A Mother's Day Gift for the Nation's Low-Income Moms

As we celebrate Mother's Day this weekend, the best gift we could give the nation's approximately 3.5 million poor single mothers is the support they need to advance their educations, improve their skills and obtain good family-supporting jobs.

While men have faced profound job loss during the Great Recession, unemployment rates for women who head households are significantly higher than other households. In March 2010, the unemployment rate for women who maintain families was 11.3 percent — the highest rate in the past 25 years. By comparison, the unemployment rate for all women was 8.6 percent, for married men it was 8.1 percent and for married females it was 6.7 percent.

Women of color have been especially hard hit. In March 2010, the unemployment rate for white women was 7.3 percent compared with 12 percent for Hispanic women and 12.4 percent for African American women.

Even women with jobs have a hard time earning a living wage. In 2008, for example, 69 percent of all workers ages 25 and older with earnings at or below the minimum wage were women.

As a nation, our economy will not prosper if we fail to invest in programs and services that provide greater opportunity for all members of society. We need to start by ensuring that every worker, including low-income single mothers, can secure education and training that leads to family-sustaining jobs and careers.

That means rethinking many of the approaches of the past that have left women and their children mired in poverty. We need to strengthen public assistance programs like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) so that the emphasis is on helping women improve their skills and education rather than being pushed into any available job  — no matter how low-paying or lacking in career potential. Additionally, federal efforts should support programs that combine on-the-job work experience with services that help low-income women overcome barriers to employment, including child care, transportation and tenuous housing.

Philanthropy and private entities also have a role to play. Through our work with the women's foundations in our communities we have a strong sense of what strategies work best at the local level and can be replicated nationally. This past year we helped launch the Women's Economic Security Campaign (WESC) with other women's foundations across the country to ensure that the problems faced by women living in poverty and their families are at the center of efforts to fix our nation's economy.

In a report released on May 5th by WESC  — Aiming Higher: Removing Barriers to Education, Training and Jobs for Low-income Women (PDF) — we offer the following strategies for helping women achieve more promising futures for themselves and their children:

• Connect women to programs and services that make education or employment possible. Supports in areas like child care, transportation, housing and health services are critical for single, low-income mothers struggling to balance work, training or education, and family responsibilities. When these supports fall through, low-income students and workers are likely to drop out of school or quit their jobs, further limiting their progress toward economic security.

• Provide women with more work and training opportunities. Limited previous work experience and opportunities for on-the-job training pose a major barrier to low-income women hoping to improve their future employment options.

• Increase opportunity by focusing on employer needs. In order to increase economic security, training and education should be tied to actual jobs. More and better jobs also need to be created in the low-income neighborhoods where these women live so they are not forced to rely on complicated transportation and child care arrangements to hold down jobs many miles from home.

As a nation we need to aim higher. For too long we have settled for too little when it comes to the lives of millions of low-income mothers. It is not enough to create programs and services if we do not provide the guidance and support these women need to access them. We cannot assume we've done our job as a nation if we have simply funneled women off of public assistance and into low-paying dead-end jobs with no hope for a better future.

As we emerge from the worst economic crisis in generations, we have a chance to rethink the status quo and develop policies that will set low-income women, and our nation as a whole, on a more promising path. On this Mother's Day that is gift we would all appreciate.

Ruby Bright is executive director of the Women's Foundation for a Greater Memphis; Jennifer Lockwood-Shabat is interim co-president and vice president of programs for Washington Area Women's Foundation.

Photo credit: edenpictures