The Big Equality Stories of 2023 – and What’s Next

Is this dramatic enough. Donald Trump indicted in Atlanta of refforts to overturn his twenty twenty election defeat in.

Georgia back to the Middle East Israel, saying his troops are pushing deeper into Gaza City after encircling the northern part of the Palestinian enclave. The White Twenty twenty three now the hottest year on record. We saw those hot record temperatures affecting cities around the world. Ukraine's counteroffensive astalled in recent weeks, even as the country continues to come under attack from the air and on the ground.

Twenty twenty three has been a year, a year of progress, and a year of disruptive change for women and people of color in particular.

The case is an effort by a conservative legal group in Texas to limit abortion nationwide. A fatal blow to affirmative action the Supreme Court ruling that the affirmative action admission policies at Harvard and University of North Carolina are unconstitutional. Disney's asking his workers to return to his office is four days a week starting on March first.

So we wanted to take stock. How has the year faired for equality efforts? Across all of these topics. Bloomberg Equality reporter Kelsey Butler says there has been progress, like corporations hiring a more diverse workforce.

There were thirty nine companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Pepsi where they increase the number of black workers in like professionals executive categories.

But as Bloomberg BusinessWeek senior writer Claire Seddeth puts it, equality in America is a long game and progress can be slow.

If the Supreme Court can overrule the FDA and say that they know better about a drug that leads us down a completely different path than the one we'd been walking down as a country until now.

Kelsey and Claire are here to give us a roundup of this year's equality news. I'm Nancy Cook today on the big take, what equality in America really means in twenty twenty three and what's ahead for twenty twenty four. So we're talking first about the equality gains made in twenty twenty three. To start, Claire tell us about the O pill and why it's notable.

Oh gosh, Well, it's been over sixty years since birth control the pill has been available for women, but up until this year it has always been prescription only, and so while millions and millions of women are on birth control.

There's still a lot of barriers to access.

You have to have a doctor, you have to have access to healthcare, and so there are also millions of women who aren't on it.

An O pill is.

The very first FDA approved over the counter birth control pill that you can just walk into a pharmacy and pick it up off the shelf.

And where does it fit into the landscape of options that women have right now in terms of birth control?

So if you're on birth control, you're probably not going to switch to a pill because it's actually kind of an old pill. It's progesterrine only, and most pills are a combo of progestin and estrogen. It's very effective and it works, and the reason why they picked that one is because they're sort of fewer side effects and more people can take it, so it's safer for over the

So like, how many people having over the counter pill like that? How many people could that help? And how widespread do you think that could end up being. I think it'll be millions of people.

It's not available on the market yet, it should be early twenty twenty four, and it'll take some time for the public to become aware of it, and so usually it's several years before it kicks in. But I think among especially teenagers who maybe do not have access to birth control because they have to ask their parents if they can go to a gynocologist or something like that, and low income women who don't have health care, we're talking in the tens of millions.

Claire, was this a long time coming? Having this over the counter birth control pill?

In some ways, this has been on activist radar since the sixties.

I would say in the last decade, maybe fifteen twenty years, it has really picked up.

This was a joint effort among reproductive rights activists and scientists to find the right pill, find a pharmaceutical company that is willing to jump through all the hurdles because one of the interesting things is birth control is so widespread that pharmaceutical companies aren't making a ton of money off of this, and so the hindrance in the past was less that the FDA wasn't open to this. It was that no drug company really thought it was worth

They did the same thing in Britain.

Actually, for the most part, this was a very smooth sailing, which you can't really say that about very many things related to reproductive rights these days.

One of the other huge things that happened in the equality space in twenty twenty three was the labor economist Claudia Golden won the twenty twenty three Economic Nobel Prize. What did Golden win for and what was the biggest finding in her research?

Kelsey, Yeah, So I think what is notable about this is it was multiple barriers broken here the first time a woman had won this prize alone. But then what Claudia Golden's work actually focuses on, which is about women in the workplace and basically a lot of things that we talk about now in this return to office environment, which is the motherhood penalty as well, and where the pay gap really starts to accelerate, which often is after the birth of a woman's first child.

And apart from the motherhood penalty, what are some of the other findings that she's known for.

She sort of studied women's labor force participation throughout history, and prior to her work, there was this sort of assumption that women quote unquote didn't work, and then suddenly in the nineteen seventies they decided that they were going to start working, and oh, this is a brand new thing, and oh my gosh, all these women are working. How do we feel about working mothers? Et cetera, et cetera.

And how has our work on the gender pay gap been a applied to the modern workplace?

So I wanted to highlight something interesting that she talked about in a recent conversation with our colleague greed Picker, after she won her prize, which is just kind of looking at the idea of both greedy jobs versus flexible jobs, and how we're kind of seeing an evolution of greedy jobs that would take a lot from a person's time. You know, for example, it was a job that maybe you had to travel a lot, and we've seen kind of an evolution of that. In this push pull over work flexibility.

We have flexible jobs that are becoming more productive. Think about the flexible job that you were told, well, you can work part time twenty five hours a week. Well, that wasn't going to lead to very much of a promotion possibility, but if you can now combine it with some remote work, that will be much better. So greedy jobs becoming more flexible, flexible jobs becoming more productive.

So I think it'll be really interesting to see see how some of this plays out going forward when we look at how the workplace is evolving and what women's advancement looks like in that environment.

One of the other big stories of the last few years is that labor data shows that big US companies did hire more people of color after the Black Lives Matter protests of twenty twenty. Bloomberg covered that data in the summer. What were the big takeaways?

This is actually pretty fascinating. I want to start by saying I did not participate in this. I am highlighting my colleagues' work, but I'm happy to talk about it because I think it's pretty awesome. They analyze employment data for the S and P one hundred, which covers about nine million working Americans, and they found that of all of the jobs created in twenty twenty one, ninety four percent went.

To people of color.

There are some caveats to that most of those jobs were sort of lower or entry level positions, but the minority hiring boom happened at all the ranks as well, so executive, managerial, et cetera. And I think it's really important because the dominant message from companies in the past has been it's not our fault that we're so mail or we're so white, because this is just the labor pool that we have to pull from. It's not our fault, this is just you know, pipeline problem, et cetera.

Et cetera.

And as you can see, when they actually sort of put their money where their mouth is and they're given a reason to try to make a difference, they can do it. You know, this is just twenty twenty one data, and since then we've had sort of a pullback on DEI efforts, and so it's sort of not clear yet whether this is going to be a blip or the start of a real sort of long change, but it is good to know that you can make a pretty

Hired first fired.

So if you're just bringing in people at kind of the entry level, the lowest rung, those are people that are going to be most likely to be cut in kind of difficult economic times, and they're also not making the hiring decisions for the future either.

And this data, you know, we talked about how it has a lag from twenty twenty one. When the twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three data come out, what will you be looking for in particular?

I'll be looking at retention, honestly, because it's very easy to ride the wave when other companies are talking about racial equity and moving the needle on all this kind of stuff. But it's a little bit harder to kind of keep that going in the environment that we're in right now, where it's not popular in any arena to do anything that.

Has a whiff of DEI.

So I'll definitely be looking at retention and also advancement to see what those executive ranks, those positions of power and companies look like.

Are those getting more.

Diverse when we're back from affirmative action to abortion medication, two cases that have changed the US the most this year. So we talked a little bit before about the progress the country has made on equality issues, but I'm curious to hear more about how the country has also regressed a little bit. Kelsey. You wrote about the Supreme Court's affirmative action ruling the day it was decided, what was the expected impact of that ruling and what have we seen with universities so far?

Six months later, the Supreme Court decision essentially banned affirmative action at the university level.

So colleges are.

Going to have to reimagine how they make admissions decisions. And that's what actually changed with that decision. But there was kind of this ripple effect that happened beyond colleges, which is now we're seeing a contribution to a chill in corporate America when it comes to dei or anything that kind of seems affirmative action esque.

And can you tell me more what those knock on effects have been from this ruling in corporate hiring?

What have you seen?

Yeah, So what we've really seen is legal challenges by some of the same activists that sued Harvard and UNC over their affirmative action policies now set their sights on companies. So conservative activists Edward Bloom, who was involved in the Harvard case he hasn't organized that has also filed lawsuits against law firms that have fellowship programs for those from underrepresented populations and As a result to law, firms Morson,

So are the companies just doing business totally differently now after this ruling or is it just they're pairing back their diversity program slightly. What does that look like?

I think we're seeing kind of three modes of addressing this, and one is companies that we're just kind of doing what everybody else was doing in twenty twenty and putting out a statement certainly pulling back, and that's to be expected. They didn't really have an infrastructure around DEI, so it's

Up on that. And then what we have that is a larger.

Kind of population is companies that are doing the same things that they're doing, they're just.

Being less vocal about it.

And the data kind of bears that out. There was a survey in October of professionals that work in corporate responsibility and more than eighty percent said that they had changed the language they used to talk about work or cut down on external comms about their DEI efforts, But only ten percent said that they had actually decreased their programs. So they're just being quieter about it. Makes my job a little harder to get them to talk to me.

And what's the argument that these conservative groups that are suing the companies that they're making and apart from sort of universities and companies, what do you see as their next target.

As far as the next target.

I don't think they're quite done with corporate America yet.

You know, we still haven't had a.

Very definitive answer from the Supreme Court on diversity programs like the ones that we're talking about. In this kind of corporate context, so I think we'll certainly see a lot more of that going forward. The argument that's really being made is that by singling out a specific group

I want to talk little bit next about abortion medication and how it was put at risk by Texas court ruling. Kelsey remind us what mepha pristone is and how long it's been around.

So mifa pristone is known as the abortion pill. It's one of two medications that is commonly used in the US to end pregnancy. It's been around for years, been proven to be safe and effective at ending pregnancies.

What did the Fifth Circuit Court judge rule and what happened after that ruling?

So right now we're in really a status quo situation that's because of an April order from the Supreme Court. So basically, mepha pristone, which is known as the abortion pill, is available up until about ten weeks of pregnancy and via telemedicine. And that's obviously, you know, in the states where abortion is still legal. So the Supreme Court has decided they're going to take up a case that is going to determine how widely available mepha pristone is going forward.

And what would happen if the courts do revoke access to it? What's the potential impact? Does that mean you just can't get it?

I don't think we can underplay the impact of mefi pristone like no longer being available. The reason being, if you look at all the data, more than half of abortions done in the US are via medication and early in pregnancy. So it is a very commonly used method of ending a pregnancy right now, and any curtailing of that would have huge ramifications, especially as we've already seen abortion access get decimated in the last two years.

And can you just put that into the broader context of access to abortion now? Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe Vweight in twenty twenty two, how does this ruling on the abortion pill fit into that.

As of right now, there are fourteen states where abortion is pretty much banned. There are exceptions, but so limited and narrow that it's almost to the point of them not existing. So we look at this as any attacks on mefapristone are just another part of this chipping awave that we've seen for reproductive healthcare in the US, and we're already starting to see data. It's obviously very early so far, but just the impact that these abortion bands

It's pretty bleak.

I think the thing to highlight is also that this is a drug that is widely considered safe. What they're challenging is the FDA's approval of it. So it also calls into question, you know, if the Supreme Court or court can overrule the FDA and say that they know better about a drug that leads us down a completely different path than the one we'd been walking down as a country until now.

And while most of.

The political arguments as it relates to medication and healthcare relate to women and reproductive rights because of how controversial abortion is, technically this would be a ruling against the FDA, and so it really weakens the FDA, and I think it makes a lot of people nervous about sort of political and judicial oversight of what should be a standalone agency.

After the break, Kelsey and Claire tell us what stories they're watching for twenty twenty four. So I want to talk about what we should watch for in twenty twenty four and what's ahead for equality issues. I'm particularly interested in childcare. I know that you both have written a lot about that. Claire, briefly, what is the funding cliff that the US childcare industry experienced in September? Can you tell me more about that.

I'm going to roll back for a few years.

But if you remember in twenty twenty, when the pandemic started and people were pulling their children out of daycares and childcare centers because of fears that they would catch COVID, and all of these childcare centers started falling apart essentially

And what are the potential on the ground effects in the coming months with this funding gone.

I think what you're seeing is a lot of daycares closing or limiting the number of students that they can take. You know, I think it'll be a while before we get statistical data on it, but I anecdotally have already been talking to people.

I talked to one woman in Indiana.

Who had to quit her job because she called I think sixty daycares trying to take her eighteen month old and they said they didn't have a spond so she just quit.

So you're going to.

See a lot of women leaving the workforce. We're going to see a lot of people also leaving the workforce because of the spots that are available. Their prices have risen so much that families can't afford it, and so one of the parents is going to stay home, and it's almost always the mother, and it's just I think it's going to get pretty.

Bleak and Kelsey on this story. What are you looking for in the next year with the childcare industry in the situation?

Some of the research that.

We've seen gives us a sense as to what the projected impact could be. Potentially seventy thousand childcare programs closing, which means three point two million kids could be left without spots in childcare. That's potentially millions of families that are going to have their care disrupted. And what we've seen already, even since September, is that backup plans are not that easy to come by. I wrote about this

At home, and.

That very first week, the child's care center closed for a week because it was a home daycare and the person had, you know, their own family emergency. So this person then had to go scramble and find backup care, which wasn't necessarily the easiest thing to do and ended up being more expensive than her typical care. So I

That's the biggest thing I'll be watching.

I'm also really curious about the battles over return to office versus work from home and how those are hurting mothers. Claire, you've written about the push by some companies to have people back in the office and how that can affect mothers. Can you talk about the moment we're in right now?

Yeah, And before where I start, I want to start with the caveat that, like, this is for a subset.

Of our labor force.

You know, this is primarily a college educated, white collar dusk workers. But among that group, as you're well aware, during the pandemic, there was the shift from jobs that had been in person five days a week, nine to five, nine to seven, let's be honest, and you know, make those fully remote. And it stayed that way for two

Keep what they had had for the past three years.

And anecdotally, I've interviewed a lot of women who have just flat out with their jobs. That's not possible for everyone because financial constraints, that need for healthcare. Maybe they're the only breadwinner or the primary breadwinner in their family and they.

Have to keep their job.

But I have to tell you, they're an awful lot of women who are like, Nope, I'm not doing this because I value my family and my children way more than commuting into the office.

And I think that's a conversation that.

We aren't really having, which I find really interesting, which is.

Why I'm writing about it. So that's what I'm keeping an eye on.

And Claire, what are going to be the key data points that you are going to look for on this story that really tells us what is happening over the next year.

I'm sort of glad you asked that, because one of the things in reporting on this that I have found incredibly frustrating is that working mother's, as like a facet of the labor force, are vastly understudied. So I've talked to so many economists who are like, you know, I can tell you how many working parents there are, or maybe how many working mothers, but I can't tell you how many working mothers who went remote, who came back, who were leaving. It's a very nitty gritty question that

Into the office.

And so I'm seeing it in surveys like that hasn't yet started playing out in the official like Fereau of Labor Statistics type data. And I also want to say, like we're talking about a few percentage points here and there, but like I think it's like seventy seven percent of mothers of elementary school age children and up work, and it's like sixty eight percent of mothers with kids under six,

You know, the idea of the return to office debates and the idea of child'scare are really intertwined because in many cases, it's not that women don't want to commute to and from work, it's just it's not feasible in the system that we have that is crumbling. So childcare centers were open far longer pre pandemic.

They've had to in many cases cut hours.

So in a lot of instances, a mom may not be able to make it work if she doesn't have a remote position.

Yeah, I think that's a good point.

And also, you know, I think when you're talking about childcare, school counts as child'scare because your children are being cared for while they're being taught. But the school day ends at like three o'clock in the afternoon or two thirty sometimes, and so usually working parents have some sort of aftercare setup, and sometimes it's a flat fee, but sometimes you pay hourly. I have two small children and one is in daycare now, and it's a flat fee up to a certain point,

Kelsey and Claire, I learned so much from both of you. Thanks so much for coming.

On, Thank you, Thank you so much for having us, Thanks for listening.

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