Rebecca Traister had a disturbing item in Salon yesterday on how the Bush administration has quietly hid information on women’s issues from public view. Salon didn’t give it the high-profile, “above the fold” placement, so it was easy to miss, but it’s definitely worth reading.
If you’d logged onto the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau Web site in 1999, you would have found a list of more than 25 fact sheets and statistical reports on topics ranging from “Earning Differences Between Men and Women” to “Facts About Asian American and Pacific Islander Women” to “Women’s Earnings as Percent of Men’s 1979-1997.”
Not anymore. Those fact sheets no longer exist on the Women’s Bureau Web site, and have instead been replaced with a handful of peppier titles, like “Hot Jobs for the 21st Century” and “20 Leading Occupations for Women.” It’s just one example of the ways in which the Bush administration is dismantling or distorting information on women’s issues, from pay equity to reproductive healthcare, according to “Missing: Information About Women’s Lives,” a new report released Wednesday by the National Council for Research on Women.
Once again, the Bush administration likes to share the information they’re supposed to hide (Plame’s identity, war plans with Saudi Arabia) and hide the information they’re supposed to share (how they’re spending money for Afghanistan, the real cost of the Medicare plan, records of Cheney’s energy task force, 9/11 information).
The Salon article added:
“When these instances are taken individually, perhaps we don’t see the cumulative pattern of what’s happening,” said Linda Basch, president of the 23-year-old NCRW, an alliance of 100 women’s policy, research and education centers, including the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, Planned Parenthood, and the Girl Scouts. “But when we gather the information together, and see the distorted or disappearing information about the economic opportunities, the situation of violence against women, health and particularly reproductive health, it is a very distressing pattern.”
Released just three days after an estimated 1 million people gathered in Washington for the March for Women’s Lives, “Missing” exhaustively catalogs the ways in which government information about women’s health, labor and education has been altered, removed or obfuscated during the Bush administration. “This is really undermining a nonpartisan legacy of government,” said Basch, referring to a history of reliable dissemination of scientific data by the federal government. Of concern to NCRW researchers is the possibility that this morphed or absent information will hurt future researchers, policymakers and citizens who in the past would have relied on federal sources of information in their advocacy for women’s equity and access.
In an e-mailed statement to Salon, New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney said, “I’m grateful to the National Council for Research on Women for confirming what many of us in Congress have insisted for years — we can’t continue to advance as women if the cold, hard facts of our status are unknown. We’ve seen a disturbing trend toward hiding the information that helps us improve women’s lives. I hope that this is the beginning of a successful effort to uncover the missing data.”
It’s quite a pattern this administration has built up. When public research points to a problem, they’ve found it’s easier to hide the information than it is to address the situation.