President Joe Biden Monday underscored his record on prioritizing women, from the number of females in his Cabinet to his economic priorities, during a White House Women’s History Month event at which he signed a women’s health executive order.
“To state the obvious, women are half the population and underrepresented across the board,” Biden told a crowd in the White House East Room on Monday. “Not in my administration.”
For example, Biden praised Vice President Kamala Harris, the country’s first female vice president, for “doing an incredible job,” and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the country’s first black female justice, as “smartest” on the high court.
Biden also contended that he and his aides had “turned around the economy” after the COVID-19 pandemic “because we focused on women,” citing low unemployment rates for women and his expansion of the child tax credit.
“If you want to have the strongest economy in the world, you can’t leave half the country behind,” the president said. “Republicans voted against it and let it expire, but I’m fighting to bring the child tax credit back,” he added.
Women, particularly suburban women, could determine Biden’s election against former President Donald Trump, depending on their votes and whether they decide to cast a ballot at all.
In Suffolk University’s national poll with USA Today in January, Biden had a 5 percentage point edge over Trump with women, 37% to 32%. In the March poll, Biden had widened his advantage to 10 points, 43% to 33%. Biden won the demographic in the 2020 election by 15 points, 57% to 42%, counteracting Trump winning men in the same contest by 8 points, 45% to 53%, according to exit polls. Women, too, have been credited for Democrats outperforming expectations in the 2022 midterm elections after the Supreme Court overturned abortion precedent Roe v. Wade.
“Women are not without electoral or political power. No kidding,” Biden said. “Let’s rise up, know our power, tell our story.”
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Biden’s Women’s History Month executive order will “ensure women’s health is integrated and prioritized across the federal research portfolio and budget, and will galvanize new research on a wide range of topics, including women’s midlife health,” according to the White House. That is in addition to more than 20 new actions and commitments by federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Science Foundation.
“This includes the launch of a new [National Institutes of Health]-wide effort that will direct key investments of $200 million in Fiscal Year 2025 to fund new, interdisciplinary women’s health research — a first step towards the transformative central Fund on Women’s Health that the president has called on Congress to invest in,” the White House wrote in a statement.