Employment
and Income
The
Foundation's efforts to improve women's income and employment
opportunities expanded dramatically in the early 1980s. By then,
increasing numbers of women had entered the labor force in the
United States and abroad. The conditions under which women worked,
however, showed persistent forms of sex discrimination and
disadvantage, as well as continuing difficulties for many women in
finding remunerated work at all.
In the United
States, employment and income programs supported two broad
strategies. The first was promoting women's access to jobs
traditionally held by men. For example, Public/Private Ventures
received support for a six-site project to apprentice low-income
women as painters, plasterers, plumbers, and carpenters. The
participants, many of them young mothers on welfare, earned from $8
to $10 per hour while training on the job with experienced union
journeymen. The success of these women, not only in entering
nontraditional trades but also in surmounting barriers to
participation in trade unions, led to Foundation support for an
expanded demonstration in 1984 and 1985. In another large-scale
effort to promote women's access to nontraditional jobs, the
Foundation supported the Coal Employment Project, which helped
rural Appalachian women find high-paying mining jobs. Such grant
making relied heavily on policies of affirmative action and on laws
against sex discrimination. These often controversial projects
helped change the atmosphere in fields where women's participation
had been widely regarded as impossible. As a result, there were
improvements not only in individual participants' incomes but also
in employment opportunities for women generally.
The
Foundation's second program strategy was to help upgrade
predominantly female "pink collar" jobs—primarily domestic
service, clerical, and other service employment. One particularly
successful grant went to the Center for Women in Government at the
State University of New York in Albany. After the center's detailed
research exposed barriers encountered by state-employed women in
moving from low-paying, female-dominated clerical jobs into
better-paying jobs,