Burroughs, the vice president of education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center and a contributor to Ms., connected the dots between poverty, policy and culture change in the latest episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward.
In a time of economic uncertainty, Gaylynn Burroughs—vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center—is leveraging advocacy, policy and litigation to advance economic justice for women across lines of race and class.
Her work at NWLC is just one of many roles the attorney and advocate has held that focused on issues economic equity: Burroughs previously led the Employment Task Force and the work of the Economic Security team at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and served as policy director for the Feminist Majority and Feminist Majority Foundation, which publishes Ms., and as a staff attorney in the Family Defense Practice at the Bronx Defenders.
While at the Defenders, Burroughs wrote a piece that’s featured in the 50 Years of Ms. collection that shined a light on the injustices embedded in our economic institutions, particularly for Black women and children.
As part of the third episode of the Ms. Studios podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward, I talked to Burroughs about the economic landscape facing women today, the ways our economy is failing women at the intersections, and how we can continue, in this challenging moment, to advance our long-term visions of gender and economic justice.
Burroughs is joined in this episode by labor icon Dolores Huerta, Springboard to Opportunities founding CEO Aisha Nyandoro, labor and women’s rights historian Premilla Nadasen, and economists Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino. Together, we traced 50-plus years of feminist resistance to workplace discrimination, women’s disproportionate unpaid domestic and care burdens, and the sociopolitical factors that push women, in larger numbers, into poverty—revealing both how the system seeks to devalue all of “women’s work,” and what we can do about it.
Carmen Rios: What led you to writing “Too Poor to Parent,” your piece for Ms. on the intersections of class, race, gender and the child welfare system?
Gaylynn Burroughs: When I wrote that piece, I was a family defense attorney at The Bronx Defenders. So, it was very much a piece about what I was experiencing every day. I felt like this was something that people needed to know about, that it needed to reach a broader audience.
At The Bronx Defenders, I represented parents and caregivers who were mostly in child neglect cases, and sometimes, those cases resulted in cases to terminate their parental rights. Every situation was different, but the thread that held everything together was that all of the families that I served were struggling to make ends meet—struggling to put food on the table, to maintain their housing, struggling to pay for transportation and medical care, and the list goes on.
That’s true of a lot of families, not just these families in the Bronx. There are a lot of families out there struggling. But for some reason, the families that I served were mostly families of color—and families of color get extra scrutiny. You’re not allowed to have a bad day if you’re a Black mom and there was this sense that being poor and being a person of color, were evidence of neglect.
The other thing that was a thread was that—and maybe it’s related to the first—is that there was an assumption that, if you removed these kids from their homes, that they would be better off.
One, it’s offensive, because it assumes that their families have no value, and while it’s true that some kids who are removed are—I wouldn’t say better off, but significant harm can be mitigated—in a lot of cases, we could’ve just provided the food. We could’ve just helped people get medical care. We could’ve given them a MetroCard so that they could get from appointment to appointment.
When we were working well together, we all played a role in helping these families get the services that they needed—not punish them.
Gaylynn Burroughs
I had so many cases where the city was attempting to remove a child because their family had become homeless, or they had no food, or in one case—this is really egregious—my client was threatened because her child was disabled. It was an educational neglect case. The child wasn’t going to school, and the truth of the matter was that there was no way to get her child to the school. She didn’t have access to transportation, and even when she was able to get her child to school, the school itself was not accessible. So, the child was having to sit in the principal’s office all day. That was, somehow, her fault, and the solution was, “We’ll remove this child from your home.” Everyone agreed it was a loving home.
It didn’t quite make sense. Why don’t we just provide the support people need? Why do we have to traumatize these families?
I was really grateful that Ms. published it, because I certainly wasn’t the first person to talk about this—there were community advocates and system-impacted parents and folks like Dorothy Roberts who were writing about this—but I think that it did shine a light for a different audience.
After it was published, I did some radio interviews. I got invited to speak at conferences. There were other stories in Ms. about this issue, and it was actually even published in a textbook. It reached different people, which was really great.
Rios: There’s so much to say about the piece and the stories within it, because it just seems like common sense that it’s not necessarily better for a child to be removed from a loving home when the problem is not the home—the problem is the community, or the society, or the culture, that creates a school that’s not accessible for a disabled child.
Burroughs: Right. And I was the person who connected the family to an attorney who could help them with that situation, it wasn’t the case worker who was investigating. People try to villainize the parents or their attorneys, but when we were working well together, we all played a role in helping these families get the services that they needed—not punish them, and certainly not remove children unnecessarily.
We know what to do to make it better for women in the economy: Raise the minimum wage. Protect people from workplace harassment. Have things like paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, support for childcare.
Gaylynn Burroughs
Rios: You mentioned, obviously, that there’s a lot of people right now struggling. What would you say the economic landscape does look like for women right now? How are women doing in their economic lives?
Burroughs: There is this trend that we have seen: Women are just more likely to live in poverty and to experience hardship, and that is still true. That’s still true today. I want to be clear that women have made extraordinary gains economically since the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act, all of that. Those things are fantastic, but that’s not the end of the story—and there’s so much more that we need to do, because it’s not like this is inevitable.
Going back to what you were saying, the fact that women are disproportionately more likely to live in poverty is a choice that we have made as a society. It’s a policy choice. There’s so much systemic inequity still. We still are facing the consequences of historical and present-day discrimination.
Women are still being shortchanged at work. The pay gap persists. It’s closed since the Equal Pay Act, but it’s still there, and in fact, between 2022 and 2023, it was the first time that we saw that the pay gap actually widened between women and men in decades.
Right now, women working full time year-round make around 83 cents to what their male counterpart makes.
We need to go faster in fixing these problems, but unfortunately, it seems like we’re going backwards. There’s a lot to be said about gains, but for the average, working woman out there, these are still tough times.
We still have an epidemic of workplace harassment that is happening. Women shoulder the burden of unpaid caregiving, and I’m not calling it a burden because we have to care—but we don’t have the support we need to be caregivers and to also be workers and also do all the things that we need to do in our lives.
The answer isn’t, ‘stop being a caregiver.’ The answer is: How do we make policy choices that allow people to fulfill their obligations to their families and also be able to work outside of the home? We’re still dealing with all of these issues that we have been dealing with since I started doing this work.
Rios: What are some of the most glaring policy gaps that you see? What are the policies that you think would be the most critical to cultivating more economic equality?
Burroughs: Just look at what’s happening right now. Congress pushed through a bill to make billionaires even richer by giving them tax cuts that would be paid for by cuts to Medicaid, housing, food assistance, and other support that women and families rely on. These programs provide a lifeline to many people in every community, and especially at a time, as you mentioned, where we have made the economy uncertain through policy choices.
We’re also living in a time when so many people have lost their jobs. Let’s not forget that we’re living in a time of DOGE cuts. That is a choice. The National Women’s Law Center put out a report showing that in the majority of the workforce of agencies that were targeted by DOGE for either elimination or reduction, women and people of color made up a majority of the workforce. People think it’s just Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, but all over the country, people are working for the federal government. Those jobs were a pathway to the middle class for people—and they’re now gone, and I don’t know what’s going to replace them.
We’re also living in a time of attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, where our government is threatening to remove funding for schools that engage in so-called illegal DEI—that’s not a legal term. that’s not a thing—threatening schools, terminating grants to programs that help women find pathways to employment, bullying law firms and private employers, creating confusion, refusing to enforce civil rights laws.
On top of that, all of that is happening at the same time that they’re literally bullying trans girls. When we talk about policy gaps, how do we even get there when we’re dealing with this? With trying to protect basic rights that we thought we had from being pulled away?
Once you start seeing these problems as being problems that policy can solve, a whole world opens up. You’re not just alone.
Gaylynn Burroughs
We know what to do to make it better for women in the economy. Raise the minimum wage. Have one fair wage for everyone. Don’t have a minimum wage that is seven dollars and change. Protect people from workplace harassment. Have things like paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, support for childcare. We know these things, and yet, we are dealing with a flurry of activity that we have to navigate through just to protect the things that we already have.
It’s frustrating because your vision is on hold: You want to create this vision of a world where there’s gender and racial equity, but we now have to defend things like diversity.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There are lots of things happening at the state level that are really exciting. We were able to get more protections on the federal level for pregnant workers, and those exist. I want to make sure people know: You have rights. We haven’t done away with civil rights protections. We haven’t done away with protections in the workplace. We haven’t done away with the Department of Education. In fact, we cannot do that. But it has made it more difficult.
What we’re seeing has caused harm, but it’s been really helpful looking at when people push back on these attacks on our rights, work being done to make sure that we don’t lose momentum, especially in the states.
Rios: At the National Women’s Law Center, you are tackling education and workplace equality—two areas that, as you’ve said, are under extreme scrutiny and attack right now by our own government. Where are you focusing? How are you working to advance an agenda in the midst of the absolute chaos and regression that we are seeing?
Burroughs: It can be boiled down to block and build.
We want to block as much bad stuff as possible. We have federal defensive priorities. We want to make sure that we can protect civil rights enforcement, for example. That we can mitigate harm to as many people as possible from attacks. Sometimes we will win, but oftentimes, especially in this context that we’re in, the win will be slowing things down. The win will be making sure that institutions remain—that we can build back.
We have to do that other part. We can’t just be fighting against something. You can’t just be against, against, against. You have to be for something. You have to have a different vision, and you have to put that forward to people. At the same time that we’re trying to mitigate harm, we’re trying to also make sure that we are working towards seeding strategies for creating this long-term vision we have of gender justice, and we are doing that in the states. We’re doing that by cultivating champions, whether that means champions in the boardroom, champions from community organizations, state officials, even congressional champions—making sure that we have people who can communicate that vision and who can continue to build momentum.
There’s so much systemic inequity still. We still are facing the consequences of historical and present-day discrimination.
Gaylynn Burroughs
We’re also doing that through litigation. We are the National Women’s Law Center. We do sue people. We’ve engaged in strategic litigation to both block and build at the same time. Folks might have heard about our case where we’re representing Chicago Women in Trades. They had their grants terminated by the Department of Labor.
We have sued, along with partners, including Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and pro bono law firms, and some other partners, to help protect those grants so that their work can continue. There’s a preliminary injunction, which means that they have to receive funding of one of their Department of Labor grants, and it’s important because Chicago Women in Trades, they’re preparing women to enter into a male-dominated field, the skilled trades, where women are certainly not receiving any advantages in becoming a welder.
Creating those pathways for women to enter into high-paying fields, protecting that, mitigating that harm, but also telling the story of diversity, equity, and inclusion—this is what DEI is. It’s providing a way for people who have been locked out of opportunities to enter the front door. You can’t have a meritocracy if there’s no DEI, because not everyone is able to compete. People who are qualified cannot compete.
Rios: The moment we’re in makes it so clear how important it is for feminists, for advocates, to keep in mind that race and class are such important dimensions of these conversations we have around women’s economic lives. Your work, and pieces like yours in Ms., remind us that there are so many dimensions that we don’t hear enough about when it comes to women and their economic experiences. How can we make sure that as we’re building that vision of what we want to make possible, we make sure that we are building an economy that works for all women, for all people?
Burroughs: It’s so important for us at this time, as feminists, as people who are in the women’s rights community and gender justice communities, that we also use our voice on behalf of trans people. They’re on the front lines in terms of what the trans community is bearing. Our government is using its full power to target and bully trans women in particular, and so, we need to make sure that, in every space that we are in, that we are very clear that trans women are women and that an attack on a trans woman is an attack on all of us, and that we will not allow trans women to be scapegoated.
And also, we know that these attacks will force us all into restrictive gender roles that harm us all. So, I think it’s really important that we say that now. It’s more important than ever maybe, given the government is trying to erase trans people from federal policy entirely. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, they moved to dismiss every case they had involving a transgender and nonbinary worker that was pending in court. We can’t allow this to happen in our name.
You want to create this vision of a world where there’s gender and racial equity, but we now have to defend things like diversity.
Gaylynn Burroughs
We have to make sure that everyone is at the table, that we are asking everyone about their experience. That we aren’t, mistakenly, centering our own experiences. That we have brought people to the table not just to share their stories, but to be a part of the solution-making, to be a part of the conversation about what policies will benefit their families. People are experts in their own experiences. We know this to be true, but oftentimes, we are interested in hearing about a sad story, but not asking the next question. What could we do to help you?
Making sure that we are listening and that we are crafting solutions that speak to the very real problems that people face, but also, how they are experiencing them. I think that’s super important, because, otherwise, this is, again, why diversity, equity, and inclusion are important, because if you don’t have all voices at the table, you’re going to miss something. If you’re not centering the people who are most impacted, your policy solution will fall apart. Making sure that you have those feedback loops is hugely important.
Rios: Why have policy and the law been such a critical part of this fight for you? Why do you believe that they are such important pieces of the puzzle of building that better economic vision?
Burroughs: I think there’s a tendency for people to think, well, this is just the way things are.
The #MeToo movement, and how that became such an important touchstone, and continues to be, is because people said, wait. This isn’t just the way things have to be. I am not experiencing this alone. There are choices that we have made that allow this behavior to continue, and I think that once you start seeing these problems as being problems that policy can solve, a whole world opens up. You’re not just alone.
You’re not just trying to navigate pay discrimination by yourself at work, but you now know that there are things that we have chosen to do. Maybe it’s that your employer has based your salary on your previous salary, instead of basing your salary on the current job that you have applied for, and what is necessary for that job, so discrimination keeps following you from job to job. That’s a policy choice. That is something that we can change. It’s something that we can do to make things better.
It’s really important that we don’t fall into this idea that nothing will ever change, this is the way it’s going to be forever—because this is, somehow, fundamentally, how people behave. No. People behave according to rules, and those rules are reflected in policy and are reflected in law, and vice versa. Law and policy shapes culture, and culture shapes law and policy.
It’s important that we do both things together, but there’s a lot of power in using the law to affirm rights. That’s why it’s so heartbreaking to see these attacks on civil rights enforcement, because the law is supposed to protect us, supposed to make the rules of the road clear—but it’s a huge promise in doing that and knowing that you can organize, also, around policy and change.
We are here for a reason. That reason is not to despair. That reason is to find the thing we can do to help as many people as we can and to do that thing.
Gaylynn Burroughs
Rios: We’ve talked about the changes we have seen in the last 50-plus years. What do you hope changes in the next 50?
Burroughs: What I hope for, is that every person is able to live the life that they want with dignity and be safe and not feel like their choices are limited by their gender, by their race, by their disability status, by their age, but that the whole world is open.
I have a 15-year-old daughter, and I was asked in a webinar: ‘What does success look like?’ How will I know that I’ve been successful, or what is success for her? Lots of people gave really great answers and I thought, whatever she wants. Whatever is success for her, that will be enough for me, and that’s what I’m fighting for. For her to be able to define success and live her life the way that she wants to, without feeling like she’s been boxed in by some predetermined notion around her role or not having these structural inequities limit what she can do, and I wish that for everybody, every person.
She has shown me that you can have joy in all of the moments of your life. That there’s no time to despair because this is the time that we have. We live in this time. She reminds me to find joy in all of the ways that are possible and to keep going. There’s hope. I was never really a fan of self-care—it seems too luxurious. I feel like I now get it. In order to make sure that you can outlast, that you can do the work, you have to take some time to just breathe, laugh with your friends, go outside, do something to fill your spirit so that you’re ready for the fight. I’m now a convert to self-care, and I now understand when people are saying it’s an act of resistance.
That’s important, too: That we remember that there’s joy, that there’s hope, and that we are here for a reason. That reason is not to despair. That reason is to find the thing we can do to help as many people as we can and to do that thing.
Great Job Carmen Rios & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
