U.S. infrastructure is a gender issue that has not been overhauled in decades. To the general American public, infrastructure is understood as the foundation of transportation in the United States. The infrastructure bill will provide the funding and planning for repaving roadways and implementing accessible public transportation. But there’s more: it will also include protections for working mothers and other caretakers, including paid leave, universal childcare, and increased pay for caretakers in what President Biden coined the American Families Plan (AFP). Through the plan, Biden vowed to lift over five million children out of poverty.
In early July, a bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Bill was passed in the House of Representatives and finally passed in the Senate in August after much debate. This bill is a negotiated version of Biden’s original proposals, and notably excluded all care policies.
Now, many Congressional Democrats are pushing for a $3.6 trillion dollar bill to be passed through reconciliation, as a package deal with the infrastructure bill. This bill includes Biden’s AFP and the Better Care Better Jobs Act that had been left out. Reconciliation, a process reserved for budgetary bills that only needs a simple majority to pass as opposed to the typical 60 votes, means that the bill can pass with the approval of Democratic senators, who currently hold 50 Senate seats. However, Republicans and moderate Democrats continue to push back against the efforts to pass it.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has reiterated that the reconciliation and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill are not linked. “Well it wasn’t linked yesterday. Right? The vote they took in the Senate was on the infrastructure piece,” he said on Squawk Box after the Senate debated the bill’s parts, despite Biden’s consistent support for both of the bills to be passed concurrently.
Republicans have criticized the care infrastructure laid out in the $3.6 trillion plan as too costly and outside of the scope of what should be defined as infrastructure. Senator Mitch McConnell said that Democrats can expect to find no support from their Republican counterparts in both the House and Senate if they continue to assert the educational and caregiving industries as pieces of the nation’s infrastructure.
However, such investments are critical to improving the American economy—especially after the pandemic. The Bill allocates funds to the nation’s system of public works, which include caregiving and educational sectors. Arguably, these sectors have more of an impact on future generations than physical infrastructure systems. Without fundamental training and care for a nation’s people, how can the nation get anything done, such as building roads, bridges, and airports?
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York believes that the infrastructure plans will not progress if American women and other caretakers are not prioritized at the forefront of the issue.
“Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure,” she wrote on Twitter.
Infrastructure is a no-win situation when viewed as a gender issue. First and foremost, traditional infrastructure jobs are more likely to be given to men. According to NPR, nine out of ten construction workers are male. By comparison, the Family Caregiver Alliance reported in 2020 that “upwards of 75% of all caregivers are female, and may spend as much as 50% more time providing care than males.” In the case of the infrastructure bill, male-dominated industries, such as construction, receive far more federal funding compared to female-dominated ones like education and caregiving.
Because of the lack of affordable childcare options, which became even less of an option during the pandemic, the majority of American moms have had to keep up with their households, whether that is their full-time job or not, while fathers who work have not been expected to help out around the house as much.
“During the pandemic, mothers have been three times as likely as fathers to be responsible for a majority of housework and child care, according to a Lean In and McKinsey & Company report. Mothers have also been twice as likely as fathers to worry that their work performance is being judged negatively because of their caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic,” Courtney Connley reported for CNBC.
“Not only are women overrepresented in industries hardest hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, [but] they have also carried the burden of overwhelming responsibilities on the home front,” Lexy Martin, head of research at Visier, told Human Resource Executive.
The pandemic highlighted the fact that caregiving and education are two crucial industries that Americans can not survive without on a daily basis. “One in ten working mothers with children under 18 said they quit a job due to COVID and half of this group cited school closures as one of the reasons. Three out of ten working mothers said they had to take time off because school or daycare was closed,” reported the Kaiser Family Foundation, a non-profit who has been collecting and analyzing data on COVID-19 and its impact. “Over one in ten women report that they have new caregiving responsibilities as a result of the pandemic.”
Investing in the caregiving and education industries would substantially take the weight off of many American women’s shoulders, while providing for the wellbeing of future generations.
Without funding these foundational industries, it’s difficult to fathom the progress of the United States in the future. It is time for Congress to rethink what falls under the nation’s “system of public works.” Without access to great public education or worthwhile paid family leave, we are setting ourselves up for a workforce that excludes female workers and fundamentally harms all people who have someone else to take care of.
