Home > Publications > The Treatment of Women of Color Under U.S. Law >
Economic Justice
  Employment Discrimination
  Welfare Reform
  Access to Credit
  Conclusion and Suggested Questions

Women of color in the United States face particular barriers to economic justice due to historically discriminatory cultural, political and legal norms as well as contemporary discriminatory behavior. Racism and sexism have left women of color with relatively decreased access to education, fewer financial resources and reduced financial ability to leave unsafe or unhealthy jobs.2 Women of color often live where jobs are limited and low paying and transportation to sustainable employment is marginal. In addition, they face more discrimination in the workplace than their European American counterparts and men.3 Such disadvantages have been exacerbated by changes to access to public benefits that have affected women of color more than European American women.4 Finally, women of color lack access to credit to pursue entrepeunerial opportunities. Consequently, women of color as a group remain relatively poor and extremely vulnerable to various forms of discrimination.

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Employment Discrimination

Women of color face discrimination in the workplace, both due to their race and their sex. Women of color and immigrant women generally occupy the lowest paying and lowest-skilled jobs, due to lower educational levels, higher rates of poverty, geographic marginalization, and language barriers.5 A recent AFL-CIO study reports that for every dollar the average man earned in 1999, women earned 72 cents; African American women earned 65 cents; Latina women earned 52 cents, and Asian Pacific American women earned 80 cents.6 These numbers represent a decrease for both African American women and Latinas.

Historical discriminatory stereotypes of women of color impact their workplace experiences. For example, women of color are often sexualized by their employers and subjected to sexual comments,
actions and abuses.7 For these reasons, women of color are often subjected to and forced to tolerate increased discrimination and harassment.

• Brooms was a thirty-six year old African American woman who was persistently sexually and racially harassed by her supervisor. She was subjected to numerous explicit racial and sexual remarks related to her position as a woman of color. The harassment became increasingly worse and culminated in an incident in which her supervisor, after showing her a picture of black women engaged in bestiality, grabbed her arm and threatened to kill her. As she fled, she fell down a flight of stairs and sustained permanent physical injury. See Brooms v. Regal Tube Co., 881 F.2d 412 (7th Cir. 1989).

However, current employment law in the United States fails to address the particular needs of these women because the two main federal antidiscrimination laws, Section 1981 and Title VII, force women to bifurcate their identities by allowing discrimination claims based on either race or sex but not both.8 For example, if a woman brings a suit under Section 1981, she must prove that she faced racial discrimination, even if the discrimination she may have experienced was in fact caused by an employer’s attitudes or stereotypes about African American or Latina women that are inherently different from stereotypes about African American or Latino men or European American women. Having brought a Section 1981 claim, she is precluded from addressing the gendered nature of the discrimination she experienced. Under Title VII, where she can claim sex discrimination, she cannot recover the punitive and compensatory damages necessary to sufficiently compensate her for her suffering.9 Although in recent years, some women of color have been able to combine race and sex discrimination claims, such claims have not fully addressed the discrimination. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is the highest court, has not addressed this issue and in fact decisions can vary from judge to judge. Consequently, women of color still are required to bifurcate their identity in order to receive justice for discrimination they face.

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Welfare Reform

Welfare reform, in the form of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PROWR), impacted the lives of everyone receiving government assistance. However, women of color, particularly immigrant women felt the brunt of welfare reform. Although individual states developed the specifics of implementing the statute, the underlying federal statute does not have the provisions to prevent the disparate impact on women of color. Women of color have faced the most difficulties in welfare reform in part due to racist attitudes of some social and caseworkers, disparate access to resources, and for immigrant women, language barriers and the fear of deportation. Most specifically, while encouraging people to seek work, many states have failed to provide adequate training, such as English classes and additional job training, and support to allow women to get and keep sustainable employment that leads to a living wage. Moreover, the PROWR also failed to include provisions and resources for adequate training to caseworkers to ensure that caseworkers can communicate with women of color and address their particular needs, in addition to being prepared for their additional responsibilities under the federal statute.

• Elizabeth came to California from Vietnam through the Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1988. Because of her limited English skills the only job she could find was in a restaurant where she faced racial and sexual discrimination. Under the California welfare reform program, CalWorks, Elizabeth was required to take the first job she could get, but did not provide her the training or language classes necessary for successful and sustainable employment. Because of her limited income she cannot afford language classes and this has prevented her from finding a job that would pay a living wage for her and her two young children. Doris Ng, From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare, Equal Rights Advocates, 8 (1999).
• A study of the effects of the welfare reform program in Virginia, the Virginia Initiative for Employment not Welfare (VIEW), found that caseworkers assigned to assist women in the transition from welfare to work encouraged European American women to seek further education to improve their employability, but did not encourage African American women to do the same. Almost half of the European American women involved in the case study indicated that their caseworkers had offered additional transportation assistance while none of the black women had received such offers. David, L. and Proctor, E. Welfare Reform and the Black Community, IV Harvard Journal of African American Policy. See also Susan T. Gooden, All Things Not Being Equal: Differences in Caseworker Support Toward Black and White Welfare Clients, Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy (1998).

Welfare reform programs also have ignored the dire need for childcare by working women.10 Women of color, because of their geographical marginalization, frequently lack access to safe and affordable childcare. Immigrant women also face difficulties in finding childcare due to the need for childcare providers to have social security numbers in order to be reimbursed by the government.11

The combined effect of the failure of welfare reform programs to provide for or direct women to educational opportunities, language courses and work or personal skills training and the fact that women of color have lower overall educational levels and live in areas with few living wage jobs, welfare reform has resulted in disparate adverse impact on women of color that have remained largely unexamined and unaddressed by the federal government.12 Consequently, while welfare reform has reduced the numbers of total women on welfare, for women of color it has often meant increased poverty and the inability to provide sustenance to their families.13

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Access to Credit

Although women of color are as innovative and entrepreneurial as any other group, they face lingering stereotypes and bias that often prevent them from receiving fair and equal access to the bank credit and capital necessary to start up new businesses. Women business owners of color continue to be less likely than European American women entrepreneurs to receive bank credit.14 A study conducted in 1998 by the National Foundation for Women Business Owners revealed that less than one-third (29 percent) of women business owners of color surveyed currently have bank credit, compared to just over half (53 percent) of European American women.15 Moreover, about half of women business owners of color say that access to capital for current and long-term needs is very important, compared to about one-third of European American women entrepreneurs.16 Although the federal government enacted the Equal Opportunity Credit Act in 1975 to prevent redlining and other discriminatory practices in lending, states have largely failed to enforce it, and only a small minority of states have enacted equal access to credit laws.17 As a result, women of color are less able to escape discrimination by starting their own businesses.

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Conclusion and Suggested Questions

Despite the longest economic expansion in the U.S. history, women of color continue to face these myriad barriers to economic well-being and justice. Although laws have been in place to protect people from discrimination, the laws and those who implement them continue to fail to consider the context in which they are applied, in particular intersections of race and gender which create particular forms of discrimination and disparate impact for women of color.

• What efforts has Congress or the executive branch taken to ensure that employment discrimination laws effectively redress discrimination against women of color?
• What training programs are being prepared by the Department of Labor to ensure that women of color, particularly those with poor English skills, are able to find and keep a job paying a living wage?
• What steps has the federal government taken to ensure the enforcement of Equal Opportunity Credit Act for women of color?

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Footnotes
2 Judith A. Winston, Civil Rights Legislation in the 1990s, 79 CAL.L.REV. 775, 780 (1991).
3 Willy E. Rice, Race, Gender, “Redlining,” and the Discriminatory Access to Loans, Credit and Insurance 1950-1995, 33 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 583 (1996).
4 Doris Ng, The Broken Promise: Welfare Reform Two Years Later, Equal Rights Advocates (2000).
5 See Ng, The Broken Promise: Welfare Reform Two Years Later, supra. See also, Nat’l Comm. on Pay Equity, Pay Equity: An Issue of Race, Ethnicity and Sex 99-100 (1987)
6 See AFL-CIO Fact Sheet, Its High Time –Past Time- for Women of Color to Earn Equal Pay, (1997).
7 Maria L. Ontiveros, Three Perspectives on Workplace Harassment of Women of Color, 23 GOLDEN GATE U.L. REV. 817, 824 (1993).
8 Wendy L. Wilbanks, Union Power, Soul Power: Intersections of Race, Gender and Law, 26 GOLDEN GATE U.L. REV. 413, 421 (1996).
9 See id. See also, Bickerstaff v. Vassar College, 196 F.3d 435 (2nd Cir. 1999) (upholding summary judgment infavor of the defendant university when the plaintiff, an African American woman, sued for discriminatory failure topromote her because she was forced to prove her claims of sexual and racial discrimination separately).
10 See Ng, supra at 4.
11 See id.
12 See Ng, The Broken Promise: Welfare Reform Two Years Later, supra.
13 Pamela Loprest, How Families that Left Welfare are Doing: A National Picture, 6 (1999).
14 Some women get access to credit. Off Our Backs, v. 29 (1999).
15 Bruce Rosenthal, Access to credit improves for women business owners. Credit World, v. 87, issue 3 (1999).
16 See id.
17 See Willy E. Rice, Race, Gender, “Redlining,” and the Discriminatory Access to Loans, Credit and Insurance 1950-1995, 33 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 583 (1996).

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