A White House report released April 6 focuses on the Obama administration’s accomplishments on behalf of women. Here are a few of the numbers and initiatives:
-
The very first piece of legislation President Obama signed into law was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act of 2009, which defined each paycheck as a separate discriminatory act that starts a new clock for the statute of limitations.
- 4.9 million women were kept out of poverty in 2010 because of expansions in refundable tax credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit.
- To ensure that cases of sexual assault are accurately reflected in crime statistics, the Department of Justice updated the FBI’s definition of rape to include various forms of sexual penetration understood to be rape and to include the rape of men.
- More than 16,000 Small Business Administration Loans totaling more than $4.5 billion were granted to women-owned small businesses.
- 24.7 million women enrolled in Medicare received preventive services at no additional cost in 2011, including an annual wellness visit, a personalized prevention plan, mammograms, and bone mass measurement for women at risk of osteoporosis.
- The Department of Veterans Affairs is working to provide comprehensive health care for America’s 1.9 million female veterans. It is installing full-time female veterans program managers at VA health care facilities and the 2013 Budget includes a $403 million investment – a 17 percent increase from the 2012 enacted amount – for gender-specific health care for eligible female veterans.
- The Office of National Drug Control Policy is working to create an online resource for women with substance-abuse disorders and those who treat them, both medically and in the criminal justice and child welfare systems.
- According to a report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, 77.9% of sheltered homeless people in families in 2010 were women. Thanks to the Homelessness Prevention and Rapid Re-housing Program, an estimated 700,000 women have been saved from homelessness since the beginning of the Obama administration.
Photo Credit, Restoring Right to Equal Pay for Women by Jerry Nadler under license from Creative Commons 2.0
