Want to see a stark example of why having women in positions of power matters? Look no further than Elizabeth Warren, who is leading her campaign with an ambitious plan to provide affordable childcare for all American families.

In announcing her proposal, Warren got personal, telling the story of her own childcare struggles. Unable to figure out who would watch her kids while she worked, Warren was about to quit her job as a law professor in Houston when her Aunt Bee offered to come lend a hand – and didn’t leave for 16 years. Consider the power in that: Warren’s moved up the ranks at University of Houston Law Center to become an associate dean, which led to various teaching stints at top-tier law schools, which led to a job at Harvard. As one of the nation’s top professors, she was tapped by various government agencies to help draft, oversee and implement legislation intended to protect consumers and stabilize the economy. Her foot in the political door – and surely realizing she had a talent for it – Warren ran for US Senate and won, and is now one of the leading contenders for the presidency.

Imagine the potential that would have been wasted had Warren not been able to cobble together care for her kids. Consider the enormous potential that is wasted because so many American women don’t have an Aunt Bee.

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As of 2016, the average cost of a year of center-based childcare for an infant was $16,200, in a country where three-quarters of families make less than $75,000 a year – meaning childcare can easily suck up 20% or more of a family’s income. The average American woman between the ages of 25 and 34 makes $37,804 per year. That goes up to $45,604 for women 35-44, but either way, the math just doesn’t add up – especially considering that one in four American mothers are raising their children alone.

American women have significantly lower workplace participation rates than women in economically comparable nations, including most of western Europe, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Japan. This was not always true – American women used to be toward the front of the pack in workplace participation – and so the explanation for our lagging behind isn’t culture; it’s policy. Most of the rest of the economically prosperous world offers paid parental leave as well as some mechanism for affordable childcare. The US doesn’t, and it’s American women, our families, and the national economy that all pay the price.

This isn’t new. But the focus on it is – and that’s almost entirely a result of having more women at the table, whether that’s in political office, on campaigns and as staff members, as thinktank employees and policy experts, as dedicated educators, or on influential newspaper op-ed pages. Policy makers and those who influence them don’t tend to see what our family structures and economic choices have rendered invisible, and female labor leads the list. A great many men haven’t given much thought to childcare, either because their wives stayed home and did it or because it was considered more of a mother’s problem than a couple’s. This is still true: how many times have you heard heterosexual couples say that she decided to stay home because childcare cost as much as her salary – with the assumption that childcare is primarily her responsibility, not a whole-family investment?

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The men who stay in the workforce simply don’t see what women lose when we drop out of it to raise kids, even for a few years. It’s not such a simple calculus as her salary v childcare costs; it’s also about experience, the ability to move up the ladder, and the fact that the prime building-block years of one’s career often come right around the same time women are having and raising children. Dropping out of the workforce for years doesn’t mean you hit pause; often, it means you have to totally rewind, or can never get back to where you were – and certainly will never get to where you could have been.

It’s not just Warren’s policy itself – it’s the emphasis she is putting on it

All of this is sold to women as “choice”. But there isn’t much of a choice for women who have invited small, vulnerable and beloved human beings in the world and have no way to both work and care for them. For men, the answer to this problem as always been “women”. For women, at least in America, it’s long been: “Just figure it out.” And when we choose the least bad of a series of inadequate options and pay some significant cost, either professional or personal, we are told that was our choice.

Because women have just handled it, men in power have been able to ignore what a problem this is for millions upon millions of American families. Which is why it’s so crucial that women have the power to dictate both policy and priorities. Warren isn’t the first candidate to put childcare at the forefront of her campaign – credit goes to Hillary Clinton for that. Warren built on Clinton’s proposal, making her own even more extensive. That’s another example of why having women run matters: One woman isn’t going to bring about an overnight feminist revolution, but as more join, change trends in the right direction.

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And it’s not just Warren’s policy itself – it’s the emphasis she is putting on it, which stands in sharp contrast to the other contenders in the field, and what progressive male politicians have tended to highlight. While Bernie Sanders also supports affordable childcare, it did not get the kind of top billing from his campaign that free college saw in 2016 (given that Sanders just announced his 2020 bid a few days ago, it’s a bit too premature to fairly assess his priorities this time around, and childcare may still top the list). Most Democratic candidates will put forward a slew of policies on everything from the environment to the family to taxes to guns to immigration. But watch what they feature most prominently and focus on first – that tells you a lot about what they will do in office, whom they’re speaking to, and what perspective they are speaking from.

Warren’s childcare proposal isn’t perfect, but luckily it doesn’t have to be – it’s a starting point for a broader discussion of what families need now, and the more we dig into it, the more we can nudge it in a more comprehensive direction. The fact that it’s not just on the table but the centerpiece of Warren’s bid is the most exciting and necessary event of the primaries thus far.

Democrats made incredible gains in the midterms thanks to the female voters who turned out by the masses to vote in a record number of congresswomen. By putting childcare first in her campaign, Warren sends a crucial message: that she sees them, hears them, has been them. And that robust, affordable childcare is a key to making America great, especially for American women.



