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The first thing to know about the list of policies and plans that former vice president Joe Biden has grouped under his new Biden Agenda for Women is that it is long. It is very, very long.
It takes 44 minutes to read from start to finish. It has five sections and more than a dozen subsections. It contains almost 100 bullet points, covering both familiar, persistent issues such as access to reproductive health care (in a reversal, Biden now backs overturning the Hyde Amendment, which bars the use of federal funds to pay for most abortions) as well as less obvious “women’s issues” like student debt, which women hold in disproportionate numbers.
It promises to: work with advocates to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, use federal funds to invest in women-owned businesses, make public colleges and universities tuition-free for all families with incomes below $125,000, expand benefits for jobs that women tend to fill, and support the Paycheck Fairness Act, which takes aim at the gender wage gap. (On that last point, the agenda offers explicit credit to the two women in Congress who've championed the bill—Patty Murray in the Senate and Rose DeLauro in the House of Representatives.)
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Most of what’s in the proposal isn’t new—just last week the Democratic presidential nominee unveiled his $775 billion plan to fund childcare nationwide, which is also noted in this latest rollout—but the debut of a platform that treats the ruinous tipped minimum wage (stalled at $2.13 an hour) as just as much of a “women's issue” as workplace discrimination is a somewhat novel development.
The agenda underscores what women have said for decades: Economic issues are women’s issues. Health care is a woman’s issue. Student debt is a woman’s issue. The minimum wage, paid leave, the school-to-prison pipeline, the wage gap, and so much more—these are all women’s issues.
So how to craft a document that is meant to signal to women voters what issues Biden and his team think are most important to them? Symone Sanders, a senior advisor to Biden, put it like this in a statement to Glamour: “Every policy is a woman’s issue, but some policies disproportionately affect women—especially women of color.” And it was those policies—running the gamut from the rape kit backlog to gun control—that the campaign wanted to highlight in the new plan, Sanders explained.
The approach is perhaps one that Biden learned from some of his competitors in the race for the Democratic nomination, who emphasized throughout the primaries that “women’s issues” deserved a broader definition.
With a record number of women in that race, the pitch was easier to make. Kamala Harris—a presumed frontrunner as a candidate for Biden’s own vice president—liked to answer questions about so-called women’s issues with a quick pivot to her economic platform. Elizabeth Warren (another potential vice presidential pick) framed retirement benefits as a feminist issue, telling Glamour in September 2019 that “women make up the majority of caregivers in America, and our current Social Security system doesn’t fairly value their work.”
But men dove into the issues too, with Cory Booker bringing up reproductive health care in prime time, insisting that “women should not be the only ones taking up this cause and this fight,” and Julián Castro standing up for trans women—and trans women of color in particular—not just in tweets, but in his housing and health care policies.
As the contest wore on, there at last appeared to be a widespread appreciation of the fact that 51% of the population does not constitute a “niche” voting block and that women’s own experiences at home and at work can shape more nuanced stances on policies like paid leave or education.
In the end, voters did not choose to select a woman (or a person of color) to face Donald Trump, and the race boiled down to two white, male frontrunners. But credit where credit is due: The tenor of the conversation is different now, and Biden seems to have internalized the effect that such personal testimonies can have on how voters see an issue.
In making the case for his childcare plan last week, he didn’t just cite the relevant statistics or frame the plan as a boon to women. Instead he summoned memories of the time he spent as a single dad after the death of his first wife and daughter in a car crash in 1972. In a speech he recalled how hard it had been to coordinate care for his sons while he tried to do his job in government: “If I didn’t have my mom, my sister, and my brother, I don’t know how I [would have] been able to afford it.”
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And when, on a call with reporters, one asked if the new childcare plan would fall under the purview of Biden’s vice presidential pick (whom he’s pledged will be a woman), staffers on the Biden team pushed back.
“This plan speaks to issues that families and people across the country are dealing with. Not just women,” a staffer said, according to HuffPost. The point was that it shouldn’t just fall to women to pitch in when reliable childcare isn’t available nor should plans to protect workers’ rights be written without the input of women, who make up a considerable portion of them.
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Of course, Biden’s “women’s agenda” does aim to appeal to women in particular, even though the policies advocates would benefit other people too. But with the coronavirus exposing festering gender inequalities in the United States and hitting women and people of color hardest, a holistic attitude toward what even constitutes a “woman’s issue” makes sense. It’s also good politics.
Women are crucial to Biden’s odds in November, and he seems intent on shoring up their support. Two polls out this month from ABC News and Quinnipiac show Biden has made good progress: He’s up at least 25 points over Donald Trump with women as a whole, and the ABC News poll attributed some of that gap to the fact that some white working-class women have soured on Trump. Biden will need to appeal to those white women and turn out Democrats’ most reliable voters—Black women, just 4% of whom voted for Trump in the last election.
No one “women’s agenda” can respond to every hesitation that every woman has when it comes to Biden, but Sanders—who has been on Biden’s team since 2019—frames the campaign’s plan as at least a statement of principles.
“Joe Biden always says, ‘Show me your budget, and I’ll show you what your priorities are. Show me when you talk about the economy, what does it mean and who are you talking to and who are you talking about,’” Sanders tells Glamour. “Some folks will want to know why it was important for us to put out an agenda right now when we have said some of these things before. Yes, absolutely true. We have. Well, we did it because women are going to be vital to our efforts this fall, and women are vital to growing and building back our economy and building it back better. We were clear—we wanted to put forth an agenda that spoke directly to women.”
Mattie Kahn is the culture director at Glamour.
