The president's signing of an Executive Order creating a White House Council on Women and Girls is a small victory with great possibility for ensuring women's equality in myriad ways, from employment to health care, from education to work and family balance.
President Obama understands that this council doesn't exist in a vacuum separate and apart from the policies and programs developed and implemented throughout the federal government and that if women are ever to be on the same footing with their male peers a coordinated and interconnected effort is required at all levels of government.
The White House Council on Women and Girls will ensure that agencies across the federal government, not just a few offices, take into account the particular needs and concerns of women and girls. The Council will begin its work by asking each agency to analyze their current status and ensure that they are focused internally and externally on women.
Were the Department of Labor, for example, to develop guidelines on, say, new "green economy" jobs, there is a real possibility that women won't be forced to put up with discriminatory patterns of hiring, training, promotion and wages -- especially as they existed and became embedded into blue-collar occupations.
Or health care: imagine if HHS, Labor and Commerce were to be fully cognizant of the gender bias that exists in rates for health and other forms of insurance and finally generated changes that made such bias illegal.
Oh, the possibilities.
It's too soon to know how successful the Council will be, but Obama has the right vision: the concerns of women and girls must be integrated into every level of public policy and not treated as something separate and apart from the welfare of the country and the world.
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