Week in Review 8-30-2019

After 70 long years, the Nineteenth Amendment giving women the right to vote was adopted and incorporated into the Constitution on August 26, 1920. Today we mark that moment as National Women's Equality Day, which was Monday.

Women have made significant gains since that time in many areas of our society. Nearly 20 percent of all startups today have at least one female founder. Women serve in every part of our armed services in a wide variety of jobs and positions, including as a four-star general. We now have three women on the Supreme Court.  

The 2018 election ushered in the greatest number of women to serve in Congress, thanks, in part to the high number of women voting. The Center for American Women and Politics found that women have continuously voted at higher rates than men since 1980.

Despite all of this, women still have not achieved equity with men. Women earn just 79 cents to every $1 a man makes. The House passed the Paycheck Fairness Act but it remains stalled in the Senate.

Women still do not have control over their own reproductive health care. More states than ever before are restricting women's access to abortion. Alabama's recently-passed bill doesn't even have an exception for rape or incest.

Trump has promoted an agenda since his first days in the White House targeting women. He has tried to defund Planned Parenthood and has nominated judges who want to overturn Roe v Wade. His changes to the Title X program will to make it even harder for women to access contraception and other general health care services.

More women have been killed by an intimate partner since 9/11 than were killed on that September day and in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet the Senate has failed to pass any of the House bills that would end gun violence. 

Women have been voting for nearly 100 years, but we still struggle compared to our male counterparts. Hopefully someday soon we will no longer need an official day to call attention to the need for women's equality. We will just have it.