The Biden Agenda for Women

The Biden Agenda’s section specific to women’s issues champions a multitude of policies aimed at benefiting the livelihoods of American women and women around the world. Specifically, Biden has policies aimed in five main issue areas: economic security, healthcare, care infrastructure, ending violence against women, protecting and empowering women globally. Combined, this agenda targets some of the most pressing issues facing women, especially women of color, today in the U.S.

Economic Security

  • Improve economic security by fighting for equal pay, ending other forms of workplace discrimination and harassment, encouraging and supporting women entrepreneurs and small business owners, making education and training more affordable, providing pathways into high-paying professions, expanding access to paid leave and child care, and strengthening union organizing and collective bargaining.
  • Nominate and appoint women, make the Cabinet representative of the people they serve
    • Reissue the Obama-Biden executive order to promote diversity
    • Implement diversity and inclusion plan for the federal workforce
  • Create the White House Council on Women and Girls to address equal pay, paid family leave, and poverty.
    • Along with a White House Council on Gender Equality to coordinate government policy that impacts women and girls, such as economic policy, health care, racial justice, gender-based violence, and foreign policy
  • Pass the Equal Rights Amendment
  • Equal Pay
    • Strengthen enforcement and accountability by:
      • Making it easier for employees to join together in class action lawsuits, shift the burden to employers to prove that any gender-based pay gaps exist for job-related reasons and business necessity, and increase penalties against companies that discriminate
      • Expanding funding for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the U.S. Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, and the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to increase the number of anti-discrimination investigators, litigators, and enforcement actions.
    • Make wage gaps transparent by requiring employers to collect and disclose compensation information by race, gender, and ethnicity 
    • Make it easier for workers to organize a union and bargain collectively with their employers by including the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, card check, union and bargaining rights for public service workers, and a broad definition of “employee” and tough enforcement to end the misclassification of workers as independent contractors. It will also go further than the PRO Act by holding company executives personally liable when they interfere with organizing efforts. And, he’ll restore the ability of federal workers to unionize and collectively bargain.
      • Full collective bargaining plan here
  • Legislation that will be enacted
  • Biden will extend the State Small Business Credit Initiative program through 2025 and double its federal funding to $3 billion, driving close to $30 billion of private sector investments to small businesses all told, especially those owned by women and people of color.
    • Expand the Small Business Administration programs that most effectively support women-owned businesses, especially those owned by women of color
  • Two years of free community college  create a new grant program to assist community colleges in improving their students’ success, while also taking steps to tackle the barriers — like juggling a job and taking care of children — that prevent women from completing their community college degree or training credentials.
  • Provide educational opportunities for women to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers
    • To address this disparity, Biden will invest in school vocational training and partnerships between high schools, community colleges, and employers.
  • Alleviate student debt burdens on women. Women, primarily Black women, hold two-thirds of the nation’s student debt. Biden will address the student debt crisis, which disproportionately affects women.
  • Ensure college campuses are safe for women – restore Title IX.
  • Biden will promote high school programs designed to help students — particularly students of color and girls — develop proficiency in with respect to financial planning, student loans, and debt management
  • Expand Pay and Benefits for Jobs Disproportionately Filled by Women
    • Making sure educators receive a competitive wage and benefits
    • Supporting our caregivers and early childhood educators
    • Stopping exploitation of low-wage working women, including women of color. 
      • Increase the federal minimum wage to $15 which will disproportionately benefit women of color who make up the majority of workers earning under $15 an hour
      • Eliminate the tipped minimum wage
      • Ensure that people receive overtime pay 

Healthcare

  • Protect and expand Obamacare
  • California came up with a strategy that halved the state’s maternal death rate. As President, Biden will reduce our unacceptably high maternal mortality rate, starting by taking the California strategy nationwide. 
  • Reproductive health
    • Stop state laws violating Roe v. Wade
    • Restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood
    • Rescind the Mexico City Policy
    • Restore the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate in place before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision
  • Health care protections
    • Create health care system free from discrimination. He will also ensure coverage for comprehensive care, including covering care related to transitioning such as gender confirmation surgery. In addition, he will ban so-called “conversion therapy
    • Women with disabilities
      • End the institutional bias in the Medicaid program and build the capacity of our system to deliver home and community-based services
      • Direct his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights to issue guidance for states and health insurance programs clarifying how the American with Disabilities Act applies to benefits and reimbursement decisions. Also, as directed by Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, Biden will ensure that entities funded by HHS do not deny medical care based on disability or age.   
    • He will condition receipt of federal criminal justice grants on adequate provision of primary care and gynecological care for women, including care for pregnant women
    • Ensure that each VA Medical Facility has at least one full-time women’s primary care physician; and, within 200 days of taking office, make available a women veterans training module for community health care providers
      • Eliminate co-pays for preventive health care for women veterans and to enact the Deborah Sampson Act and ensure that the safety and privacy concerns of women veterans are addressed throughout his Administration. 
    • Increasing funding for IHS and making that funding mandatory, critical for helping Native American women access comprehensive health care, including preventive screenings, such as mammograms, trauma-informed care, and mental health treatment.

Care infrastructure

  • Ensure mothers and all parents can access high-quality, affordable child care
    • Provide 3- and 4-year-olds access to free, high-quality pre-kindergarten
    • Offer low-income and middle-class families an up to $8,000 tax credit to help pay for child care
    • Provide access to affordable, high-quality child care on a sliding scale for low-income and middle-class families who would prefer this option over the tax credit for young children
    • Build safe, energy-efficient, developmentally appropriate child care facilities, including in workplaces and in child care deserts, and renovating existing facilities
    • Ensure all families are able to choose high-quality child care that works for them,
  • Ensure Early Head Start is an option for families that will benefit from comprehensive family support and child development resources
  • Expand Child Care Development Block Grant subsidies to increase the number of school-aged children up to age 13 in low-income families who can benefit from the program.
  • Fund installation-based child care facilities and expand awareness of the U.S. Department of Defense fee assistance program
  • Eliminate the current waitlist for home and community services under Medicaid
  • Establish a long-term services and supports innovation fund to help expand home- and community-based alternatives to institutional care. 
  • create a national paid family and medical leave program to give all workers up to 12 weeks of paid leave, based on the FAMILY Act
  • Implement sick leave as outlined in the Healthy Families Act, requiring employers to allow workers to accrue seven days paid sick leave for workers to go to the doctor, get a flu shot, recover from an illness, or care for a sick child or family member, or a family member with disability-related needs

End Violence Against Women

  • Reauthorize VAWA and keep guns out of the hands of abusers
  • Expand the safety net for survivors of domestic and sexual violence by establishing a new coordinated housing initiative, expanding access to housing assistance, and protecting survivors from housing discrimination
    • Expand grants to enhance culturally-specific services for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence, and stalking. 
    • Reaffirm Tribal sovereignty to support victims and hold offenders accountable, and expand federal resources for Alaska Native and American Indian women and girls impacted by violence and abuse. 
  • Expand requirements for comprehensive sexual assault, stalking, and dating violence prevention education on college campuses; expand survivors’ reporting rights and options on college campuses; restore Title IX guidance for colleges and increase fines imposed on colleges for Clery Act violations (failing to report statistics about campus safety) as well as develop stronger enforcement protocols to oversee reporting under the U.S. Department of Education; and expand prevention and services to public K-12 schools.
  • Biden will take a comprehensive approach to end the epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women
  • Take action to recognize the disproportionate rates of harsh school discipline practices and juvenile justice responses to adolescent girls of color
    • Reinvest in the National Girls Initiative of the Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention to support communities and schools
  • Combat the epidemic of violence against transgender women of color and reduce domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking against LGBTQ+ individuals  
  • Expand the Elder Justice AmeriCorps program to include a dedicated focus on legal advocacy for domestic violence and sexual assault victims
  • Expand funding for the Training and Services to End Violence Against Women with Disabilities Grant Program
  • Push to repeal extreme, anti-immigrant state laws that have a chilling effect on the ability of immigrant domestic violence, sexual assault survivors, and other victims of crimes to seek safety and justice.
  • Make sure women refugees and asylum seekers have access to necessary services and protections by ending Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols
  • Increase visas for domestic violence survivors, ending processing delays, and tripling the current cap of 10,000 on U-visas.
  • Appoint a commission comprised of current and former military leaders, military sexual assault survivors and their advocates, and prominent sexual assault experts, to make concrete recommendations to him within 90 days. 
  • Create Regional Sexual Assault Investigative Training Academies, which will provide cutting-edge, evidence-based and trauma-informed training, increase funding for the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, and ensure that law enforcement training addresses attitudes that lead to the neglect of testing for rape kits.

Protect and Empower Women Globally

  • Ensure full implementation of the Women, Peace, and Security Act
  • Biden has pledged to strive for gender parity and full diversity in his own national security and foreign policy appointments, elevating women into senior national security positions and ensuring that women of color are well-represented in senior ranks.
  • Elevate women economically
    • Increasing access to education as a driver of empowerment and accumulation of wealth
    • increasing women’s access to capital
  • Confront gender-based violence globally
    • Restoring U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund
    • Training law enforcement to root out the corruption that enables gender-based violence
  • Pursue ratification for the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW)