The mission of Time’s Up is to change culture, companies, and laws to create a society free of gender discrimination, in the workplace and beyond — which made it a natural fit for former Obama adviser Tina Tchen. She took the helm in November after more than 30 years of helping women fight sexual harassment and abuse.
The nonprofit’s mission has become ever more urgent as the factors that have defined many women’s work lives — reduced opportunities for advancement leading to low pay and little savings or retirement funds, bias, and other inequities — have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic and brought to the fore, Tchen says.
Nearly 80 percent of health -service workers in nursing homes, doctors’ offices, outpatient care centers, and the like (but not hospitals) are women, as are 83 percent of workers in social assistance professions such as child care, vocational rehabilitation, and housing, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Women also are the vast majority of health-care aides, flight attendants, and service-industry workers such as grocery-store cashiers — jobs that expose them to the public and make them vulnerable to catching and spreading Covid-19. Women, Tchen says, are putting their lives on the line.
“This crisis has really brought out to people the challenges around how work is structured and how those structures have held women back for so long,” she says. “One of those is if we’d had paid sick leave when this crisis hit, more people would’ve been able to stay healthier from the beginning.”
Time’s Up has launched Women on the Front Lines, a program aimed at publicizing what’s at stake for women during the pandemic and its economic fallout. The effort provides information about how the pandemic is affecting women at home and at work — and asks women working on the front lines of the crisis to share their stories. It also provides an online tool that lets people send messages urging their senators and representatives to pass paid sick-leave laws.
Another goal is to show how the pandemic is affecting life at home, Tchen says.
“Women were doing the vast majority of work at home before this, and they still are, but now their partners and others are seeing that,” she says. “We want to make sure we’re telling those stories because after this crisis, we will have to do better and address gaps in pay and opportunities.”
There From the Start
The group Tchen leads is an umbrella organization that includes Time’s Up Now, a 501(c)(4) advocacy organization, and Time’s Up Foundation, the 501(c)(3) arm. It grew out of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which is supported by Time’s Up but is administered by the National Women’s Law Center.
The legal-aid arm was launched in January 2018, in the early days of the MeToo movement, which was ignited by revelations about the abuse of women by Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein and other high-profile sexual-harassment and assault cases that came to light in 2017.
Tchen, who led the White House Council on Women and Girls during the Obama administration, has been involved in Time’s Up since the beginning. She and several other prominent leaders co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal aid to women battling sexual-harassment cases, especially low-wage women. It also offers public-relations and other types of assistance to women who face retaliation for bringing such cases.
Along with its advocacy and public-policy efforts, the group’s work includes programs that help company leaders in the advertising, entertainment, health-care, hospitality, sports, and technology industries figure how to build equitable and safe workplaces.
Last year, the organization started Impact Lab, a project backed by Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures to conduct research into sexual harassment and disseminate its findings to policy makers and corporate leaders. An upcoming study looks at the link between sexual harassment and inequities in pay.
Tchen describes sexual harassment as a “symptom” of what happens when workplaces are not equal and inclusive. Being able to provide lawmakers and companies with data and evidence of the dangers to society and business when sexual harassment and unequal pay flourish, she says, will make it much easier to demonstrate why these issues matter.
Making that case — to corporate America, at least — is not as heavy a lift as it was even five years ago, Tchen says.
“I’m incredibly encouraged by what I see from CEOs,” she says. “I’ve been in enough rooms with them and with general counsel in the last two years to know there is a different attitude out there and there are people from big Fortune 100 companies who do see the need to change, who do see the benefits. I used to have to start from ground one.”
