Obama Creates Women’s Council

Alexis Rice — March 11, 2009 – 3:38 pm | Barack Obama | Civil Rights | Domestic Policy | Women's Issues Comments (0) Add a comment

President Barack Obama today signed an Executive Order creating the first-ever White House Council on Women and Girls.

The Swamp noted details about the event for the Executive Order signing:

The council, which expands on a similar effort during the Clinton Administration, would give the administration a centralized way to track how efforts at federal agencies impact the lives of women and girls. The president made the announcement at a White House event and his signing of the executive order was part of the president’s marking of International Women’s Month.

“Its purpose is very simple,” Obama said. “To ensure that each of the agencies in which they’re charged takes into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support. It’s not enough to only have individual women’s offices at individual agencies or only have one office in the White House.

Obama cited a number of areas where women still don’t fare as well as men because of gender discrimination or societal norms as a reason to establish the council.

”... When women still earn just 78 cents for every dollar men make, when one in four women still experiences domestic violence in their lifetimes, when women are more than half of our population but just 17 percent of our Congress, when women are 49 percent of the workforce but only 3 percent of our Fortune 500 CEOs, when these inequalities stubbornly persist in this country, in this century, then I think we need to ask ourselves some hard questions.” Obama said.

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