KC’s Women’s Initiative a finalist for national award

The Women’s Empowerment Initiative, a Kansas City project to appoint more women to municipal boards and commissions and support women-owned businesses, is a finalist for a national award honoring innovations in government, Mayor Sly James announced Thursday morning.

At the same time, Women’s Foundation CEO Wendy Doyle was telling reporters that her organization is making headway in its efforts to improve the economic status of women in Missouri.

The empowerment initiative, recognized by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is backed by the Women’s Foundation, the Central Exchange and the Women’s Center at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The initiative partly stemmed from research and advocacy work done by the Kansas City-based Women’s Foundation and the Institute of Public Policy at the University of Missouri’s Truman School of Public Affairs. Through data collection over the last three years, the effort charted the need to correct gender-based pay imbalance and other economic factors affecting the lives of women.

Doyle and Emily Johnson, associate director of the policy institute, on Thursday introduced an updated report, based on collected data, that seeks public policy solutions to inequities.

The foundation’s advocacy to reduce the gender pay gap — women in Missouri who work full-time, year-round, earn 78 cents compared to every $1 for men — has focused on the public sector, Doyle said. It helped influence former Gov. Jay Nixon to order a pay review in state offices. She said she hopes that analysis will continue under the new governor and the initiative will spark similar pay reviews in the private sector.

“We encourage corporations to conduct their own audits of every position,” Doyle said. “It provides the evidence in black and white” to see where gender pay imbalances exist.

The foundation’s updated “Status of Women” report also used data to illustrate a dearth of accredited child care centers in the state. There are no such accredited centers in 38 percent of Missouri counties. And most existing child care centers are too expensive for many working women to afford.

Research pegged the annual cost of full-time day care in the state at between $5,600 and $8,700 — higher than a year’s tuition at a four-year public university, the report noted.

The Affordable Care Act has improved health insurance coverage in the state since 2013, the report said. Thirteen percent of Missourians lacked coverage in 2013; 9.8 percent were without in 2015. In 33 Missouri counties, more than one-fifth of the population is uninsured, the research indicated, and 60 percent of the state’s uninsured are women.

Charting poverty rates, the report said 41.3 percent of women-headed households with children under 18 have income levels below the federal poverty line.

In order to affect public policies that improve economic conditions for women, Doyle said it’s important to have more women in public office. Women account for 51 percent of the state population but only 22.3 percent of state legislators, a 2016 decline from 25 percent in 2015. Also, only 24 percent of state court judges are women.

The research efforts, which led to an initial report in 2015, are supported by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

This story was originally published January 19, 2017 at 11:57 AM with the headline "KC’s Women’s Initiative a finalist for national award."