Arizona Foundation for Women releases new report

March is Women’s History Month and Monday is International Women’s Day. With that in mind, we looked at a new report from the Arizona Foundation for Women that focuses on the state of women in Arizona. Mesha Davis is the foundation’s CEO.

The report comes from 2020 and Davis said, “We were actually trying to find some data to see if we’ve moved the needle at all since our last report in 2016 and kind of not surprised that we weren’t able to find too much-updated data, but we did find a few things to see if we’ve done some improvements and not really, unfortunately. So that was kind of disheartening to that we will really have a lot to do and Covid-19 of course really impacted a lot and pushed the numbers a few years back.”

Following that up, Davis continued to say that before the pandemic Arizona was still lagging behind the rest of the country.

Host Ted Simons asked about why women are in worse status in Arizona than the majority of the country and Davis answered, “I think a lot of it is that we don’t want to believe that it’s happening. You know Arizona is supposed to be a great place to live and we don’t really talk about domestic violence or those things that are just not, you know, the topics you want to talk about at the dinner table.”

As the conversation specified toward the wage gap, the problems continued to come to light.

“There was something new that came up, it’s called the motherhood wage gap. So when you look at mothers with children compared to fathers with children, that wage gap is even worse than just regular pay. So again it’s showing that women who predominantly are the caregivers in the home with or without children are not having equal pay.”