Women’s rights organizations are making a renewed push for an Office of Gender Equity in the U.S. Department of Education under President Joe Biden.
In a Jan. 8 letter to the Biden-Harris transition team, the idea garnered support from 117 organizations, including the Feminist Majority Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the National Council of Negro Women.
This comes after a similar letter sent on Dec. 17, led by the National Coalition of Women and Girls in Education. It argued that the office – headed by a special assistant for gender equity, who would report directly to the secretary of education – should be established “in order to ensure full implementation and enforcement of Title IX, with a focus on protecting the rights of women and girls of color, expectant and parenting students, LGBTQ students, students with disabilities, and English language learners.”
A formal office would help “ensure that gender equity is recognized as a core principle that cuts across program areas,” said Emily Martin, vice president for education and workplace justice at the National Women’s Law Center. “Yes, it is a part of the work of the Office of Civil Rights but it can’t be siloed there … I think an office dedicated to gender equity helps ensure that [there are] efforts focused on racial equity, efforts focused on accessibility of higher ed, efforts focused on student loan forgiveness, that there is a place where it’s people’s jobs to ask, ‘What does that mean for women and girls? And is there a particular gender analysis we also need to be bringing to this problem?’”
Martin highlighted that Black women bear the heaviest student loan debt burden of any group. She thinks broader conversations in education – like college affordability, racial disparities in school discipline and school policing – have a “gender thread” that needs to be addressed.
As Biden starts his new role, the letters also assert that a gender equity office could play a crucial role in reversing the “harms of the previous administration,” referring, among other things, to changes to Title IX protections under former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Recent Title IX regulations offer more safeguards to those accused of campus sexual harassment and assault than the original federal guidelines, like allowing the accused to cross-examine potential victims. DeVos also rescinded guidance from under President Barack Obama that extended Title IX protections to transgender students, enabling them to use school bathrooms consistent with their gender identities.
Dr. Sue Klein told Ms. Magazine that one goal of the office would be to create a “coordinated system” of Title IX coordinators – operating at the state level, the school district level and in every K-12 school and on every college campus – to create a network that can “reinforce and help each other and where interested educators, parents, students and community members participate in the complete eradication of even unintentional sex discrimination and sex stereotyping in and through education.”
