[Each year, the YWCA hosts a Seattle luncheon to bring together community members, share stories of empowerment, educate about the YWCA’s impact on women and families and encourage support for the 122-year-old organization. This year, President Cauce was invited to deliver the keynote address. Remarks as prepared for delivery.]
Good afternoon. Thank you, Dr. Alamdari for that kind introduction and thank you also for your work as a member of the UW Bothell advisory board. As the lead sponsor of this event and through their ongoing support of the YWCA, Boeing has demonstrated once again their deep commitment to the well-being of Seattle and the entire Pacific Northwest. Just last week I had the opportunity to recognize and thank the Boeing Company for their generosity to the University of Washington, and for their steadfast commitment to educational access for minority and economically disadvantaged UW students. Boeing continues to prove, again and again, their deep and long-standing dedication to improving lives and institutions in Washington.
It’s an honor to be here in support of an organization that has such a profound and positive impact on the communities it serves across Seattle and in King and Snohomish counties. The YWCA has a mission that couldn’t be clearer:
To eliminate racism, empower women and promote peace, justice, freedom and dignity for all.
Everyone in this room understands how vitally important that mission is. Whether you’re a client who has felt the tangible benefits of the YWCA’s programs or whether you’ve invested in this mission with your time, your energy and your financial support, we are all here together in celebration and support of this wonderful organization. And I want to pause here to offer a sincere thank you to those of you who have donated, because what you do makes possible what the YWCA does.
As I was preparing to come here today, and I kept thinking about the connections between educational opportunity and social mobility. Certainly my own life would look very different if I hadn’t had the educational opportunities I did, and having spent my life as an educator, I know it’s a nearly universal truth: education empowers people and improves not only their lives, but also the lives of the people they touch. And this is ESPECIALLY the case for women, because of the special role they continue to play in raising children, whether alone or not.
I also spent some time thinking about women who have inspired me, and my mind kept flashing back to the very first study I conducted here in Seattle – more than 25 years ago. As some of you know, I was trained as a clinical/community psychologist and my work has been mostly with kids often called “at-risk,” particularly African American and Latino youth and homeless and street youth. In this study we were examining parenting practices in African American families and how that affected their adolescent children’s behavior, from school achievement to problem behavior of various sorts. We conducted surveys with about 150 early adolescents (14-16) and their parents, been then focused especially on mother-daughter relationships – which, by the way, are those in which conflict is most intense (more than father-son, so much more often the subject of novels and movies). In some ways, we were focusing on something that I know is of great interest to the YWCA, what us academics call “intersectionality” – like how race INTERACTS with gender. So, for example, is not just about African American and a woman. It’s about being an African American woman which is more than some addition of the two.
For this part of the study we conducted face-to-face interviews with about 60 mother-daughter pairs after having them engage in videotaped interactions where we had them try to resolve an area of conflict — explain a bit more —. Basically, what we did was have them fight with each other. And, despite the videocameras they knew were behind the one way mirror, they DID fight.
What struck me, both during the interviews, and even in the midst of their often intense arguments – and what has stayed with me over all these years, because it was SOoo strong – was the deep commitment these mothers had to see their daughters safely through the risks and pitfalls of growing up in a world that was not going to be friendly to them.
These moms were very intent on making sure their daughters were prepared to be self-supporting and independent – and they modeled this behavior for their daughters with determination. I remember one of the daughters telling us that the lesson she took from her mother was, “Don’t wait for anybody to do for you, ‘cause you’ll have nothing.”
They were also painfully aware of the dangers facing their daughters – dangers often associated with being poor or working class, and often living in neighborhoods with relatively high rates of crime, but also with simply being black women America – not just later in life, but now. Because one thing we know is that people tend to overestimate the ages of African American youth, consistently viewing them as older than they are. This is partly based on reality, both Latina and African American girls reach puberty early than White of Asian girls – largely due to having more fat in their diets. But, while for boys early puberty is an advantage (bigger for sports), it puts girls at higher risk for sexual harassment if not actual victimization from older men. – just one example of that intersectionality I talked about.
So these women mothers walked a careful line between exerting control, while giving them the autonomy they needed to develop the skills they would need later in life. They kept a close rein on their daughters, even when it caused conflict or even when they had to be stricter than they would have wanted, because they were so conscious of the high cost their daughters would pay for wandering off the path – a price higher than that of more privileged peers whose environment is more forgiving.
These women, many in challenging circumstances, were engaged in a high-stakes balancing act to protect their daughters, while simultaneously fostering strong, competent, independent young women. It was inspiring getting to know them, even if the situation was somewhat artificial, and they continue to inspire me today. And, when I think of the challenge they were taking on with such intelligence AND grace, is also a reminder of why an organization like the YWCA is so important. Because through programs like GirlsFirst and Stand Against Racism, the YWCA is helping to create the conditions for ALL girls to succeed.
The interviews I mentioned took place over 20 years ago – the girls are long past their adolescence, some may be raising adolescents of their own, but the truth is that it’s still too difficult to grow up black and female, or Latina and female, Native American or Asian and female – heck, it’s tough to grow up just plain female. (And just to clear the air, I’m NOT saying that growing up male is a piece of cake. But, today we’re going to focus on girls and young woman. The kinds of problems they have are often less flashy, depression vs aggression, so they don’t get as much attention.)
We are all SO grateful the YWCA is an organization dedicated to helping girls and women tackle thier problems, to knocking down the barriers – of racism, of sexism, of poverty, of scarce opportunity – that endanger women. Indeed, in the research community, we call organizations like this “urban sanctuaries” because they serve as safe places in cities and their surrounding areas.
But, you can’t do it alone, and it’s important for us to support and compliment the work you do; our educational organizations need to become as empowering for girls and women as the YWCA. Because the link between educational opportunity and economic advancement are quite clear women face especially steep challenges on this front, especially women of color.
How strong is the connection between education and financial security? Of American women with a bachelor’s degree or higher, less than five percent live in poverty. For those with only a high school diploma, the percentage in poverty rises to more than 16 percent, and for women without a high school diploma, nearly 40 percent live in poverty. Even if the strong relation is partly because of self-selection it’s impossible to argue with the fact that education is fundamental to a better life for women and their families.
Here in Washington, more and more women are attaining higher education. In 25 years, we’ve seen the percentage of Washington women with college degrees rise from less than 20 percent to more than 32 percent. But those increases have not benefitted all women equally. Black, Hispanic and Native American women in Washington are all less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than their white counterparts. Poverty and lack of access become generational and cyclical – my initial contempt for parents of street kids.
So, access to education is a part of how women become empowered, but it doesn’t get them all the way there (no one can do this alone). Education does indeed increase women’s earnings, women in this state earn just under 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn, this is larger than the national average: (Guess the new Rosa Parks $20 bill will only be worth $15.60).
At the current rate of progress, the gender wage gap in Washington won’t close until 2071. I think we all agree that 55 years is simply too long to wait!
But, even if their wages were the same, women have other gender-related economic barriers. They are disproportionately penalized by a lack of affordable child care. In fact, they are 18 times more likely than men to be forced to work part-time because they lack child care options. In Washington, the average yearly cost of full-time child care is over $12,000. (which by the way is $150 more than the cost of tuition at the UW!- and infants don’t get scholarships and financial aid or its equivalent is rare) Put another way, that sum is nearly half of the median income for single mothers. The downstream effects of that economic reality are both profound and far-reaching; women’s professional advancement opportunities suffer, their Social Security and pension benefits are reduced, and their long-term financial security is threatened.
Racial injustice, inequity and in some cases, racism clear and simple, help to cement these conditions. It takes many forms. Sometimes it’s easy to see, so glaring that it shocks the conscience. Police grabbing middle school girl hair or shootings – Black teenage boys are not inherently “menacing” and black teenage girls are not naturally “defiant.” These ugly stereotypes persist and are used to justify brutal – sometimes deadly – use of force. When racist incidents make headlines, it can be demoralizing, but it can also create a clear call to action – and the UW, as one of the largest institutions in the state we must do our part.
Racism isn’t just something that you can see in a YouTube video in living color. It can be insidious and manifest itself in indirect, almost invisible ways. There’s not always a smoking gun or a clear culprit – the weapon is our culture; the culprit is all of us, even, or especially, when we don’t recognize it.
According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, job applicants with “white sounding” names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; in contrast, those with traditionally African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback. When white and youth were sent out with equivalent resumes to interview for low wage jobs, Whites were twice as likely to get call backs, heck a black applicant with a clean criminal record was no more likely to get a callback than a white youth who was released from prison in the last 18 months! And we see the same kind of thing for women.
No one person, no one organization is responsible for this; it’s not OUT there — We are ALL, more or less, culpable even if we don’t mean it. My friend and colleague Eric Liu, founder of Citizen University, who has written several books including “A Chinaman’s Chance,” loves to refer to a billboard he saw while sitting in a traffic jam on the highway. It said simply and powerfully, “You aren’t IN traffic, you ARE traffic.”
The University of Washington is built on a commitment to serving the public good and perhaps the most important public good is working toward fairness, justice and equity for all people. To do that, we must frankly and honestly acknowledge that we are still a long way from that ideal. And we, especially those of us in leadership, must also acknowledge our own privilege as we do so.
As a public university, the UW has a particular obligation to make our campuses inclusive and accessible to ALL students. In service to that goal, last spring we launched the Race & Equity Initiative, a wide-ranging campaign to encourage personal reflection, and campus-wide conversations among our students and faculty, and to combat and racism and injustice on our campuses. That initiative – which builds on, really, generations of work by students and faculty, is a work in progress, but we’re listening to our students who said loud and clear that Black Lives Matter, and to our faculty who make issues of race and equity part of their teaching and scholarship. We’re guided, too, by the staff members in the Office of Minority Affairs & Diversity who are updating the Diversity Blueprint and have initiated a series of Community Conversations to learn how to better support the communities we serve. Through this initiative, we will improve the UW’s ability to receive and respond to incidents of bias and discrimination, improve our search processes so we can identify implicit bias and how it can hinder the hiring process, and support our academic leadership’s efforts to recruit top faculty of color from around the world to the UW. The initiative is relatively new, but it will help shape the UW of the future.
We’re all here today because the YWCA helps shape the future – through their work – your work — with girls and young women, in workforce development programs, and through literally life-saving housing and social services to families in need. Throughout the YWCA’s 122-year history, this organization has made the women of Seattle its priority; in the early 1900s, the YWCA provided job training to help women qualify for the then-progressive $10 per week minimum wage. In the 1930s, your Seattle chapter became the first YWCA to have a racially integrated board, and in 1960s and ‘70s, the organization championed federal civil rights legislation.
Today, the impact of the YWCA is felt by women and families of color throughout Seattle and King and Snohomish counties. We need look no further than Natalia and her inspiring account of getting the personal support and professional development she needed to make a better life for herself and her son to see what real change looks like.
The breadth and depth of your work is simply incredible. It includes a progressive federal policy agenda, calling for legislation that would ban racial profiling by law enforcement, the prevention of domestic and gun violence, and mandated paid sick leave that will lead to healthier, more financially stable families. Through dozens of programs, you provide vital services to women and families in need at every level: from emergency interventions to housing, from health services to leadership and mentoring programs like GirlsFirst.
In learning about GirlsFirst, I was struck by something that one of the mentors, Esperanza Borboa, said about her mentee, which was this: “Being a mentor makes you reflect on what you’re saying. If I tell her something, then I have to believe it and live it. So you change too. You both become better people.” That’s really what change is all about – it’s not something you can just impose on the world outside; real change also happens inside of us.
Change happens through job training programs like Community Jobs, Career Pathways or Pathways to Work that help people to reach that next rung in training and education. As so many clients and program participants can attest, the YWCA is making it possible for women and families to better themselves, one step at a time, in safe, supportive spaces with the help of dedicated staff and volunteers. For people struggling to overcome hardships – abuse, addiction, poverty – taking those small steps requires enormous courage and the results of all those small steps is nothing short of miraculous.
It’s vital that this work continue because there is still a lot of work to be done. Dismantling systems of oppression that are the legacy of centuries will not happen quickly or easily and there is certainly no silver bullet. Like any long-standing edifice, racism and injustice can’t be swept away; they must be chipped away, and that will take time, dedication, and resources. It will take many hands and many voices, joining together with courage and compassion in service of a common purpose: to achieve equity and empower our women and minority friends, neighbors and family.
We are united in this room by that common purpose. We share a vision of a world where poverty is eliminated, not just because it will make other people’s lives better – although it will – but also because it lifts up our whole society. We envision a world without racial and social injustice not just because it’s better for people who are now marginalized – although it is – but because equity and fairness for all lightens everyone’s burden.
I believe in this shared mission, and I’m proud to be part of this movement with all of you here today. This organization needs the support of people like you. And our nation and world desperately need for us to succeed in these efforts. In the words that the YWCA itself uses to describe their vision, together we can build “an inclusive society where all people can thrive and communities are valued, respected and self-directed.” A very worthy vision – so let’s make it happen.
Thank you.