Inequities for women are on agenda

When a group of female business, cultural and civic leaders meet today to discuss improving the plight of women in Los Angeles County, they will have a daunting task ahead of them.

According to a new report to be released today by the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, women are living longer and make up 44% of the county workforce -- but they remain poorer than their male counterparts.

Most striking is that 40% of the estimated 88,000 homeless people in the county are women and children. Twenty years ago, that percentage was unheard of, according to Marge Nichols, who researched the report.

“Homelessness has changed so much,” said Nichols, who retired last year as director of research for the United Way in L.A. but still consults for the agency. “I did a report on homeless shelters in 1986,” she said. “Gender wasn’t even addressed. There were bag ladies. And very few of those.”

Nichols attributes the increase in homeless women and children to the rise in housing costs. “We’ve lost low-rent housing. There are more single moms with children, and oftentimes those women have a lower income. When they run into hard times, it’s the pits.”

“The State of Women in Los Angeles Report” paints a picture of women beset by a complex set of problems: poor educational training for today’s better-paying jobs, low wages and a dwindling stock of affordable housing.

Among other findings, the report says “40% of single-mother families with children under 18 are poor” -- up from 37% in 1990.

“I think we all hoped there would be more progress -- that women’s earnings would be up more, that fewer women would be living in poverty,” said Elise Buik, president and chief executive officer of United Way of Greater Los Angeles. “I hope this creates an urgency about how women are compensated.”

Buik hopes that urgency will permeate today’s 2006 Women Leaders Summit at downtown’s California Endowment Center for Healthy Communities, which 150 prominent women are expected to attend.

Among the guests will be Paula Madison, president and general manager of KNBC-TV Channel 4 and regional general manager for the NBC/Telemundo TV stations in Los Angeles; L.A. first lady Corina Villaraigosa; writer and performer Sandra Tsing Loh; and Maria Elena Durazo, executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

Although the United Way still dispenses funds to numerous nonprofit groups, Buik says the agency has to take a more active role in getting community leaders together to devise strategies for fixing problems.

“The world’s issues have gotten more complex,” Buik said. “How do we become more relevant to donors and how do we have more impact?”

On the subject of work and earnings, the United Way study found that 34% of women in the county work full time and have a median income of $34,941 -- compared with $36,581 for men.

Eighteen percent of all women in Los Angeles County live below the poverty level -- which is $13,200 for a single mother with one child, compared with 15% of men, said Nichols, who used the U.S. Census Bureau’s “2004 American Community Survey for Los Angeles County” and other sources for the study.

Also, the report says “child care is a make-or-break issue for working women; half of women make less than what they need in order to afford child care.”

One result of the study that Nichols thinks leaders should focus on is education. Although, as the report points out, more girls than boys graduate from high school in the county and more women are enrolled in college in the county than men, there are still problems.

Girls in high school tend not to do as well as boys in math and science. And Latinos in general lag in educational achievement. According to Nichols, only 24% of Latinas have a high school diploma, 18% have taken some college courses and 8% have a college degree.

“We’re going to have a larger and larger Latino population, and because they have come from a position with less education, there’s going to be a challenge to make sure Latino youth and women have the education necessary to maintain the workforce in L.A.,” Nichols said.

“Unless the education and training picture is greatly improved, our largest group of workers is going to have the lowest level of education.”

carla.hall@latimes.com