The next federal stimulus package has to reduce inequality, not make it worse.
The federal coronavirus relief packages were less effective than they could have been because they ignored the ways that the pandemic would inevitably harm some communities more than others.
We must do better.
Before doling out any money, we propose that governments at the local, state and federal levels, as well as philanthropies, analyze the impact the funding would have on women, men, boys, girls and nonbinary people across race and class and other social identities. Then they should ensure the money is allocated in a way that alleviates inequality, rather than reproduces it.Read more in Opinion on women of color.Opinion | Vanessa DanielPhilanthropists Bench Women of Color, the M.V.P.s of Social Change
Our idea, a gender- and racial-equity-budget assessment, grows out of similar efforts adopted at Beijing’s women’s conference 25 years ago. We need this analysis now more than ever as our country is faced with the desperate task of saving lives and livelihoods.
Let’s take one example where such an assessment would have helped. The Cares Act allows small businesses to receive loans, a provision that’s gender- and race-neutral on its face. However, only 12 percent of the black and Latino owners in a survey who applied for aid reported receiving what they had asked for.
That’s partly because many black- or Latino-owned businesses do not have relationships with banks, making it nearly impossible for them to benefit from this program. Similarly, while businesses owned by women of color grew faster than any other last year, they are the least likely to be able to float and wait to obtain said relief funds without their businesses closing.
The assessment would have taken these factors into consideration by providing dedicated funding opportunities for minority and women-owned businesses, and within that funding pool, for women of color-owned businesses.
Like our societies, budgets are neither gender-neutral or race-neutral. Budgets tell us whose lives matter and whose do not.
That is why in the 1990s, feminists in South Africa demanded that their new democracy, emerging from decades of apartheid, include a women’s budget. They argued that every item of income and expenditure in the government’s budget be examined for the differential impact it had on men and women across race and class.
Although the women’s budget has never been implemented to its full potential, one of its biggest victories was a narrative shift, according to Pregs Govender, a member of Parliament with the African National Congress who introduced the idea at the budget debate in 1994. “Throughout the country, people are talking about women and the budget in a way that you never heard before we started this,” she said in an interview in 2002.
The initiative made visible that those who suffered the most under apartheid — rural black women — were also the leaders most needed to build a successful democracy. We should follow South Africa’s example.
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While it might seem improbable that this administration would adopt such a strategy, Iceland, the Netherlands, Canada, Mexico and other nations have already done so as of 2016.
Consider its impact: In 2015, Iceland abandoned a legislative proposal to simplify the income tax system after a gender analysis revealed it would have inadvertently widened the income gap. In Mexico, gender budgeting has resulted in funding targeted toward diseases affecting women, like cervical, ovarian and breast cancer.
Closer to home, such budgeting practices have taken place on the local level. The Department of Public Works in San Francisco reported in 2012 that it hired more female engineers after a gender analysis showed the department hired women for mostly clerical and office positions. Even more promising, Hawaii has proposed a feminist economic recovery response to the coronavirus that addresses the health and financial independence of those most suffering under inequality, especially Native Hawaiian and immigrant women.
Philanthropy should also implement such an approach. As a former foundation executive director who is white (Ms. Shifman) and a nonprofit leader who is black (Ms. Tillet), we have seen again and again the ways in which women of color are passed over for funding, in favor of most everyone else. In general, nonprofit organizations led by blacks and Latinos receive less funding than peer organizations with white leaders.
This disparity is not a result of effectiveness. In fact the inverse is true. Women of color are leading some of the most critical and transformative social justice organizations in the country often on shoestring budgets and most certainly without the social capital of white-led nonprofits. A pervasive example of this vicious cycle is when grant size is tied to budget size and not impact or potential for impact, compounding historical underinvestment in the leadership of women of color.
A racial and gender-equity assessment would help grant makers break that cycle and propose larger grants to account for past discrimination — even if that means disregarding the common practice in which foundations provide no more than 20 percent of an organization’s overall budget. Some might argue that this analysis will be unduly burdensome or costly. However, not doing this is much more costly in the long run.
This is the first of many steps to recognize that those who have been pushed to the far and fatal margins of our society are the most important members of our democratic future.
Pamela Shifman (@PamelaShifman) was the executive director of the NoVo Foundation. Salamishah Tillet (@salamishah) is a co-founder of A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that uses art to empower young people to end violence against girls and women. She is also a professor of African-American and African studies and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark.
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Salamishah Tillet is a professor of African-American and African studies and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark. @salamishah
