Somewhere, a woman in Arkansas is driving 40 miles one way to find child care. Another woman is having to put thoughts of a career on hold while she takes care of her ailing parents.
It is those stories and more that a state commission wants to hear in hopes of finding solutions to the many barriers that keep women from attaining financial independence, and that commission is coming to Pine Bluff on Friday.
"It's just shocking," said Maddie Spickard, referring to some of the stories she's already heard during the Women's Commission of Arkansas meetings that have taken place in a half-dozen other cities around the state.
Spickard is director of strategic initiatives with the Women's Foundation of Arkansas, a group that encouraged Gov. Asa Hutchinson to breathe new life into the Women's Commission of Arkansas by allowing the foundation to plan and help finance the listening tour now being conducted by the commission.
After hearing the foundation's pitch, the governor went forward with the idea.
"He said, 'Yes, let's do it," Spickard said.
It was then that the women's foundation put up $20,000 that is being used to finance a final report, based on the data collected, that will be submitted to the legislature in December.
Mildred Franco, the former director of The Generator, agreed to host the Pine Bluff commission meeting, which is being held at the Pine Bluff Public Library from 1 to 2:30 p.m. on Friday. Franco said the focus of the meeting will be on workforce development and entrepreneurship, which were key elements of her job at The Generator.
"Some of the women coming will be those I've worked with the past five years," Franco said. "These are people who we helped launch a business or stay in business. And some are people who have been in business a long time, and it will be interesting to hear what barriers they have had to overcome over the years."
The governor's executive order, which was signed in February, states that the commission has its roots in the early 1960s under action taken by President Kennedy. Other governors pushed the topic during their administrations, but those efforts lost steam and ended in the mid-1970s.
Spickard said the purpose of the statewide meetings is to inform legislation, philanthropic and nonprofit efforts and the business community – all with the purpose of reducing economic and social barriers that hinder women.
"With all of these different sectors, we're hoping that the end result will be to improve the lives of women in our state," Spickard said. "By having these meetings all across the state and listening to women in person, we're getting a better idea of what women face."
Franco has invited dozens of people to Friday's meeting in hopes of getting the "right voices at the table who will add value to the research being conducted," but she and Spickard both encouraged the public to attend.
"I want people to know that this will be a safe place," Franco said. "They need to know that we will be advocates for them."
Spickard said the barriers for women are sometimes different in different parts of the state. In one area, she said, women who, for instance, were trying to go to nursing school to better their lives told stories of having to drive long distances for their childcare needs.
"Lack of access to childcare, and especially affordable childcare, is a huge barrier," Spickard said.
Women are also typically at a disadvantage when it comes to having access to capital, a crucial element when someone is trying to start a new enterprise.
"We see access to business capital as a pathway to wealth," she said. "Women fall so far below men, and there are a lot of reasons for that lack of capital."
Another financial hurdle is the lack of "asset building" for women, Franco said.
"They probably do not own a house," she said, "and if they do own one, they probably don't have much collateral. It's a very complex, layered issue. There's a lot to unpack."
An average white family, Franco said, has an average of $130,000 in accumulated wealth, while a Black family has $13,000.
"So by a factor of 10, the Black is at an immediate disadvantage," Franco said. "And it's worse in the Delta."
The report will also look at how covid-19 affected the lives of women, Spickard said. When covid started and students stayed home, mothers had to become teachers for their children. Likewise, she said, it was likely a woman who took elderly parents out of a nursing home because it was too dangerous to leave them there and took them home to provide care.
"Those burdens in many cases fell to women more often than men," Spickard said. "We want to know deeper how that affected women in Arkansas."
Spickard also said that there isn't much information about the different demographics that are associated with women's issues in the state, and she pointed to a Barriers Survey on the governor's website as a way to gather more data on a variety of women's topics.
"There's not much data that has been analyzed through a gendered lens," Spickard said. "So we don't know a lot about the barriers that different women face: white women versus Black women in general and Black women in rural areas of the state versus white women in suburbia Arkansas, for instance. There are distinct differences, and that's something this report is trying to determine. I hope that's something the report is going to shed light on with evidence-based research."
Friday's meeting will be livestreamed on the governor's YouTube channel and will also be recorded and placed on the governor's website, Spickard said.