Woman Warrior

In her new job, 9to5 founder Nussbaum is still helping women balance work and family responsibilities.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


When Karen Nussbaum, director of the Women’s Bureau in the Department of Labor, was introduced recently to a group of activists by Deputy Director Delores Crockett, Crockett said, “We always used to have to sit down the new political appointee and explain what working women’s issues were. This woman didn’t have to be broken in.”

Indeed, Nussbaum was spurred to activism while a secretary at Harvard University in 1973. She was alone in the office one day when “a male student came in, looked me right in the eye, and asked, ‘Isn’t anybody here?'” Soon afterward, she founded 9to5, the National Association of Working Women, with the goal of organizing “pink-collar” workers to improve their wages and working conditions.

Nussbaum toiled for years as an outsider-advocate for women. Now she speaks from the inside, having been appointed to the bureau by Bill Clinton last year. She’s the driving force behind “Working Women Count!,” a groundbreaking survey being distributed to millions of American women in the workforce and at home via labor unions, businesses, activist groups, and the media. Results are due out in October, and will help Nussbaum determine public policy for the nation’s 58 million working women. (For a copy of the survey’s findings, call the Women’s Bureau at 1-800-827-5335.)

Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Nussbaum’s immediate boss, is a strong supporter of her work with average working women. By contrast, Labor Secretaries Elizabeth Dole and Lynn Martin focused on upper management women’s woes with a “Glass Ceiling Initiative.”

While women in management still face daunting barriers (they comprise only 2-3 percent of top management), Nussbaum points to figures that are even more infuriating: Working women have median weekly earnings that are only 75 percent of similarly employed men; nearly 80 percent of women still earn less than $25,000 a year (see chart). Two out of every three mothers with children under 18 are in the workforce; since women make less than men and often must take time out of the labor force to raise children or care for elderly relatives, they have smaller pensions, too.

The bureau, which was created in 1920 to “promote the welfare of wage-earning women,” launched a campaign earlier this year to alert working women of their rights regarding sexual harassment, pregnancy discrimination, and the new Family and Medical Leave Act. The campaign and the “Working Women Count!” survey underscore Nussbaum’s mission to help women balance work and family responsibilities. She has also traversed the country to talk to working women. In Denver, a data processor told Nussbaum how her boss had called the hospital where she was being treated for a miscarriage to bawl her out for missing work. In San Francisco, a nurse said her early shift meant phoning her children to get them out of bed for school. Others spoke of family emergencies that threatened their job security or just their ability to sleep at night.

“Women don’t need to live this way,” Nussbaum says. “We need a national discussion on how to have a human life. Government will listen.”

Printed in several languages, “Working Women Count!” asks respondents about what they would tell President Clinton about their lives as working women, their views on child and elder care, and their opportunities for advancement. Says Nussbaum, “I can’t wait to read the notes scrawled in the margins.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate