Individual Assignment 04: Practice Professional Networking

Practice Professional Networking

For this assignment, I attended the annual Women & Gender Studies Spring Dinner. The dinner took place in the Mellon Board Room before the showing of the April Just Films installment, Zero Weeks. The dinner was attended by Women & Gender Studies students and faculty, as well as board members, staff, and fellows from the Women & Girls Foundation. The Women & Girls Foundation is an organization that works nationally to empower women and girls and achieve equality. One of the main campaigns of the Women & Girls Foundation of Southwestern PA is the Paid Leave for PA campaign. They have worked with many other organizations and activists to create a plan to establish paid leave in PA by 2020. Attendees included Rochelle Jackson, the Femisphere Project Director, who also spoke to our Women's Leadership in the 21st Century class. 

During dinner, Heather Arnet spoke about the importance of paid leave, how the lack of it affects us all, and her work to get paid leave guaranteed in PA. Arnet is the CEO of the Women & Girls Foundation. She can be found on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/heatherarnet. Arnet discussed how paid leave is important not just for families, but for individuals as well. If you get hurt in a car accident, you would need time off of work, but you could quickly accrue debt if it is not paid leave. My family personally experienced a need for paid leave in my junior year of high school when my dad had to take an unpaid week off work to care for my mom after she had neck surgery. In 2016, only 14 percent of private sector workers in the U.S. reported having paid family leave through an employer; less than 40 percent have personal medical leave through an employer-provided temporary disability program. The United States and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world without a paid leave law. Because 44 percent of American households don’t have enough savings to cover their basic expenses for three months, families are often forced to choose between taking time off to care for a partner or parent with an unexpected medical emergency or continuing to work so that they can keep their job and health insurance. Nearly 1 in 4 mothers return to work within two weeks of having a baby. Without the protections of paid leave, new mothers are 40% more likely to need food stamps or public assistance.

Pictured to the left are the Women & Gender Studies students, wearing the Women's Leadership & Gender Equity shirts commissioned through Student Affairs by Dr. Ramey and designed by me in my capacity as a publicist. 








Zero Weeks is marketed as follows: 
Weaving powerful stories together with insightful interviews from leading policy makers, economists, researchers and activists, ZERO WEEKS lays out a compelling argument for guaranteed paid leave for every American worker. The film looks at paid leave from an emotional, medical, financial and global perspective.

ZERO WEEKS is the fourth documentary by award-winning director, Ky Dickens. As a female director, with a track record for creating poignant work known for shifting policy and public opinion, Dickens is an ideal filmmaker to tackle this project. Dickens was inspired to make a film about paid leave, after facing financial depletion, emotional turmoil and guilt of having “not enough time,” due to a lack of paid leave, after the birth of her first child.

Following the screening of the film, Ky Dickens skyped in to the panel moderated by the Women & Girls Foundation. Ky Dickens is on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kydickens. 

This article from the Economist, How American Women Got Stuck in the Kitchen, discusses the IMF's [International Monetary Fund] most recent World Economic Outlook and the cost of not having a federal paid leave program. The article was published on April 13, 2018, so the information is very recent and relevant. The IMF noted that while America had a very high proportion of women in the workplace, it has since been overtaken by Germany and Australia. The Economist notes that it is unlikely that America has fallen behind because fewer American women want to work. Instead, America "seems to have fallen behind because it has failed to introduce policies that make it easier for women to stay in work after they have had children." 

References

M.S.R. (2018, April 13). How American women got stuck in the kitchen. Retrieved April 25, 2018, from https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica
/2018/04/womenomics

Zero Weeks. Retrieved April 25, 2018, from http://www.zeroweeks.com/