S04 E05: SHE-cession

Episode Transcript

Vanessa : Welcome to “Pod for the Cause” the official podcast of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the Leadership Conference Education Fund, where we expand the conversation on the critical civil and human rights issues of our day. I’m your host, Vanessa Gonzalez, coming to you from maybe it’s the beginning of spring, Washington D.C. And like we start off every show, we’ve got the Pod Squad, where we discuss pop culture, social justice, and everything in between. We’ve got some amazing folks on the Pod Squad today.

 

First up, Jess Morales Rocketto, co-founder at Care in Action, Supermajority, and She Se Puede, and co-chair of Families Belong Together. Hey, Jess.

 

Jess: Hi. So happy to be here.

 

Vanessa: Such a busy woman. Thank you so much.

 

Jess: It’s true. There’s a lot to fix.

 

Vanessa: Next up, we have Dr. Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy at Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and executive vice president of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Hey, Kate.

 

Dr. Bahn: Hey, Vanessa. So good to see you.

 

Vanessa: Love having you here, and we’re gonna talk about your Twitter name here. I love it. And, Adrienne Lawrence, attorney and senior consultant at Jennifer Brown Consulting, and media and legal consultant at Bantam Impact, and author of Staying in the Game. Hey Adrienne, thanks for being here.

 

Adrienne: Ah, thanks for having me.

 

Vanessa: In this Women’s History Month-themed episode, we are talking about how the pandemic has highlighted the issues women face today, including the gender and race pay gap, reproductive justice, harassment, and the professional and economic impacts of COVID-19, all through an intersectional lens.

 

Before we get started, I want to make sure to take the time and acknowledge the hurt and the violence that we have seen increase against the AAPI community. To all of our Asian American and Pacific Islander brothers and sisters, please know that we are with you, we are allying with you, we stand with you, and we’ll fight for you.

 

Before we jump in, I want to set the stage with some quick stats. An estimated 2 million to 5 million women are out of the workforce since COVID began. In December, 140,000 jobs were lost in the economy, and all were held by women. The U.S. Labor Bureau of Statistics says that women of color lost jobs most, while White counterparts made significant gains. Total employment for Black women is 9.7% lower than it was in February 2020, before COVID-19 hit the U.S., with that figure for Hispanic women close behind, at 8.6%. For comparison, employment for White men, White women and Black men is only down between 5% and 6%.

 

Also, let’s not forget, women do 75% of the world’s unpaid care work, so this all compounds. So, how has this pandemic really started to expose inequities of women’s responsibilities compared to men? I want to first get Jess in here. You wear so many hats. You work specifically with domestic workers, who really are the backbone of this economy, whether people want to talk about it or not, and they also allow people to continue their jobs. So, can we talk a little bit about, really, what are you seeing in your work in terms of an expansion of the inequalities?

 

Jess: You know, we’ve been surveying at the National Domestic Workers Alliance for almost a year at this point. We started right when the pandemic started, our workers, every week. So, about 10,000 workers a week, which is really critical because many of our workers who are housekeepers, nannies and elder care workers exist kind of in the gray economy, and are often left out of the jobs numbers, Labor Bureau Statistics, etc. So, this survey has been incredibly rich in helping us understand what’s the situation actually like for workers. And in fact, in our February report…so, again, we started surveying in March, so, eleven months after we began to survey folks, at the height of the pandemic numbers, we saw something like 76%, as high as, like, 81% of workers surveyed who said they were out of work. We have seen a decrease, at least in the workers that we are talking to. These are mostly Spanish-speaking housekeepers, so a pretty specific set of the economy, but I think important.

 

So, now we’re seeing about 34% of the workers telling us that they had zero work. No job, no nothing. So this is a big decrease from the beginning of the pandemic, which is good, but it’s still very high. We would expect more like 10%, 11%, 12% of workers telling us that they had zero work, so this is double what we might expect in any normal time, and I know that word doesn’t feel right. And then what we are also finding, I think even more importantly, is that 85% of respondents still tell us they are underemployed. So, that means that they have at least one hour of work a week, but as we know, one hour of work is nowhere near what people need…

 

Vanessa: It’s not gonna get you anything, yeah.

 

Jess: That basically means I hadn’t lost all of my clients. I’m able to clean one or two houses. So, this is a really big problem, because we don’t actually know when the market for domestic workers will ramp back up again. It basically happens with reopening. Very similar to restaurant workers, very similar to anybody who kind of works in the service or hospitality industries, where a number of Latinx women, Black women, AAPI women, immigrant women work.

 

The reason that many of these women have these jobs, the reason that’s sort of in the care economy in the first place, is because, usually, their immigration status, and that has a direct effect on their overall economic well-being. So this isn’t just about whether or not they’re out of work, it’s also about what their situation was like before the pandemic started. For many of our folks, the situation was not great. Hearing now about women who have not been kicked out of their homes yet, you know, because of short-term eviction moratoriums, but that’s not rent forgiveness. So at the end of the pandemic, they will have $15,000, $20,000 back pay in rent. Domestic workers make between $11,000 and $13,000 a year on average, so that is literally more than their yearly employment, and that’s just rent.

 

So the challenges are compounding one on top of the other for many of these women. We’re not gonna see recovery on that unless there is real, kind of, systemic intervention, from the government, support by checks in Congress, whatever. And, again, because of immigration status, it’s hard to see a pathway towards that.

 

Vanessa: People really do take it for granted, right? You think “Oh, you know what? I can’t afford to continue to have someone come in and take care of my kids, or to clean the home, or whatever it may be.” And maybe you don’t really think about it again, right? But it’s someone’s livelihood. And then it compounds, as you said. Let’s hope that everybody stays healthy, right? Because there’s a lack of health insurance there, right, that it just continues to feed into these systems of inequity all around.

 

So, Kate, you’re the economist. How do we fix it? Fix it, Kate.

 

Dr. Bahn: Jess laid a really good groundwork of a different complex issues we’re facing, and there’s a variety of issues that, like, are layering on top of each other, that are impacting women’s worse economic outcomes in this recession. Big piece of it is occupational segregation, so, women are crowded into these service jobs, like domestic work is a great example of it, that we’ve had huge losses in. But it’s not just those service jobs, it’s also food service jobs. It’s also all these low-wage jobs. Those workers then will have less of a cushion to sustain the loss. On top of that, you know, we have a big risk for declining public sector work, which is a place that has historically been an important source of quality jobs for women, and also quality jobs for Black workers. And so, we’re losing those middle-wage jobs too, which is a big risk.

 

And then the last piece laying on top of it, or, you know, one of the other big pieces, is the way in which women have care responsibilities in their home, which has always been a major factor for women’s economic outcomes, is that women, if they are the primary caregiver in their family, they might have to alter their work schedules, they might have to work part-time, they might need to work closer to home if they need to come home more quickly for any caregiving needs. That has always been a huge constraint in women’s job mobility and how they function in the labor market, and that is just so much worse now, when school schedules are uncertain, care needs are higher, maybe your family members are getting sick, so you also just have more care needs from that.

 

So, this is sort of like what I’m seeing as the background to it. Now, where do we go from here is the other important thing. It is a public health crisis, first and foremost, so we need to be sustaining workers until we get to the other end of the public health crisis. And that means including trying to reach out to workers who have previously fallen through the cracks of the social safety net that we have. And so, I will say, I’m a little bit optimistic that I think this recession relief has done better than in prior ones. Like, unemployment insurance was more accessible to a broader range of workers, and that was really important. We’ve had two stimulus checks now. That has been really important, but it needs to be really sustained, and we need to be centering job quality going forward into the pandemic. As we move forward, job quality is a pretty critical part of how we rebuild the economy.

 

So, that includes things like, Jess had said something about immigration status, and both of you could probably speak to, like, immigration rights issues, but we also know that workers who are not citizens are more likely to have labor laws violated, they’re more likely to have employers steal their wages, not get overtime. We know that gets even worse in recessions, and so we need to beef up things like our labor protections, we need to do things like increase the federal minimum wage. I don’t think we should shy away from increasing the federal minimum wage when we’re in a recession, because I think there’s going to be this, you know, what economists would call a downward pressure on wages, just because there’s high levels of unemployment, and that is bad for those workers. It is also just bad for the economy broadly. Like, low-wage workers are also critical consumers in our economy, and how much they earn is important for the overall health of the economy, so instituting policies that make sure their earnings are higher is really critically important.

 

We have good labor policy, even if we’re in a recession. We need to be centering job quality for the most vulnerable workers which, you know, as you said at the top, that has been primarily women of color, that year over year, since last February, it is really Latinx women and Black women who’ve lost nearly 10% of their employment in one year.

 

Vanessa: Yeah, thank you for that. There’s a lot in your response. I want to continue to paint the economic frame for women. Normally, when we look at during normal times, if that’s what we can call it… I saw someone said that BC now means “Before COVID,” we knew that the gender pay gap was mainly centered on White cis women and White cis men, and when we talk Black and Brown women, it’s worse, right? Black women make 62 cents on the dollar, Hispanic and Latina women make 54 cents, Native women make 57 cents. And so, we already started this with a deficit. You continue to layer upon these inequities, it just keeps getting bleaker and bleaker.

 

I think the cultural shift we’re seeing is great. We see women like Cardi B, Beyoncé, J.Lo, who are like, “Go get your money, ladies.” It’s a new conversation, which I really appreciate, but at the same time, I think it’s how do we merge this cultural conversation with the policies and the systems, right, so that they meet that. On top of all the economic issues, we have, again, what has continued to be a scourge upon women, which is workplace harassment. We know that it has shifted, it has changed. It is hidden, right? When we talk about women with lack of immigration status, that’s even worse. We know that there’s threats to women who are not U.S. citizens. We know that there’s further threats to women who are in some of these caregiving positions and in people’s homes, right? Who do they report these things to?

 

So, Adrienne, and I want to talk to you a bit about this. Can you talk a little bit about what was it like for some of the most vulnerable women in this space? And then, how have you seen this shift in telework?

 

Adrienne: When we talk about workplace sexual harassment, a lot of people don’t understand what that is. They see it as the misnomer that it includes something sexual or sexualized. Largely, that is not the case. Oftentimes, there are forms of gender harassment, which might be putting down people, excluding people, using other types of leverage against them because of their gender or refusal to adhere to gender stereotypes, or these traditional notions of how a woman or a man should act. And so, first, we need a good understanding of that, because the reality is that it appears just about everywhere and all the time. And as a result of the pandemic, it’s created this perfect storm for more forms of gender harassment, sexual harassment, to occur in professional spaces, and just in people’s professional work/career lives. And it especially is impacting, as it always has, women of color, because unfortunately there are those intersectional racist and sexist tropes that end up playing out in all areas of society, including in work spaces.

 

And the thing that made the pandemic this Petri dish for enhancing and increasing forms of workplace sexual harassment and mistreatment of women of color in professional spaces is because sexual harassment is about power, and when people don’t feel they have power, they try to take it by illegitimate means, oftentimes. And that could be putting a coworker down or engaging in behavior that makes them feel uncomfortable, because it makes the person feel a little bit more powerful.

 

Having the pandemic create this perfect storm, where people are insecure about their career and professional paths, they’re insecure about their economic viability. Also, we’ve seen so many changes go down, and socially, during this pandemic, including the protest for racial justice. Right now we’re seeing people standing up and lifting their voices against anti Asian American and Pacific Islander sentiments that are going on. These are all power struggles that will end up translating in people’s professional lives, and so we’re seeing more workplace sexual harassment come to play. And unfortunately, just like many hate crimes, and a lot of utter nonsense and mischief that is legal and illegal, go on in professional spaces, it hits women the hardest. And so, when we keep our eyes open for those things, that’s when we can actually address it.

 

Those are the changes we also need from our government, to put in stronger public and social infrastructure, so that people can continue to generate income and stay employed, and not be victims of workplace sexual harassment. As I mentioned, it does befall women of color the most, typically Black women, who file three times as many sexual harassment complaints with the EEOC than white women do. And the thing is, now that we’ve moved into this telework kind of situation here, we see it manifest in different ways. We had the situation with Jeffrey Toobin, the legal analyst, when I believe he was caught allegedly masturbating while on a Zoom, or kind of group chat situation.

 

We also have people now, not having those professional barriers in play, people are now texting or messaging or engaging in all of these forms of communication, without having these professional structures around them to remind them to act right, it essentially leaves open a lot more room for people to engage in inappropriate behavior. That is something that a lot of workplaces are not prepared for, but they need to be. That’s a push for change, things we need our government to actually institute and to require, whether it be training, or some kind of logging of complaints and issues, so we can move forward and keep women, particularly women of color, in the workplace.

 

Vanessa: That is fascinating. Thank you for that point. I knew that there was a general sense of “you can relax,” right? People are typically wearing their sweatpants, maybe with a nice shirt. Not talking about myself in particular, at this moment. There’s a sense of relaxation. I will say I think I am guilty of not realizing how, in a warped mind, that can also translate into relaxation, and you feel like maybe you have new opportunities to push that power upon women. So, thank you so much. I think you’re absolutely right. We have not necessarily kept up policies to address those issues, and I hope that a lot of people are looking at that.

 

So, I want to kick us back a little bit, now that we have painted a very glum picture of what it is, and it’s the reality though, right? And I think COVID is helping bring these things up to light. Let’s talk about the relief package, The American Recovery Relief Bill. So, due to the adverse effects of job loss, and the pandemic at large for women, we have seen pushes for relief for families and for women. But is this bill adequate? Is it enough?

 

Jess, I know you work with a very specific set of women, right? And for a long time, when we looked at immigration status, there was a fight on the Hill as to whether or not immigration status should be considered in relief. So, we’re still not at that point where we’re really valuing all workers. So, from your perspective, do you feel like this bill is enough?

 

Jess: What I’m going to say maybe will surprise you, Vanessa. I think it’s a great bill. I do. I think it’s a great bill. It’s the best anti-poverty legislation we’ve had in 50 years. Literally 50. Like…

 

Vanessa: Wow.

 

Jess: …that is a long time. I really don’t think that’s hyperbole. I mean, you know, the real economist should back me up here. I think that there will be major drops in poverty among, you know, folks who are most vulnerable, especially Latinos and Black folks. But I also think, really, really importantly, there will be outcomes that actually affect people in their lives. Like, so, it’s not a policy, you know that is, like, some change in regulation that is opaque and unclear, and done by some agency, and people just don’t have any interaction with that. People will actually interact with what happened, with what got passed. So, people will get extended UI until September. Also more than before, $300 a week. I think a lot of times, in progressive land, we are like, “It’s not perfect, so it’s not good,” and, like, it’s not. Let me just say that. It’s not perfect. But I didn’t have any expectation it was going to be perfect, so maybe that’s why I’m so excited about it.

 

So, like, is $300 a week adequate? No, I don’t think that is adequate. Is it better than nothing? It is sure as hell a lot better than nothing. You know, $1400 stimulus checks. I wanted $2000, but $1400 is a lot of money for some folks. It is a difference between zero dollars that month and $1400.

 

Vanessa: That’s real.

 

Jess: That is absolutely real. There was $40 billion for childcare, $4.5 billion to help folks with, like, home heating and cooling costs, which I think is actually very, very important for a number of families who’ve been suffering over this winter. Lots of state and local aid, emergency housing assistance, vaccine distribution, which is the most important thing to get us out of our houses. I am really excited about a lot of things in this bill.

 

But it’s not perfect, so what are we not excited about? You know I represent domestic workers who are mostly immigrant women. Over half of them are immigrant women. And a number of them will not be included in this, and they are among the people who most need to be included in it, which I think is one of the big tensions here. There was some good on immigration that, you know, was maybe a little bit not expected, particularly for mixed-status families, where children, you know, have Social Security numbers or are American citizens, and their parents are actually also eligible for that assistance because of the child. We did not think that was going to get in, so that was a big, big win on the part of immigrant justice groups.

 

Now, I think everyone should get it. The virus, it turns out, doesn’t ask for your papers, and so, everyone is affected by what’s going on here. So I would like it if 100% of my members were receiving assistance. But I think that I agree with you completely, Vanessa. It’s so much better than the other two packages. I mean, like, really quite a lot better. You know, we should put ourselves on the back a little bit for that. That is in part because we fought for it. Nobody handed that to us, certainly not Republicans.

 

Vanessa: Very true, very true. I appreciate the lifting up of the good and the bad. You are totally right. It steps forward. Also, it’s our expectations. We have been saying forever that just because the election happened didn’t mean it was a new nirvana. The doors of heaven didn’t open up. We still have problems to fix. And if this is a step forward towards that, including additional assistance for child care, which is vital, and rarely included, then let’s take it and let’s keep working. I do want to remind folks that no Republicans came across the aisle to vote in favor of the bill. And so, while we are progressives, and we are nonpartisan, it’s just what it is. You can look up the vote sheet yourself and decide what does that mean for you as you’re out there in the states, and what does that mean when it comes to how we politicize people’s lives, and especially during a historical pandemic.

 

So, I want to continue on this conversation about how we can take the step forward that this bill has given us, and continue to build on it. So, Kate, when you look at it from an economics perspective, knowing all the deficits in policy that impact women negatively, and again, for women of color, even more so, if you could just wave your wand, what are things that you would like to see continue or come out of this bill?

 

Dr: Bahn: I mean, it was a really good bill, and as Jess said, like, it was a great bill. It was more than we’ve ever done. That being said, I think the critical piece is making sure we’re sustaining some of this relief. So, for example, where, you know, we’ve extended unemployment insurance into September. That is great. We have the child tax credit, which is huge, but we should sustain that. I mean, what, the stats are something like it’s going to cut childhood poverty in half, and we could have, always do that. We could just keep that up. That would be great. The state and local aid is really important, as I said before. Like, public sector work is a really important type of high-quality jobs for women workers and Black workers historically, and so, making sure that we can sustain that employment in that sector, that is really quality jobs. And, like, the critical pieces, like, we just need to hold this out, not just because it is good for people’s well-being. Like, that is the first step, is ensuring that we maintain people’s economic well-being.

 

But also, we want to make sure that we have, like, the appropriate floor to rebuild our economy from. So, economics research shows us things like better access to unemployment insurance does things like helps people have better job matches going forward. If you have extended unemployment insurance access, you are more likely to eventually match into a higher-paying job. What’s essentially happening is you are not coerced into accepting a bad job because you have no other options because your unemployment insurance is running out. And we want to do more policies like that, where we’re giving people, like, a real robust floor, so that they have the capacity to build on those gains and follow what careers they want to, care for their family how they want to, and do all these different things, because that ultimately builds a much more dynamic economy, an economy where economic growth is broadly shared by everyone.

 

Vanessa: So, Adrienne, building on that, when you talk about, and when you’ve written about the difficulty of women leaving some workplaces because their economics battle, the reality of where they are, right, and they may not be happy. It may be really hard to leave. If we were able to get some of these structures in place, can you just tell us, how would a woman’s life change in the day-to-day workplace, when she is facing this kind of discrimination and harassment?

 

Adrienne: Well, in situations where we can kind of have this social and public infrastructure in place so that women have more options available, what they would have is largely just more options. They can walk away from workplaces that are toxic, or experiences that involve harassment. And that often will involve employers, and also the government, to do more. Because the thing is, we’ve had what, the Civil Rights Act, what, 1964, all of these years, yet sexual harassment and other forms of discrimination still continue to permeate workplaces, and it’s a true significant impact on women’s lives. It is not an epidemic, it is endemic. It is natural and enduring, and it’s an everyday impact that manifests in various ways, but has a long-term impact on women economically.

 

Long-term, you know, the fact is that when women suffer workplace sexual harassment, and maybe their career trajectory is in some way offput, that results in less financial security at retirement. We’re talking lower lifetime earnings. Also, it’ll impact Social Security and retirement investment. And a lot of women who happen to be mothers also were already facing kind of that “motherhood penalty,” as the Brookings Institute called it, that appeared in the form of an average 16% reduction in Social Security benefits. And these things have that long-term impact of when can you retire? Are you economically independent? When can you possibly leave that work environment?

 

And so, if women were able to have that greater support system, that really hampered the forms of discrimination, and provided some kind of repercussions for workplace retaliation, and more was done in that regard, then women would have greater economic viability and opportunity to leave those places and to continue to yield their professional fruits, and to be viable members of society and contribute to professional spaces.

 

Vanessa: I think it’s really important that we don’t frame when a woman is impacted by discrimination and harassment, sexual harassment, gender inequity, it’s not just a one-time blip. It is ongoing, and it has ongoing repercussions. I think many of us, myself included, have often made the decision between economics and how much you can just kind of take. And the reality is, like, “I gotta pay my rent, I gotta provide for my daughter, so maybe this isn’t that bad.” But it’s also an awareness of where am I supposed to go anyway with this, right? So there’s that gap.

 

The Biden administration announced that they will be bringing back the White House Council on Gender Equity, and I believe it was formerly the White House Council on Women and Girls. When we think about how we can have these conversations in a more intersectional lens, holding women of color whole and centered, and we think about the economics and we think about just the environment in which they work in, what are some of the first things that this Council on Gender Equity should look to tackle? Kate?

 

Dr. Bahn: So many different things. So, I don’t know where to start. I think, like, for me, as an economist, what I try to do is, like, I just want more information, and I want to understand what are people facing now and what are the reasons they’re facing that now? And so, I think this is why, like, an intersectional lens, is critical to shaping good policy, because we want to know the women who are facing the greatest barriers, the greatest constraints, what are those barriers? What are those constraints? Why do they exist? Why are they so persistent over time?

 

And so, you know, I want to see a Council on Gender Equity really digging into why is occupational segregation by race getting worse? It’s even worse than it used to be. Why is that happening? Why is that limiting people’s economic mobility? How do we improve that? So, we just want more research and statistics on what is happening to women of color in the economy, and what has caused those outcomes. So, that’s sort of the framing I want to see. I think we’re going to get there because, you know, I’m heartened by things like the Department of Labor’s chief economist is a economist named Janelle Jones, who coined the term “Black Women Best,” where it’s about centering the economic well-being of Black women in all of our labor policy.

 

And so, I think this administration is taking that pretty seriously, of centering women of color in these outcomes. Where do I want them to go from here? Looking at the reasons that women of color, in particular, are doing worse in the economy, and addressing those. So, that would be things like if women of color are more likely to be in low-wage jobs, increasing the minimum wage, giving more job protections, doing better enforcement of the job protections that already exist. You know, I think Adrienne is probably very aware that, like, a lot of job protections that are technically on the books in our law are not well-enforced. People don’t actually get access to a lot of systems that they’re supposed to be entitled to in our economy. And so, making sure that happens.

 

Doing things like empowering workers through traditional institutions like unions, I think that is really important. There’s all these things that are sort of themselves not gender-specific, but because women have been the most vulnerable in the economy throughout history, and particularly in this recession, instituting these policies would have a huge outsized impact on women, as long as we sort of keep our eye on the prize of how are women of color doing, and what kind of policies can we ensure will be targeted to them.

 

Vanessa: For our last question, I want to bring through a little bit of that thread that you said. Some of these policies are in theory, on paper, gender-neutral. But because women of color are the most impacted, Adrienne, do you feel like there has been a shift in the fight and the narrative? Are you seeing women leading these charges more and more so, with more victories? Is it, “Kind of always been this way, but now people are finally paying attention?” Are you seeing any kind of change in that narrative?

 

Adrienne: Not particularly. It seems to have been somewhat stagnant in terms of making change, and also the efficacy in it. And in part, it was because we just came out of an administration that was not very progressive at all, and so it almost seemed this thought that issues that predominantly impact women get pushed down on the threshold, particularly when it involves something that’s in a professional landscape, because it’s still this mentality that men’s careers and their professional lives are far more important than women’s. The good thing that we did see, that came out of the #MeToo movement, although that movement largely did focus on the injustices against White women, is we did see women more likely to stand up, to speak up, and to speak out.

 

But how much that is translated at the ground level, in terms of the everyday woman, as opposed to the Hollywood woman, we haven’t seen how that operates quite yet. And especially in these times where we have people suffering economically, financially, and having families they need to care for, you end up having, as I mentioned earlier, a lot more “harassholes,” I call them, or predators out there, who are seeming to leverage that situation of knowing that women are left unemployed, or women do have these pressures in the midst of a pandemic, and thus they are leveraging that and taking advantage of it, and harassing more.

 

Because of the circumstances, and the fact that so many women are unemployed, it makes women less likely to speak up. Hopefully the momentum that may have come from the #MeToo movement, and also the outpouring of experience as a Black woman that came out during the George Floyd kind of protests, hopefully the momentum for that will not be lost in this, the pandemic, but we have yet to see if it continues to manifest, and to what extent.

 

Vanessa: Well, I am very excited for your voices, very excited to continue the fight with you in this. We know that things seem bleak, but we know that things will continue to move forward and we will continue in the fight with all three of you. So, thank you so much on behalf of the Leadership Conference for your time and your wisdom. To Adrienne, thank you so much. I appreciate you.

 

Adrienne: Thanks for having me.

 

Vanessa: To Kate. Kate, what’s that Twitter handle?

 

Dr. Bahn: @LipstickEcon.

 

Vanessa: Yes. I follow her for things I did not know about the economy, or did not understand. And thank you, of course, to Jess for all of the work that she also does with domestic workers and immigrant women.

 

Jess: Thank you. So, so happy to be here.

 

Vanessa: Thank you, thank you, thank you. Could not have made this conversation any stronger and any better without your voices, so thank you.

 

Thank you for listening to Pod for the Cause, the official podcast at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the Leadership Conference Education Fund. For more information, please visit civilrights.org, and to connect with us, hit us up on Instagram and Twitter @PodForTheCause. And also, you can now text us. Civil rights. That’s two words, civil rights, to 40649, to keep up with our latest updates. Be sure to subscribe to our show on your favorite podcast app, and leave a five star review.

 

Until next time, I’m Vanessa Gonzalez. Thanks for listening to Pod for the Cause.

 

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