[R]ANDOLPH — When women do well, everybody does well.
That was the message that U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch brought to Vermont on Saturday as the keynote speaker at Sen. Patrick Leahy’s 20th annual Women’s Economic Opportunity Conference.
Hundreds of people turned out for Lynch’s speech and the daylong event at Vermont Technical College. The event also offered seminars on how to seek out and interview for nontraditional jobs and to negotiate adequate pay with employers.
“The prosperity and well-being of America is increasingly tied to the prosperity and well-being of Vermont women,” Lynch said. “In fact, we are the bedrock of the economy.”
“Women constitute more than half of this country’s workforce,” she said. “More women graduate from college than men. … For those of us who live these lives, these are just things that are the facts of life.”
However, Lynch said, women continue to suffer from violent events, such as sexual assault, domestic violence and human trafficking. She said the Department of Justice has been “taking on landlords and property managers” who sexually assault their tenants.
Looking beyond the U.S., Lynch said that developing countries can increase their gross domestic product by 3 percent by sending their young girls to school. Nationally, she said, educating and employing women is the difference between someone needing subsidies to meet basic living expenses and not needing them.
At the workplace, Lynch said, women face lower pay than their male colleagues; pregnant women are forced to choose between their families and their jobs; and transgender women face challenges because of their gender identity.
She pointed to a case the Department of Justice has brought against a local government in Nevada that paid its female director of diversity less than her white male predecessors. She laughed while she talked about the irony.
Leahy pointed to a recent report by a women’s empowerment group that showed half of the state’s women are working in fields that pay less than $35,000 a year, compared with 13 percent of men. “You can’t make it on that,” he said.
Lynch encouraged women to take risks “because that’s what life is all about,” and praised “bold and fearless women, undaunted by opposition and obstruction” who seek out what they want and follow their dreams.
“We need the contributions of all of you,” Lynch said. “We need your support, your energy, we need your active engagement. We need people like you who are literally here on the ground.”
“You — you — are the ones who are serving as role models for your daughters, your granddaughters,” and ensuring that the next generation will be able to face less discrimination than their mothers and grandmothers, she said.
Lynch said she has been giving commencement speeches at colleges that once barred women, who were told they “don’t have the mentality for law.” The audience erupted into laughter.
“I love proving people wrong,” she said.
