Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025's Plans to Gut Women's Rights in the Workplace and Classroom Pt 2

Misogynist Manifesto: Project 2025’s Plans to Gut Women’s Rights in the Workplace and Classroom Pt 2
PUBLISHED 9/10/2024 by Carrie N. Baker


Project 2025’s plans for women students and workers would devastate their educational opportunities, harming their careers and earning power.


A woman on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., on Oct. 9, 2016, ahead of the second presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. (Robyn Beck / AFP via Getty Images)

Gutting Women’s Workplace Rights

Project 2025 eviscerates women’s long-held rights to sex equality in the workplace. It calls for the next president to rescind executive orders signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s that prohibited federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race and sex, and it would weaken Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits sex discrimination in employment. First, it would narrow the meaning of the word sex in Title VII to mean the “biological binary meaning of ‘sex,’” allowing employment decisions based on gender stereotypes. In 1989, the Supreme Court ruled that an accounting firm violated Title VII when it denied a woman partnership based on partners’ comments that she needed “a course in charm school” and should “walk more femininely, talk more femininely, dress more femininely, wear make-up, have her hair styled, and wear jewelry.” Project 2025 would reverse this interpretation—which would also exclude LGBTQ+ people from Title VII protections in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision, penned by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, in Bostock v. Clayton County.

The plan calls for the next president to eliminate Title VII coverage of disparate impact discrimination, where an employer practice appears to be sex-neutral but falls more harshly on women than men and cannot be justified by business necessity. That would mean, for example, that employers could disproportionately screen out female job candidates by using unnecessary strength, aerobic capacity and endurance tests or height requirements unrelated to the job. Project 2025 directs the next president to issue an executive order exempting religious employers from laws prohibiting sex discrimination, allowing them to discriminate against employees who have abortions or are parents. The plan calls for weakening the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces Title VII. It would end the agency’s long-standing power to issue guidance, technical assistance and policy positions interpreting Title VII, and it would block the agency from entering into consent decrees with employers to resolve discrimination cases. This would mean that women would have to file expensive and time-consuming lawsuits to defend their Title VII rights. Project 2025 also demands a reorientation of EEOC enforcement priorities away from sex and race discrimination to focus instead on claims of religious discrimination.
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*********Finally, Project 2025 calls for the end of all programs designed to eliminate discrimination against women and people of color at the federal, state, local and private-sector levels and directs the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to investigate and criminally prosecute state and local governments that have these programs. *********

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The plan would increase public funding for religious education through expansion of “school choice” policies, and give federal education funds to states as block grants with no strings attached. On student debt, it would end Biden’s loan forgiveness program, and it proposes student loan repayment programs that would multiply costs for borrowers, increase defaults and end existing programs that allow borrowers to earn cancellation, according to a report from the Center for American Progress. It’s worth noting that women hold 64 percent of all student loan debt.

These proposals and more would devastate the educational opportunities of women and girls, harming their careers and earning power.


https://msmagazine.com/2024/09/10/project-2025-education-women-students-work/