added?
00:13:43
Speaker
Well, there's different component pieces of that. And it goes to what I was talking about in the workforce in terms of where are women represented? We just had equal payday a few days ago on March 31st, which is obviously the aggregate payday in the US, oftentimes for women of color. It's later in the year, white women. It's actually next week on April 9th. But pay equity,
00:14:12
Speaker
When we look at pay, the 82 cents on the dollar, that's really, there's a piece of it that is truly about equitable pay for equitable work. But another piece of that is actually about where you sit in the corporate ladder. So right now in the United States, or the women are 7% of all Fortune 500 CEOs.
00:14:40
Speaker
Right. So we are 51 percent of the population and we're only 7 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. You juxtapose that with the fact that women are 62 percent of all minimum wage workers and occupy 70 percent of all the lowest paid jobs in the United States. That's when we're talking about economic equality. That's what you're talking about. You're talking about closing that gap.
00:15:11
Speaker
That's 257 years. Whoa. And so if someone's reading this and they're like, what is the source of that information? Who gathers this information? What is the source, Karaka, that people can be paying attention to?
00:15:24
Speaker
There's a number of different sources. We actually published an equity for all day, excuse me, equity for all report. So the next one will come out on April 10th, which is a week from today. It includes both our original research as well as over 140 secondary resources. And we talk about it.
00:15:45
Speaker
through many lenses, including global, the United States, the States, et cetera. So there are many different resources and that obviously will be available in the next week. And so you just addressed pay equity. How many years until we reach gender equity?
AI's Role in Advancing Gender Equity
00:16:05
Speaker
Well, that's an interesting number because it's an aggregate, and right now it sits at about 100 years. So there are some pieces, for instance, we know that education attainment, that's one piece of gender equity, that's actually quickly closing and projected to close globally in 12 years. So you're essentially looking at a weighted average, if you will,
00:16:33
Speaker
and that's where we get to the 100 years. Wow. That's a long time. We'll all be long dead. Do you see this shifting at all, Karaka? What can we be doing?
00:16:51
Speaker
Well, I think there's a couple of things that we can be doing. One is we are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, which is changing things faster than they have ever been.
00:17:07
Speaker
and really the slowest it'll probably ever be. And so this idea of embracing advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud computing, which is sort of less new, but it provides the basis for the use of things like artificial intelligence. And so if we look to embrace advanced technologies, that can actually catapult us forward toward gender equity.
00:17:36
Speaker
I'll give you an example. So within, there are
00:17:44
Speaker
30 million employees in the Fortune 500. And what Pipeline knows from its research is that there's three key decisions that you make across your talent every year, which is performance, potential, and pay. And so for the Fortune 500, that's 90 million opportunities to move toward gender equity each and every year.
00:18:09
Speaker
And we can do that through embracing advanced technology. And so we can catapult that and actually close the gender equity gap in our lifetime. I think that's the exciting part of the world that we live in today is that we are really at the place where we can catapult that action forward. Wow.
00:18:36
Speaker
When it comes to other ways that we can impact gender equity and try to begin closing this gender gap, perhaps there's some things that women should know that could help us, and men for that matter as well.
00:18:54
Speaker
So I'm wondering, could you talk about how, when you were talking about performance, perhaps it fits in this bucket, how are women judged on their performance? What are you finding on that?
Bias in Performance Evaluation
00:19:09
Speaker
Yeah, so women, sort of generally, women are judged on their, when we're looking at like succession planning potential.
00:19:17
Speaker
women are judged on their past performance rather than men are judged on their future potential. So when we look at the opportunity for women to be developed as future leaders, to be in the succession line, it's less likely that women will be there simply because we judge them based on, have you already had that position? And obviously, if you're going to be promoted, you haven't.
00:19:42
Speaker
That's just the logic of it. What we've also found is that you can't close the gender pay gap by starting with pay. The reason is that pay is the quantitative value that you place on your talent, but the actual value that you place on your talent happens in performance and then potential.
00:20:02
Speaker
So, for instance, what we've found in performance is that for similar performance, so this is through pipelines implementations, similar performance, women actually receive lower performance ratings 4% of the time.
00:20:18
Speaker
Oh, wow. And that has an impact on their potential. It has an impact on their pay. It also, when you look at it across the lifespan of an employee, it really mimics pretty closely when we see women are about 50, 51% of entry level positions, but yet they're only 22% of the C-suite. And it's those little pieces taken as a collective that either can push us backward or can catapult us forward.
00:20:48
Speaker
Yeah, so if someone is listening and is thinking, okay, I need to make an ask in my company, whether it's an ask to be part of a decision or to get to the decision-making table or maybe even asking for budget and you're a woman, it's good to know that, first of all, you're not starting in the same place, but what may help you, it sounds like, is if you bring evidence of your past performance into that request. Is that what I'm hearing?
00:21:17
Speaker
Yes, I tend not to give advice to women. Yes, of course. But yes, as a general rule, and I'll tell you why I don't do that, but as a general rule, and something I've done throughout my career is just quantify everything. So understand what are the success measures, what does success look like in the beginning, and actually try and work to get actual metrics. Like what does that look like?
00:21:42
Speaker
Right. And then quantify that. I used to actually do it in every single one on one I had with my boss and then as a collective over the year. But yeah, and I will tell you the reason why, you know, certainly I'm happy to share my kind of tips and tricks of my career. But the reason why I'm very careful not to give women advice is that most of the gender diversity, gender equity efforts in companies have been focused on that.
00:22:11
Speaker
They've essentially come from the place that women are broken and we need to fix women. It's just, you know, the women weren't, you know, they don't know how to be in the workplace. And so they don't negotiate or they don't apply for jobs or they, you know, end their speech with an uptick, whatever that is. The issue, that's not the issue.
00:22:32
Speaker
It is a false narrative. The issue is that women are not broken. The system is broken. The system was not designed to value women equitably. And so because of that, it doesn't. So we need to fix the system and not fix women. Otherwise, what happens is then somebody brings data to the meeting and they think, oh my gosh, that was my fault.
00:22:55
Speaker
But it's very much the, I think the most kind of common narrative that happens around this is this, well, women will only apply for jobs if they have 60% of the qualifications, excuse me,
00:23:11
Speaker
100% of the qualifications in men if they have 60%. And so we just need to get women to apply for more jobs. Well, the issue with that, just as an example, is that women, that's only half the story. The other half of that story is that the person sitting on the other side of the table deciding whether or not you can do that job is using the very same criteria. That is, women are judged on their past performance, men are judged on their future potential.
00:23:41
Speaker
So we need to tell the entire story and fix the system. Yeah. And that's a piece of what your company does is trying to fix that system rather than fix the genders that are part of it. And I want you to be able to talk about that too as we go on today. So thank you for that. Does gender inequity impact men as well?
How Gender Inequity Affects Men
00:24:08
Speaker
That's also one of these false narratives is that gender equity is a synonym for women's rights and it's not. Women are half the conversation and men are the other half. If you just look at it from a workplace perspective, 48% of working dads would like to stay home with their children, but they don't.
00:24:31
Speaker
And a lot of that has to do with isolation and identity, sort of our collective definition of what it means to be a man. I will also tell you that pipeline, and we'll get to pipeline, I know in a minute, but we make recommendations about human capital decisions. And so we have closed pay gaps and performance gaps for women as well as men.
00:24:54
Speaker
It is, and it's interesting when we go into companies and we mostly work with enterprise companies, so those that have 10,000 employees or more, when we talk about that, and we're not often the ones doing the communication, we're kind of behind the scenes, but we're helping the comms people put forth those communications, and I may or may not do a fireside chat or something like that.
00:25:15
Speaker
for that company. We talk about that because otherwise there's this fear that comes up that says, well, wait a second, particularly for men, like, wait a second, I'm supposed to be the provider. I'm now no longer viewing inclusion as inclusion. I'm viewing inclusion as invasion.
00:25:36
Speaker
And so we need to talk about this as a collective. It's also sort of going back to your first question around what is a gender economist. When you look at gender equity through the lens of economics, what you see is that gender equity is not an us versus them. It's not a black versus white. It is ultimately about equity for all. It's about economic opportunity for everyone. If we close the gender equity gap,
00:26:03
Speaker
that actually provides more opportunity for everyone, not just women. Makes sense. Absolutely. You just had referenced a second ago, how does race and age impact pay?
Introduction to Pipeline Equity
00:26:19
Speaker
And is there any good news for women in STEM? Yeah. Well, by the way, when I said black versus white, I didn't mean race and ethnicity. Oh, got it.
00:26:27
Speaker
I realized after I said that, oh, that's probably was going to, that's okay. No, it's okay. I meant just, we tend to, you know, like that sort of us versus them, you're either with us or against us. That's what I meant. And my apologies for a bad description, but in any event, it does. And I think, you know, we, you know, intersectionality is particularly important. We know, for instance, I talked about this, but you know, March 31st for this year was the aggregate equal payday.
00:26:59
Speaker
Asian women's equal payday was actually earlier in the year because they have a smaller gap. White women's payday is April. Equal payday is April 9th. They tend to make up the majority. That's why they're so close together.
00:27:13
Speaker
Black women's equal payday is later in the year, and then a Latina's equal payday is like almost a year. It's almost at the end of the year. So when you're looking at those gaps, it's not intersectionality. And this is actually one of the trends that we've seen come up over
00:27:32
Speaker
the last 10 years over the last decade is this talk about intersectionality, which is very important intersecting both race and ethnicity with gender and also age with gender, that you get a more complete picture. It also ensures that you really are looking at that full picture and you're not trying to silo people into gender and then race and ethnicity and then age that taken together that matters.
00:28:02
Speaker
Mm hmm. Fascinating. Well, Karika, I'm interested to hear and have you share with our audience about Pipeline. You are the founder and CEO of Pipeline Equity. It's a software company. What is its mission? To bend the arc of history toward inclusion and make gender equity a reality in our lifetime.
00:28:26
Speaker
That's a beautiful mission. Thank you. How does it work? What does it do? So Pipeline is essentially augmented decision making. So much like you would use Waze or Google Maps to get from point A to point B, Pipeline does the same thing for your human capital decisions. So we are at our core recommendations engine.
00:28:49
Speaker
And what we do is intercept HR decisions across the five pillars of talent, which is essentially the five main buckets or categories that companies' decisions that they make about their talent. So that's hiring, pay, performance, potential, and promotion.
00:29:11
Speaker
So what happens is, and hiring, I should just mention, is actually internal hiring, not external hiring. The reason why is that the best way to attract diverse talent is to ensure that your existing diverse talent is successful, and not just in their current role, but across your company. So fundamentally how it works, you're a hiring manager, let's say you write a performance review,
00:29:38
Speaker
That sends a trigger to the pipeline platform that you need a recommendation. So there's a back-end connection from a technology perspective. Then we send a recommendation through. What that looks like from a performance perspective is we call out bias phrases actually in the text of the performance review itself, as well as rating recommendations. So any rating changes. And what that does is essentially
00:30:04
Speaker
In the HR world, it's called calibration. But essentially, what that's doing is ensuring that ratings are applied equitably within the organization. And it's a debiasing vernacular that's being used in written. OK. Yeah, contextually. So it could be that or hiring. As an example, if you post a job requisition, we find, on average, for our customers, we find
00:30:33
Speaker
for 86% of the job requisitions that they post, we find five or more qualified internal candidates. So that's an example of how pipeline works. It sounds powerful for employers. Are they often surprised or like it's welcome information, like we didn't know we had some internal candidates or how is it received?
00:31:00
Speaker
Generally, it's received well. We tend to work with companies who've already made a public commitment, typically through a public pledge to gender equity. They've often tried to do some of this work internally. They have 10,000 employees or more, so they're looking at scale oftentimes in more than one country.
00:31:21
Speaker
it essentially makes this kind of very large charge, this large mission that they're charged with actually tangible. One of the things we talk about is pipeline takes what is often perceived as intangible, which is gender equity and makes it tangible through the decisions that you're already making.
00:31:42
Speaker
Right. So it's taking that goodwill and that commitment and turning into something that's actionable through tangible means. Exactly. I think the other thing probably that's helpful to share about pipeline is that we actually started with research. So we did a research study across 4,000 companies in 29 countries.
00:32:03
Speaker
And what we found was that for every 10% increase in gender equity, there's a one to 2% increase in revenue. And so our whole model is not gender equity as a social issue or the right thing to do, even though we do believe that to be true.
00:32:18
Speaker
But really, gender equity as an economic opportunity. That is, if you are not baking into your human capital decisions, gender equity, you are leaving money on the table. And the primary job of a CEO is to maximize shareholder value. And this is a really key lever that they can pull to have good return for their investors.
00:32:47
Speaker
couldn't be any more important in our current economic climate as to have access to another lever. Fabulous. So, Karika, in closing and thank you so much for being here.
Turning Emotions into Action
00:33:01
Speaker
For anyone who's listening and is feeling perhaps hopeful by some of the things that you've said or maybe angry or overwhelmed,
00:33:09
Speaker
What do you recommend for people to process what they've heard today or conversations they can be having with colleagues or friends?
00:33:21
Speaker
in the workplace or more broadly. Well, right, in the workplace and more broadly. Yeah, I mean, I think in the workplace it is, you know, we often talk about it's not enough to be angry or surprised that it's really important to catalyze that into action, you know, positive action for men and women, boys and girls.
00:33:45
Speaker
And so in the workplace, it's really focusing on how are we ensuring that the decisions that we're making, despite the current economic climate, and I would even say because of the current economic climate, it makes it even more important, are equitable, that we are ensuring that there is equity in those decisions.
00:34:06
Speaker
I think those, at scale, I think those are the questions that are important to ask in terms of not just pay and pay equity, though I think that's something that gets pushed on a lot and certainly it's an important piece, but what about performance? What about succession planning? What about promotion? Really starting to look at those pieces. I think more broadly and particularly in the world, the COVID-19 world that we currently live in,
Gender Budgeting During Crises
00:34:33
Speaker
And with the economic stimulus that has been passed, we have been very focused from a brand perspective on what the broader economic implications of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 will have, particularly for women and their families. Because as I mentioned, the women are 62% of all minimum wage workers. They are also 70%
00:35:00
Speaker
of the lowest paid workers in the US. There are, just to give you a few more stats on that and what some of the things we're recommending, but there are 16 million breadwinner moms in the US. They support 28 million children. So 40% of the households in the US with children under the age of 18
00:35:20
Speaker
women are the brand winners. There are 15 million women and 12 million children who live in poverty in the US and 13 million women and 4.3 million children in the US without health insurance. So when we think about currently where the economic stimulus that's being passed, one of the things that we've really
00:35:42
Speaker
advocated for is for Congress to ensure that they're taking gender budgeting, which is essentially a slice of what I talked about from being a gender economist, into the fiscal stimulus to understand that if you're a single mom, $1,200 and $500, $1,700, half as much money as you would get for a family of four is probably not enough.
00:36:07
Speaker
and that there are certain things that we must put into place to ensure that women and their families do not bear the brunt of this economic crisis. One of them, just quite simply, is student loans. Women are 57% of all college graduates, but they hold 67% of all student loan debt.
00:36:28
Speaker
Why is that? How could we have more debt? There's two reasons. The pay gap starts when they're in college, so they have to take out more loans. And women are also less likely to have financial support from their families to go to college. So they take out more loans, and it takes them longer to pay off the loans because of the gender pay gap.
00:36:50
Speaker
And so deferring student loans is a great first step. It puts about 390 bucks on average back into the budgets of folks who are impacted by COVID. But more importantly, we need to look at what might student loan forgiveness look like.
00:37:12
Speaker
Because this is a really key lever from a gender budgeting perspective that actually we can immediately keep more money in people's wallets. And we know that 70% of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending. If you can put more money back into people's wallets, they can actually have more discretionary income to spend.
00:37:31
Speaker
and that's good for our economy. I mean, that's the math, right? This is not a giveaway. This is an investment in our economic recovery and making it stronger and faster. So that's one example that we fundamentally believe that people can advocate for right now. It doesn't take money. It just takes a little bit of time.
00:37:54
Speaker
Makes complete sense. And thanks for sharing the math of it. Appreciate that. Karaka, are there any resources or networks that you'd recommend for people to be paying attention to right now?
Resources for Gender Equity Information
00:38:09
Speaker
Well, yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things for pipeline in particular. One is that we actually just launched. It's it is an election year. And so in a few. Right. Right. And that was all the news. And then all of a sudden that's all there's it's all covered, which makes sense. It should be that. But it is an election year. And
00:38:30
Speaker
If you go to katakaroy.com, there is a voting guide, which actually looks at 15 campaign issues. It's nonpartisan. What you can look for in politicians, their platforms to ensure that they're actually standing forward on gender equity. It's free. You can download it.
00:38:57
Speaker
It came from a couple of articles I wrote for Fast Company. One was about gender mainstreaming, which is gender budgeting is a part of that. But one is gender mainstreaming, which is about public policy. But the other was I actually interviewed four of the then presidential candidates about their commitment to gender equity and then kind of took those two pieces and wrote the voting guide. So the voting guide is definitely something we would recommend.
00:39:25
Speaker
And then the equity for all report will come out next Friday, April 10th. So folks can go to pipelineequity.com and it actually pops up on that page and people can, and that's again, that is free as well. Karika, thank you so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
00:39:54
Speaker
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00:40:15
Speaker
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00:40:39
Speaker
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