Biden council will tell federal agencies to put gender front and center when making policy
A council formed by President Joe Biden to reduce inequality for women at home and abroad plans to issue a directive telling federal agencies to put gender front and center in their policymaking decisions.
The president’s Gender Policy Council, as early as this month, will instruct federal agencies to begin considering the potential negative effects that their actions can have on women. Agencies will also be asked to identify areas where they can exercise their enforcement authority to prevent gender discrimination and to produce plans for how they will advance gender fairness.
The directive will rely heavily on government agencies to develop concrete plans and map out their own budget and staffing needs to advance gender equality. Implementation of those plans are likely to take years.
“In some instances, you’re asking for a completely new approach and asking folks to rethink how they analyze questions and problems, and you don’t sort of change the status quo overnight,” said Jocelyn Frye, who was policy director to former first lady Michelle Obama and is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Women leaders whose input the White House sought, say they were told by the Gender Policy Council that it would provide a blueprint to federal agencies on how to proceed without detailing specific policies.
A White House official described the strategy to McClatchy as an aspirational document that deliberately does not include specific policy recommendations.
When Biden established the Gender Policy Council in March, he ordered it to produce a strategy to advance equity and equality for women and girls through domestic and international policies, especially those in underserved communities.
He tasked the council with coordinating the government response to a host of problems that affect women, including sexual harassment, gender-based violence, wage and wealth gaps, health disparities and reproductive health rights.
He also told the council to help promote women’s interests in areas such as diplomacy, trade, foreign assistance and peace and security efforts and gave it the authority to provide legislative and policy recommendations and to propose changes to federal programs that affect women and girls.
Biden gave the council that is co-chaired by Jen Klein, who is executive director, and Julissa Reynoso, who is also the first lady’s chief of staff, until the end of September to submit recommendations.
The council has held extensive listening sessions with groups that represent a wide range of interests about potential areas of focus for the administration. The White House says that in putting together the strategy, members of the council met with 250 outside organizations.
Some advocates worry that the council, which has five full-time staff members in addition to its co-chairs, a staff assistant and an aide it shares with the National Security Council, does not have resources and staffing to tackle all of the challenges it has committed to working on.
“It’s a double-edged sword because to be effective, you have to have a really tight, targeted agenda. But you also want to be inclusive,” said C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Mason said that while the Gender Policy Council has sought to include views from many fields, “It can have the opposite effect, and there’s so many things, you don’t know what to focus on. And so you’re not able to accomplish much.”
NEXT STEPS
After the strategy is released, the council plans to shift its focus to implementation efforts. It is also leading the administration’s response to the Texas abortion law and is helping with White House efforts to make child care more accessible and affordable for low- and middle-income families, among other issues that affect women and girls that are central to the president’s agenda.
“Their task is giant, for sure. But the times require that sort of focused attention,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO at the National Women’s Law Center.
Women’s groups that focus on foreign policy have also urged the council to get more involved in international issues. They would like to see the council push for trade policies in which there are built-in incentives for women to be treated equally and use its power to push for more resources to go to women’s groups abroad.
Megan O’Donnell, assistant director of the Center for Global Development’s gender program, said the council has “been sort of in firefighting mode,” trying to juggle pressing issues, such as the evacuation of women and girls in Afghanistan, with the longer-term planning that is needed to address problems that require significant financial investment.
“It is tricky,” O’Donnell said.
Reynoso has been splitting her time between running the first lady’s office and co-chairing the council. Biden has nominated Reynoso to be ambassador to Spain, and the White House said it had not decided whether to replace her on the council if she receives Senate confirmation.
The White House said it hopes to grow the council by adding additional staff members but denied it had over-promised to advocates.
“I don’t think it’s a matter of resources, I don’t think it’s a matter of our inability to avoid being spread too thin,” Klein said in an interview. “This council is only going to work if we are able to — and this is what we’re doing — take advantage of the resources across the administration.”
While previous presidents have had women’s initiatives, Biden is the first to form a free-standing council that is not housed within another office, with staff directly reporting to the president.
Lynn Rosenthal, an adviser to Biden when he was vice president who recently chaired the Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military, said Biden’s council is building on the work of the Obama administration’s Council on Women and Girls, including efforts to fight domestic violence, sexual assault and other gender-based violence.
“It does take time to get your footing in a new administration, but they also have people who are able to hit the ground running and take on these very complex policy issues, and I think they’re doing that,” Rosenthal said.
In the Trump administration, women’s issues largely fell to the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her staff. They largely focused on paid family leave, child care and workforce development.
Maggie Cordish, a former policy adviser to Ivanka Trump, said a council that can create awareness about how policies could have a negative impact on women is an improvement.
“And that doesn’t mean that every time you have a policy, it’s going to be perfectly constructed, but you have at least people considering these policies through a lens that makes it possible,” she said.
This story was originally published October 12, 2021 at 2:54 PM.
