Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

The White House is planning a Working Families Summit in June to discuss ways to get women out of their homes and into the workplace – whether they want to or not.

CNSNews.com is reporting that the Summit, scheduled for June 23, is being couched in language such as “making sure the economy is working as well as it can for American families” but one of its main thrusts is to discuss how to “release constraints” on women who are being “deprived of wages and career opportunities” because of their role as care-givers.

” . . . What you see is that women, as they get into that point where, you know, there’s a lot of family burdens, they’ve got young kids at home, they’re making trade-offs, they’re put in positions where they end up resulting in a larger gender-wage gap,” said Betsey Stevenson, a member of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, during a White House briefing on Wednesday.

“What we want to do is make sure that we’ve done as much as we can, that businesses are doing as much as they can to not lose women at those critical moments when they’re having children, when they have young children at home.”

President Barack Obama also spoke out on this issue on Wednesday, telling a group of female members of Congress that “women are still the ones that are carrying the greatest burden when it comes to trying to balance family and work. Because of inadequate child care or the inability to get paid leave for a sick child or an ailing parent, they end up suffering the burdens, and by the way, that means families are suffering the burden because increasingly, women are a critical breadwinner for families all across the country.”

Stevenson backed him up by displaying a chart that contained the female labor force participation rates in countries such as Canada, Germany and Sweden and compared them to the U.S.

“What research shows us is that countries that provide more support to working families, more flexible work arrangements, greater access to paid leave, greater access to child care, greater access to early childhood education — all of those things actually do facilitate women participating to a greater extent in the labor force,” Stevenson said.

She went on to the tell the briefing that there’s more the United States can do to “encourage women to participate in the labor force, to make sure that they’re able to make the most of their talent and that our labor force is able to get the most out of their talent.”

What the summit seems to be overlooking is the fact that some polls show as many as 75 percent of new mothers would prefer to stay home and raise their child if they could only afford to do so. Will the Summit address any of their concerns? Will they discuss ways to make it easier for women to stay home and raise their children, such as lowering the deficit and unemployment rate, thus improving the economy in ways that increase the median household income that has dropped four percent in the last four years?

Somehow, I doubt it, especially when I read who was being invited to the Summit – “business leaders, educators, researchers, advocates, lawmakers, state and local government”. Even though Stevenson says it’s open to “anyone who wants to attend” her invitation list contains all of the usual suspects who attend these meetings not because they care about women but because they have an ideological ax to grind.

Without a nice cross-section of women from the general population in attendance, I have severe misgivings about Stevenson’s goals, which are to establish “best practices” and “the policies that leaders should be pursuing coming forward.”

Even the reporters were skeptical, asking if this was just another election year pitch to women voters like last year’s phony “war on women” campaign.

Of course, Stevenson denied it, reciting her nicely written talking points  ” . . . it’s important for us now to think about how to make sure that the labor force is working as well as it can for everyone.”

Except women who want to stay home with their children.

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