Skip to footer

Obama vs. Romney 101: 5 differences on women's issues

President Obama won the women’s vote four years ago, and he’ll need to again to win reelection, given Mitt Romney’s strength among male voters. Here are some of the women’s issues on which the candidates differ.

4. Equal pay

Scott Applewhite/AP/File
Lilly Ledbetter joins Senate majority leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada during a news conference on Capitol Hill on June 5, as the Senate considers the Paycheck Fairness Act.

  • By Linda Feldmann Staff writer

According to US Census data, women earn 77 cents to a man’s dollar for the same work and level of experience.

In 2009, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which allows women more time to file wage-discrimination lawsuits. Obama also supports the Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to make it easier for women to prove wage discrimination but has yet to clear both houses of Congress. The legislation pressures employers to prove lack of discrimination in wage differences, and makes it easier for employees to reveal information about their salaries.

In June, the Romney campaign replied to a request from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for comment, but did not specifically take a stand on the legislation.

“Gov. Romney supports pay equity for women,” a Romney spokesperson wrote. “In order to have pay equity, women need to have jobs, and they have been getting crushed in this anemic Obama economy, losing far more jobs than men. As president, Mitt Romney will create a pro-jobs business climate that will put all Americans back to work.”

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.