Women still face hurdles to equality in Iowa

Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick
Writers' Group

It passed with far less fanfare than was planned, but last year was the 100th anniversary of women’s right to vote in the U.S. In the generations since women gained that right, women have had many “firsts.”

In our family, Kelcey’s great-grandmother Wilma was the first woman in her Iowa town to vote. Her grandmother Yvonne was a local leader, one of the first two women elected to her town’s school board and the first to be elected its president.

While women have made gains and seen many firsts nationally — our vice president, governor, one of our senators and three of our four Representatives are women — and across our state, women are far from equal in our statehouse. Only 12 of 50 state senators and 31 of 100 state Representatives are women.

That women are in the minority shows in how our legislature is run. In recent years, Iowa paid $1.75 million in taxpayer money for the bad behavior of our politicians in a lawsuit brought by a Republican staffer. The subsequent investigation brought to light decades of systemic and repulsive harassment, discrimination and misogyny.

But the Republican men who were the subjects of specific allegations are no longer in office and the legislature made some much-needed changes to its rules on harassment, leaving the most prominent problem on the Democratic side of the aisle.

Sen. Nate Boulton’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign collapsed when he was accused by three women (both Democrat and Republican) of sexual misconduct spanning years. Boulton temporarily lost his committee assignments, and he's now one of five assistant leaders and the top Democrat on the senate's Labor and Business Relations Committee.

And there still is no clear system of resolution and consequences in either party. Republican leaders allowed decades of harassment; Democratic leaders dodge the current issue. These issues fester and erode trust in our lawmakers’ commitment to integrity.

And in our economy as in our government, Iowa’s women face inequity.

Even before the pandemic, American women did not have a level playing field: the same work for less pay; disproportionate child care and household duties; “mommy tracks” that cut women off from promotion.

Child care was, according to the Iowa Women’s Foundation, one of Iowa women’s greatest barriers to employment. One-third of Iowa’s child care facilities closed between 2015 and 2020, leaving one-fourth of Iowans in child care “deserts.” Then the pandemic hit, and many child care facilities simply shuttered; alarmingly, the IWF estimates that half of Iowa’s remaining child care supply could be lost.

The pandemic also took away the once-safe option of sending children to school during the workday. Parents — disproportionately mothers — were forced to choose between working and keeping children safely home, or to juggle work and online school. Forcing schools to reopen unsafely has not helped.

It’s unsurprising, then, that women’s participation in the workforce has plummeted, falling from near-parity with men back to levels last seen in the 1980s. In Iowa, 133,000 workers have left the labor force since February. Job losses have been especially concentrated in women’s employment. The expected damage — stalled career advancement, lost training, lost retirement savings and more — will last decades.

Our current circumstances make it critical that we finally create another long-overdue first: a system that supports working parents. The overwhelming majority of parents are working parents. The unsustainable costs of child care and the scarcity of quality care are obvious, as are the immense costs to Iowa’s economy and tax base. But somehow we have treated these things, as well as our lack of paid parental leave, as incidentals, side-thoughts in how we structure our work and our lives. It is long past time that we support working parents like the vital part of a healthy economy that they are.

100 years after gaining the vote, women not only vote but vote more reliably than men. How many more years will it be before our laws, our legislature and our economy finally treat women equally?

Writers’ Group members Kelcey Patrick-Ferree and Shannon Patrick live in Iowa City. And biannual time changes must be abolished.