Protect access to reproductive and gender affirming healthcare

We need to codify into federal law the protections that were lost when Roe v. Wade was overturned and ensure everyone has access to the gender affirming care they need.

Pass the Paycheck Fairness Act

The gender pay gap persists, and we need more action from Congress to address it. Passing the Paycheck Fairness Act will strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by requiring employers to justify pay disparities, prohibiting retaliation against workers who discuss their pay or challenge pay discrimination, and limiting employers’ reliance on salary history.

Fund medical research

Medical research is biased against women in myriad ways:

• Women are underrepresented in clinical trials.

• Conditions that affect women, like menopause and endometriosis, are understudied.

• Laboratory research often relies on male test animals and cells extracted from men.

The results hurt women every day. Women experience adverse drug reactions approximately twice as often as men. Symptoms of things like heart attack, which can show up differently in women, are more likely to be missed because diagnostic knowledge is based on male subjects. Medical advances and breakthroughs for conditions affecting women remain undiscovered.

In 2023, the Biden Administration launched the Initiative on Women's Health Research to address these equity issues, and we need to push to implement the goals of that Initiative.

Build Bigger Restrooms

Our built environment discriminates against women in many ways. Women have different physiological needs than men, and pubic restrooms that have the same number of stalls for men and women do not take this into account. Building codes currently require a minimum number of stalls, but builders have no financial incentive to go beyond that. We don't have to accept this unfair and unequal status quo.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology should study the right ratio of women's and men's restroom stalls and publish it as recommended best practice for new buildings. The government should require new federal buildings be built to this standard and incentivize, through tax credits and other means, these best practices in private sector building design and construction.