GENDER EQUALITY
Women for Progress maintains any discrimination based on gender violates human rights and creates barriers to equal participation in society. Gender-based discrimination creates an environment that perpetuates unequal employment opportunities, economic disparities, educational disparities, and woefully inadequate prevention of and penalties for violence against women. Gender inequality also influences societal expectations around child care, household duties, and financial decisions, generally having a negative effect not only on women but also their families, colleagues, and communities. Maternity, in particular, has an enormous impact on women, and without equality, typically hampers career path, earnings, body autonomy, and personal agency. Lack of equality also allows for and perpetuates sexual harassment, both inside and apart from the workplace. This remains another major obstacle to full and equal participation.
The United States has much work to do on these fronts. Just one recent example demonstrates the work remaining to realize true gender equality. In 2020 Pew Research reported the gender pay gap had remained unchanged for the past 15 years, with women, on average, earning 84% of what their male counterparts earned. (https://www.pewresearch.org/
We believe in advocacy, education, and legislation that acknowledges, promotes, and enacts policies that recognize all people, regardless of gender and/or gender identity, must have access to equal rights, choices, and opportunities as it relates to their bodies, potential, and livelihoods including unfettered access to reproductive healthcare, birth control, and abortion.
GUN VIOLENCE PREVENTION
Women for Progress maintains that gun violence negatively impacts society and public health. Gun violence includes increased risk of suicide and suicide attempts, intimate partner violence, unintentional deaths and injuries, violent conflicts, and homicides. The impacts of gun violence are traumatic across communities and are often generational. These impacts contribute to perpetuating cycles of violence and disproportionately affect communities of color. We acknowledge that gun violence greatly reduces overall quality of life, has a detrimental effect on health, and increases healthcare costs to society at large. Additionally, the exponential rise in gun violence places extraordinary stresses on an already overburdened criminal justice system.
We support prevention strategies, goals, and policies that use a public health approach rooted in science and research to identify risk and develop protective measures to implement preventative interventions.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
Women for Progress maintains the condition of our environment directly impacts public health, water resources, food resources, livelihoods, biodiversity, ecological systems, quality of life, the global economy and species survival. We support goals and policies that acknowledge climate change is not only real but also a serious threat to global health, the health of the planet’s ecosystem, and, ultimately, humanity. These goals and policies include but are not limited to strategies that focus on energy conservation, drastic and immediate pollution reduction, land and water conservation, current and future investment in and development of renewable resources, as well as the education and promotion of sustainable practices.
RACIAL JUSTICE
Women for Progress maintains that systemic racism in the United States creates ongoing inequities and unjust barriers for people of color in our educational, housing, legal, medical, political, economic, and social systems. We believe in acknowledging how these disparities were formed through countless exploitations, bigotry, and injustices, from colonization and slavery to enduring prejudice and discrimination as well as the abiding ideology of white supremacy.
We support legislation, activism, education, and policies that work to eradicate the institutional racism found throughout these systems. We support civil rights activism that works to comprehensively dismantle systemic racism to rebuild a nation that acknowledges its past while creating a system that reflects true equality, rights, and opportunities for people of color and Indigenous communities.
HUMAN RIGHTS
Women for Progress believes in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, established by the United Nations in 1948, that “fundamental human rights are to be universally protected.” These rights should extend to all people no matter where they reside across the globe. We support local and international efforts to ensure all people are granted the same basic human rights, dignity and equal treatment. We believe in social progress, freedom of speech, and freedom from tyranny and oppression. We believe these human rights should be protected by law and promoted throughout the world so that all may enjoy these standards of living.