Table of Contents
- Fueling the Fight for Net Neutrality
- Embracing Ranked-Choice Voting as a Pathway to Pluralism
- Measuring U.S. Drone Use and Misuse
- Fulfilling the Promise of Child Savings Accounts
- Linking the Individual Mandate and Social Responsibility
- Tracking Terrorism in the United States
- Early Education Doesn't End at Pre-K
- Making Higher Education Outcomes Transparent
- Redefining Care Policy
- Using TV "White Spaces" to Create Equitable Internet Access
- Investing in America's Future Thinkers
- Proposing the Public Option
- Creating a Public Interest Technology Sector
- Building a New Practice of Public Problem-Solving
- Expanding Access to High School-Age Youth for High-Quality Apprenticeship Opportunities
- Engaging North Korea
- A Universal 401(k) Plan
- Measuring the Internet for Everyone
- Rethinking Economic Policy
- Documenting the Long Wars
- Ranking Digital Rights
- Future Tense
- Using Fiction to Make Policy More…Realistic
- Pop-Up Magazine
- Developing an MA in Global Security
- Helping Communities Deploy Mesh Networks
- Partnering with Universities
Redefining Care Policy
Long Story Short Media
Idea
Recognizing that families that used to be of the rigid breadwinner-homemaker model had become two breadwinners or a single breadwinner, New America Fellow Karen Kornbluh popularized the idea that American policy had not changed to keep up, proposing a series of policies to address this gap.
Incubation
Kornbluh wrote her 2001 Washington Post piece “The Mommy Tax” shortly before coming to New America, citing the work of Joan Williams and Jane Waldfogel. While many had examined this arena, New America was the first to frame it as part of a changing economy. New America Senior Policy Analyst Lauren Damme proposed paid family leave as part of the Next Social Contract Initiative. Building on those foundations, New America launched the Better Life Lab. In 2016, the program released the New America Care Report, which maps the cost, quality, and accessibility of childcare, and it has since worked to change the way we think about the intersection of gender, work, and social and economic policy through rigorous analysis, practical toolkits, and data-driven storytelling.
Impact
Work from New America authors has changed the national conversation around women, work, family, and care issues. In 2012, when she was still a New America board member, current CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote the groundbreaking Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” which re-launched a national conversation about gender equality. That same year, Fellow Liza Mundy wrote The Richer Sex, which explores how women’s rising economic power affects the dynamics of marriage, dating, work, and home life. Two years later, in 2014, Fellow Brigid Schulte wrote Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time, which argues that workplaces have created a culture that is less productive and less happy. And with her 2015 book, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, Slaughter argues that gender equality can never be achieved until societies value care work as much as career work, with prescriptions for government, workplaces, and couples. This work continues within our Better Life Lab program, which actively works for culture change on these issues via its channel on Slate and the Better Life Lab podcast.