As we mark the 20th anniversary of the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on the Status of Women in Beijing, APA's Public Interest Directorate is promoting psychology's contributions to addressing and improving the status of women. At the women's conference, 189 nations agreed on A Platform for Action, which called for the "full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life." This agenda called on governments and civil society to take strategic action to improve the lives of women and girls in 12 areas of critical concern: persistent poverty, access to education and training, access to health care, violence, armed conflict, economic inequality, power sharing and decision-making, women's advancement, human rights, media, environmental protections, and the rights of the girl child.
More specifically, it stated that "governments must ensure equal access to education, eradicate illiteracy among women, and improve women's access to vocational training, science and technology."
The organizers were right to highlight the links among education, economics and well-being. Psychological research supports these connections. And since 1995, we have seen measureable progress in efforts to provide access to education and to address economic inequality. But, we have also seen retrenchment.
While earning an advanced degree does not erase the pay gap between men and women, higher education is critical to upward mobility and socioeconomic advancement. While much recent and deserved attention has been paid to the plight of African-American and Latino boys, particularly through President Obama's My Brother's Keeper initiatives, black girls and Latinas are affected by the same influences and constraints that are negatively affecting boys, perhaps even more so. A new report by the African-American Policy Forum, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected, found that "Black girls were suspended from school six times more than white girls, while black boys were suspended three times as often as white boys." In addition, the report echoed APA's 2006 Zero Tolerance Task Force Report that harsh disciplinary policies, to which many of these children are subjected on a regular basis, curb educational progress and run counter to our "current best knowledge concerning adolescent development."
In a study of the economic outcomes of women and men who do and do not complete high school, the National Center for Education Statistics found that women "had significantly higher rates of unemployment, lower rates of labor force participation, and, consequently, lower hourly wages and average annual earnings," even after controlling for the timing and the type of high school credential earned. The most pronounced disparity in annual earnings is seen between women and men who never earned a high school diploma or GED.
For single mothers, the outlook is even more distressing. Single mothers had a 41 percent poverty rate compared with a 14.5 percent rate for the nation as a whole (Entmacher, Robbins, Vogtman, Frolich, 2013). Hillary Clinton recently commented on the challenges still unfinished since the Beijing conference. "Twenty years later, women and girls still comprise the majority of the world's unhealthy, unfed, unschooled and unpaid," she said.
APA's Office on Socioeconomic Status and Women's Programs Office, along with our Government Relations staff and United Nations representatives, work to ensure that psychological research is being disseminated and employed at all levels to alleviate educational disparities and to eradicate poverty.
