Remarks to the Uncommon Women on Common Ground Conference in Jacksonville

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 9, 2000

October 4, 2000

[The President's remarks are joined in progress.]

The President.-----and when the actors were supposed to get their curtain call, they pulled back the curtains and all the real people were standing there. It was an amazing thing. But Kerry, you know her husband, Andrew, is in my Cabinet, of course. And her mother is a great friend of mine, and one of her brothers served in Congress with me during my Presidency. But she has done an astonishing thing here, and I urge you to look at the book and read it. It's really amazing. There are a lot of brave women out there around the world, doing things that stiffen the spine when you read about it.

Let me just say a few words about a couple of women's issues that I think are quite important. And I hadn't really prepared anything to say, but we're close to an election in which I believe the American people will make choices which, whether we consciously are aware of it or not, will shape a lot of how we live for the next 20 years. And one of the biggest challenges we face, I think, is how to broaden the circle of prosperity to include people that aren't part of it and then how to figure out how both to continue to open opportunities for women and allow people to balance work and family, because the most important work of society is still raising children, and so we have to figure out how to balance these things.

And the truth is that our country is better at creating jobs, starting businesses, and expanding the economy than nearly any country in the world. In the last several years. we've been, by far, better than anybody else in the world, but if you look over a long period of time, we do pretty well with that. But we lag significantly behind a lot of other countries in figuring out how to balance work and family.

So I would just like to say that, for whatever it's worth, I think the family and medical leave law has now allowed some 25 million people to take some time off when a baby is born or a family member is sick without losing their jobs. I think it should be expanded. A lot of you are small-business people. The big debate that we always have is, how burdensome will it be to small business if we expand it? Should we exempt smaller businesses? If so, where should the cutoff be at number of employees, and what kind of leave should we have?

But that's something I hope all of you will sort of debate, discuss, and go forward with, because when we finally--it was the first bill I signed as President and, I think, still one of the finest pieces of legislation I've ever been involved in. It's made a huge difference. Still, after all these years, it's not unusual at all for me in any given crowd of any kind of people to have at least one person come up to me and thank me for the family leave law and explain how it's affected their lives. It's already happened tome once today, and it happens everywhere.

But it's still rather limited in its reach. And we've got to decide what to do about it. But it's important. It's an important part of balancing work and family.

Another, I think, very important thing is strengthening the equal pay laws that the country has. I've got some legislation before the Congress now I've been trying hard to pass for more than a year to strengthen the equal pay laws. And there's an even more extensive bill up there that goes beyond what I have proposed, that maybe should be a law, but I can't even pass what I've got up there. [Laughter]

And again, the issue is, how much can we do on this? What kind of burden is it? Is it a burden for small businesses? And I think a lot of women who are active in business are in a unique position to offer the right kind of perspective. But the main thing is, we need to keep taking action on this, because there is still, even though we've made dramatic progress since President Kennedy signed the first legislation, there's still significant differences in providing equal pay for equal work. There's still a big gender gap in access to high-tech jobs. There's still a significant gender gap in people who hold positions of big responsibility in corporate America. Maybe Cathy talked about that a little bit; I don't know. But we've got to--there's a lot of these challenges that are out there, and I believe the National Government does have a responsibility, at least on the equal pay front.

And for the whole time I've been President, I've had six or seven women Cabinet members, including the first female Secretary of State and the first female Attorney General, who is from here in Florida. So we've tried to set a good example, but I think that these are very important issues that we will have to continue to work on.

Then there's a whole big cluster of health care issues that I think need a lot of emphasis. I've got legislation before the Congress now to spend a couple of hundred million dollars to provide medical care to poor women with breast or cervical cancer who otherwise wouldn't be able to access medical care. I think that's important.