Women at Work
DOL’s Women’s Bureau

How do you function if you’re part of a very small federal agency but charged with a very large mission? The answer, says Rose Kemp, U.S. Department of Labor Women’s Bureau Regional Administrator, is to always work with other organizations and to always look for policy implications that can help propel you forward. That philosophy has been the hallmark of the Women’s Bureau, created by an act of Congress in 1920, the only federal agency mandated to promote the status of wage-earning women. Eighty years later, the bureau is working hard to achieve its goals.

That centered tenacity was seen just this September when the bureau and the Kansas City chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) hosted a computer camp for 20 disadvantaged middle-school girls in Kansas City, Kan. Every year, SWE grants about $300,000 in scholarships to engineering students and participates in numerous outreach programs specifically targeting girls in middle and secondary schools. The Kansas City project included the KCK school district, which provided access to candidates for the camp and which also hosted the first “camp” session. There will be four meetings in all, preceded by homework and mentoring. Successful students will be allowed to keep the computers, which were funded by the bureau and SWE, in part with a grant from Microsoft.

The computer camp is an excellent example of the agency’s priority to help young women achieve competency in technology. This priority is especially important given the increasing gap between men and women as fewer and fewer women continue to enter technology and science fields. Since there are so many good jobs in these areas, says Kemp, “This trend must not continue.”

This technology focus has extended to a five-region, e-mentoring project that collaborates with organizations like the YWCA and Girl Scouts. Here, young women can e-mail questions to the University of Illinois in Chicago, and a moderator makes sure the answered questions are distributed to the list-serve. In this region, 120 girls age 13 to 18 have the opportunity to interact with each other and their mentors in areas of science and technology, while a teleconference will involve around 600 girls from the five regions. A program called “Glitter” was recently developed as well, to show girls that arts and humanities can fit into technology through graphic design and computer arts. A Kansas City Arts Institute graphics designer was the instructor for this course.

Besides technology, another focal point this year for the Women’s Bureau is financial security. Here the agency is looking at programs such as One Stop Career Centers, where it provides a single-source resource to single mothers. This includes information about women’s work rights, employment opportunities, social services, housing, social security and financial implications. The Women’s Bureau Work and Family Conference Call convenes regularly to deal with issues around creating family friendly environments and looking to business-mentoring assistance for child care. “The work we do is all around outreach and education,” Kemp points out. “The sharing of ideas and resources is absolutely invaluable.”

With such a broad vision, helping 64 million women in the nation’s labor force to achieve parity by encouraging and supporting equal-opportunity workplaces, the bureau’s attention is focused on important initiatives that can be achieved through coordination with other agencies and organizations—all with a very small budget. Kemp says she’d be thrilled if the bureau’s 10 federal regional offices and 38 staff people (the Kansas City office has a total of four people) received just a dollar per working woman—compared to the $10 million the agency currently spends to create its many varied programs. “There’s still so much to be done!” she declares passionately.