Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tiff Bluemle, executive director of Change The Story, and Cary Brown, executive director of the Vermont Commission on Women.
[T]his spring, Bloomberg News ranked Vermont the nation’s number one state in gender equality for women and number six in terms of women in leadership.
As gender equity advocates with nearly 40 years of combined experience, you might think we’d be thrilled. However, through our work collecting information about gender equity in Vermont with the Change The Story initiative – a partnership of the Vermont Commission on Women, the Vermont Women’s Fund, and Vermont Works for Women – we’ve unearthed data that illustrates the reality is much more nuanced.
No doubt about it, we’re well ahead of the curve on many counts. Vermont women hold almost 40% of the seats in our state Legislature, own businesses at a rate that is almost twice the national average, and are a majority of Vermont’s five Supreme Court justices.
Rankings can be newsworthy and sometimes interesting, but their value is limited. Comparative rankings are a snapshot developed by aggregating and comparing a set of data points chosen from dozens of possible indicators. Decisions about what to include in the calculation are subjective, reflecting as much about their authors as they do about whatever they’re supposed to measure. And all too often, rankings reflect degrees of difference that can be as small as a 10th of a percentage point.
Bloomberg’s gender equality rankings are based on five state metrics: median gender pay ratio, labor force participation, poverty rate, college degree attainment, and health insurance coverage – all of them reasonable indicators of women’s economic well-being. And yet the picture they paint – particularly when boiled down to a single ranking – is limited.
Aggregate scores can obscure individual data points that aren’t so flattering. Despite Vermont’s high overall score, our female poverty rate (at 12%), puts us not at the top, but 17th among states. When women are single mothers heading households, that rate is nearly three times higher, or 37%. And while Vermont is near the top for percent of women who hold college degrees, only 57% of our high school girls graduate and go to college, well below the national average of 72%. These factors and more should be taken into account when considering women’s economic and educational status in Vermont.
Furthermore, aggregate scores rarely reflect trendlines, which are arguably a more useful measure than a single data point. For example, the wage gap fluctuates from year to year – and not in a straightforward downward trajectory. In 2007, it was 13%. In 2013, it climbed to 17%. Now, it’s down again to 14%. As a state, we should be paying as much attention to trends as we do to individual yearly statistics to ensure we’re moving forward.
If we look at the status of Vermont women in leadership, the picture is no less nuanced. True, our state Legislature has long enjoyed a higher gender balance than in most states. But according to Represent Women, a national organization that promotes gender parity in political office, Vermont ranks 34th. Why so low? Perhaps because only ten women have ever been elected to statewide office. Or because just one of its eight mayors is female. Or because Vermont is the only state that has never sent a woman to Congress. Women are well under 5% of the state’s sheriffs, police and fire chiefs. And the percentage of women serving as CEOs of Vermont’s largest companies is under 5% – a rate on par with the national average.
Rankings aren’t just limited because of what they measure and what they leave out. They can also allow us to set the bar far too low. To whom do we want to compare ourselves? How might we define true gender parity? To answer these questions, we might want to dig into the most recent gender equity report of the World Economic Forum, which ranked the United States 51st among nearly 200 nations – far outdistanced by Iceland and Norway, of course, but also by countries like Rwanda, Albania, Costa Rica, and Canada.
Let’s compare Vermont to Vermont. Instead of being distracted by rankings, let’s face our data squarely – all of it – and let’s look at trendlines to see whether we’re making progress or treading water. At our current pace, women won’t achieve equal pay in Vermont until 2047. Rather than pat ourselves on the back for achievements that from a global perspective are pretty minimal, let’s set the bar high and commit to significant reforms that are truly aspirational, that reflect our values, and that support Vermont’s most vulnerable women.
