Womenstake

The Pact: Update

by Julia Kaye, Health Policy Associate and Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

It seems there wasn’t a pregnancy pact in Gloucester after all.

According to Mayor Carolyn Kirk, there is no evidence that the pregnant teens had actually made a premeditated “pact” to become pregnant. The Mayor suggested that the young women had instead made an agreement to support each other in raising their children upon learning of their pregnancies. This account was subsequently confirmed by one of the pregnant teens. The good news is that the pregnant teens apparently also agreed to help each other graduate.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that teen pregnancy rates have soared in an economically depressed and socially conservative city, at a school where contraception is not available without parental consent and where (young) motherhood can seem like a bright option. 

The Mayor blamed the city’s dramatically increased teen pregnancy rate on the media’s “glamorization of pregnancy” and a lack of health education funding. Assuming that by “health education” you mean comprehensive sexual education, Mayor Kirk, we agree whole-heartedly that its absence could have contributed to this phenomenon. But it also seems clear that these young women didn’t see the compelling reasons to delay motherhood; they didn’t think about the value of taking a few years (or decades) to develop their own skills and ambitions before helping a child develop his or hers. This story might have turned out differently if these young women had been aggressively encouraged to day-dream about their personal goals; had been taught to believe in their own potential; had felt like they had options available to them. 

The Pact

by Julia Kaye, Health Policy Associate, and Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

The number of pregnant teens at Gloucester High School in Massachusetts has quadrupled since last year. Though the national teen pregnancy rate has also risen, by 3 percent in 2006 — the first increase in 14 years — the principal of Gloucester High was certain that the disproportionate number of pregnancies (17) at his school of 1,200 didn’t just reflect a national trend. So he went looking for answers.

Turns out that nearly half of the expecting students — none older than 16 — had taken a pledge to become pregnant and raise their children together. The teens were high-fiving each other upon receiving positive results of their pregnancy tests.

How to explain this troubling phenomenon? Some blame the fishing city’s struggling economy. “This is a city in transition going through a hard economic time,” noted Mayor Carolyn Kirk. “There are cuts in economic programs, cuts in services, cuts in after-school programs, and they’re all impacting the social climate. We really let these kids down.” Maybe it’s true that in a downtrodden economic environment, where adolescent females are given little reason to hope for a fulfilling academic or professional life, they apply their ambition, dedication and hope to a goal that seems achievable — pregnancy.

High School Dropouts More Likely to Die Early

by Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

A new study found that for Americans without high school diplomas, the risk of premature death is increasing even though the risk of premature death among college graduates is decreasing. The risk of premature death has increased most for white female high school dropouts, whose mortality rate for ages 25 to 64 has risen more than 3 percent from 1993 to 2001. In this age range, white female high school dropouts have a mortality rate 3.8 times higher than that of white women who graduated from college.

This study is consistent with the findings of When Girls Don’t Graduate, We All Fail: A Call to Improve High School Graduation Rates for Girls, a report released by the National Women’s Law Center, which found that high school dropouts encounter higher health risks and have less access to health coverage. These health concerns for high school dropouts are one more reason that it’s vital to ensure that every student is able to graduate from high school.

7 Questions with NWLC's Taryn Wilgus Null

by Jessica Lauredan, Outreach Intern
National Women’s Law Center

This post is part of a weekly series profiling our blog authors.

Taryn Wilgus Null is a MARGARET Fund Fellow for the Education and Employment team at NWLC working on employment discrimination and Title IX issues.

Q: It’s been 45 years since the Equal Pay Act was passed, yet women still earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by men. Why has this travesty gotten so little public attention?

Taryn: I think there is a misconception among many people that the wage gap between the sexes is based entirely upon choices that men and women make about the jobs that they take. Unfortunately, it’s difficult for them to see that sex discrimination is at the root of much of the sex segregation in employment and the pay differential between the jobs held primarily by women and those held primarily by men.

Q: What are the biggest obstacles women face in earning equal pay?

Taryn: Many jobs are largely segregated by sex and have been for a long time. This is not inherently problematic, but many of the jobs held primarily by women pay much less money than primarily male jobs that require similar levels of training. There is no reason that, for example, a cosmetologist should earn much less than an auto mechanic, but it’s hard to change things once salary levels are so entrenched.

Q: You’ve previously worked at the American Civil Liberties Union and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. How have those experiences influenced the work you do here?

Taryn: At both the ACLU and the EEOC, I got a lot of wonderful legal research and writing experience that has been invaluable here. I also worked on sex discrimination cases in both positions, so I learned some substantive law that has proved very useful.

Creative Solutions to Keep Girls in School

by Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the National Dropout Prevention Center/Network’s  At-Risk Youth Forum in Myrtle Beach, SC. This was a wonderful experience for a couple of different reasons. First, Myrtle Beach is a much nicer place to be in February than Washington, DC, as I was reminded when I flew back from sunny weather in the upper 50s to snow and freezing rain in DC. The view of the ocean from my hotel room wasn’t too shabby, either.

More importantly, though, I was able to meet numerous educators doing interesting and innovative work to help keep students in school. I attended the conference to speak about our report, When Girls Don’t Graduate, We All Fail: A Call to Improve High School Graduation Rates for Girls. I was really pleased that people seemed to find our report interesting, thought-provoking, and useful.

Discrimination Against Male Athletes? Really?

by Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

Over 35 years after Title IX was passed, misconceptions about Title IX’s implications for school sports still abound. Sometimes, unfortunately, these misconceptions turn into lawsuits. Yesterday, the National Women’s Law Center filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in a case alleging that Title IX discriminates against men.

First, here’s a little background on what the law actually says. Title IX requires schools to treat male and female sports teams equally and to provide students with an equal opportunity to participate in athletics, regardless of their sex. Department of Education policies state that a school can show that it is providing female students an equal opportunity to play sports in any one of three ways – that is, through the famous “three-part test.” The test is flexible and fair, and has been found to be lawful by eight of the eight federal circuit courts that have considered it. 

Despite these facts, the drumbeat of unfounded allegations – that Title IX results in discrimination against men – has continued for Title IX’s whole history. The most recent foray into the field is the effort by the misnamed “Equity in Athletics” organization to challenge a decision made in September 2006, by James Madison University (JMU) in Virginia, to eliminate three women’s sports teams and seven men’s teams. 

We’re truly sorry that JMU opted to make its athletics program “lean and mean,” rather than making broad-based opportunities available to both men and women on campus; we wish it had decided differently. But Title IX is simply not the culprit here. 

Reflections on Juno

by Julia Kaye, Program Assistant
and Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

Over the holidays, several of us from the Center took a field trip to see Juno. We laughed, we cried, we debated its implications for minors’ access to contraception– it was a roller-coaster of emotions. For those of you who have not made it to a theater recently, Juno tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl named Juno who gets pregnant and decides to give up her baby for adoption to an adorable but seriously flawed yuppie couple. The breakout indie film deals with a number of issues that NWLC holds dear; nevertheless, we’ve had more conversations about it than can probably be justified. And after all the talk, we are, in conclusion…ambivalent. 

On the one hand, we were dismayed by the disdainful and inaccurate portrayal of the abortion clinic, with its inappropriate and apathetic receptionist and all-female waiting room (Arthur Shostak from RHReality Check wrote an insightful—and scathing—blog post on these two points). We also fear that this movie might mistakenly convince young women that all abortion clinics are as unpleasant and sleazy as the one Juno encounters (they are most decidedly not). On the other hand, anyone who has seen the film would surely agree that Juno’s decision to continue the pregnancy and put the baby up for adoption was anything but political. It was personal, as the decision to have or not have an abortion should always be.

Beyond the abortion scene, there were two elements of the movie that directly spoke to our work at the Center: minors’ access to contraception (and comprehensive and accurate information about contraception) and Title IX protections of pregnant students.

Maternity Leave Causes Teen Pregnancy? Someone Really Needs More Sex Ed!

by Jill Morrison, Senior Counsel
and Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

We cheered it.

Women’s eNews cheered it.

So it’s no surprise that Concerned Women for America thinks it’s the downfall of a moral society.

A Denver High School is taking steps to make sure young women aren’t punished for taking time off to give birth and care for their newborns. Concerned Women for America claims that this new student maternity policy promotes out-of-wedlock births, teen pregnancies and sexual irresponsibility. Just listen to the interview with CWFA’s Janice Crouse. She describes the effort to ensure student maternity leave as a harmful social policy that “accommodates a change in culture.”

Hmmm… the same could be said of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (you know, that neat little law that said employers can’t fire pregnant women just because they are pregnant). Didn’t that accommodate a “change in culture”? And doesn’t Title IX also provide similar protection to pregnant and parenting students already?! 

Just yesterday, the NCAA voted to prohibit colleges from yanking athletic scholarships from students due to their injury, illness or medical condition — including pregnancy. Evidence of more cultural decline? Perhaps Ms. Crouse would assert that Title IX causes pregnancy?

Denver High School Students Seek Maternity Leave

by Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

Students at a Denver high school are advocating for a policy that would allow pregnant students to have four weeks of maternity leave after giving birth. According to the Denver Post, the current policy at East High School charges new mothers with unexcused absences unless they return to school the day after being discharged from the hospital. Yes, you read that correctly – after they give birth, teen mothers are required to return to school the day after returning from the hospital. If they fail to do so, they start racking up unexcused absences.

Fortunately, at least some guidance counselors and school board members have recognized that this policy is both unfair and counterproductive. Like all students, pregnant and parenting students should be encouraged to stay in school. As reported in When Girls Don’t Graduate, We All Fail, the National Women’s Law Center’s groundbreaking report on the dropout crisis for high school girls, about one-third of female dropouts cite pregnancy and parenting responsibilities as a major reason that they dropped out. Of dropouts, these students were most likely to say that they would have stayed in school if their schools had done more to support them. And because the economic consequences for female dropouts are especially severe, it is critical that young mothers complete their educations, so that the cycle of dropout and poverty does not continue with their children.

Girls Continue to Struggle for an Equal Playing Field

by Taryn Wilgus Null, MARGARET Fund Fellow
National Women’s Law Center

Thirty-five years after Title IX was passed, complaints of Title IX violations still abound. This month, officials from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights are investigating allegations of Title IX violations at Scotts Valley High School in Scotts Valley, California. The allegations center around inequities in treatment of the boys’ baseball team and the girls’ softball team. The former coach of the girls’ softball team says that the boys’ baseball team receives preferential treatment, noting that “I do think the girls need to have better equipment and a better field. They work and play as hard as the boys. They don’t get the credit and the support that the boys do.”

Some girls who play on the softball team, however, deny that there is a problem and attribute any differences in facilities to the fundraising efforts of the boys’ baseball team. Senior Audrey Payne noted that, “As far as I know the boys did so much fundraising; they spent their money well.” Both Audrey and her father believe that the district should not be held responsible for providing the girls’ and boys’ teams with equal facilities if the boys’ team was able to raise more money.