Want women back in the workforce? Here’s what Biden must do.
The Equal Rights Amendment was passed by Congress in 1972, and in 2020 Virginia became the 38th and final state to ratify the amendment, fulfilling all constitutional requirements set forth in Article V of the U.S. Constitution.
Jan. 27, 2022 marks the two-year anniversary of Virginia’s ratification, and it’s the date the ERA should go into effect across the country. Despite meeting all of the necessary requirements for ratification, the ERA has yet to be published in the Federal Register as the 28th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Why not? Because an Office of Legal Counsel opinion written by the Trump administration in January 2020, instructed the National Archives, the agency in charge of publishing ratified amendments, not to publish the ERA.
Nevertheless, we, as N.C legislators — along with many constitutional scholars — believe the ERA is the 28th Amendment and is fully enforceable, even without publication.
Women have been fighting for the ERA for nearly 100 years. In that time, 38 states have voted to affirm that women are equal in the eyes of the law.
It’s clear that although women were purposefully excluded from equal protections when the U.S. Constitution was first written, our nation has come a long way since then. Publishing the ERA as the 28th Amendment is long overdue, and the Biden administration has an opportunity to play a part in affirming, once and for all, that women should be guaranteed equal rights on the basis of sex.
Publishing the ERA would not be a symbolic gesture. Women have borne the brunt of the economic burden of this pandemic. Since March of 2020, women have left the U.S. workforce at significantly higher rates than their male peers, and in September 2021, McKinsey & Company reported that as many as 2 million women were considering leaving the workforce due to barriers they faced while trying to work and care for their families during the pandemic.
If we are going to prepare our economy for a full recovery, where women are able to fully return to the workforce, then we need to publish the 28th Amendment and force states, like North Carolina, to reckon with their failure to pass laws that guarantee adequate accommodations for pregnant people in the workplace and paid family leave for parents with young children.
We’ve waited over a century for this moment. There is no more time to waste. President Biden must instruct his Office of Legal Counsel to take up the case for publishing the ERA. The 166 million women living in the U.S., including 5.4 million North Carolinians, deserve to celebrate their newly guaranteed right to equality.
The Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion is the only thing standing between the 166 million women living in the United States and a constitutional guarantee that they have equal rights under the law. President Biden should ensure gender equality in this country by acting within the full scope of his authority to undo the Trump administration’s efforts to delay the publication of the Equal Rights Amendment.