Originally at msmagazine.com
This is part two in a three-part series about Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president that maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of hard-fought gains for American women and girls. Part one analyzed the misogynist manifesto’s plans for “biblically based” marriages and rollbacks on reproductive rights. Part three, out Wednesday, will tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and democracy as we know it.
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.
The plan also proposes to explain away the gender wage gap by directing the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau to “rededicate its research budget towards open inquiry, especially to disentangle the influences on women’s workforce participation and to understand the true causes of earnings gaps between men and women.”
Contrary to decades of peer-reviewed research, conservatives argue that the pay gap is the result of women’s choices to work in lower-paid occupations rather than sex discrimination. Women’s salaries are currently 84 percent of men’s salaries, but when benefits such as health insurance and pension plans are included in the calculation, women workers receive a mere 57 percent of men’s earnings, according to the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality.
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.
Framing DEI as discriminatory toward white men, it calls for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to immediately use “the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.” In other words, it would work to advance white men in the workforce, at the expense of all women and men of color.
The Heritage Foundation’s plan calls for the elimination of the Department of Education, which enforces Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. It would allow Title IX enforcement only through litigation filed by the Department of Justice—a costly, time-consuming and inefficient way to enforce the law.
The authors call for rescinding the Biden administration’s new Title IX regulations that strengthen protections against sexual harassment and assault in schools. Instead, it would reinstitute the Trump administration’s regulations that provided extraordinary “due process” rights to those accused of sexual harassment and assault while requiring victims to submit to cross-examination by the accused.
As with employment, Project 2025 recommends ending disparate impact discrimination claims under Title IX and narrowing the meaning of sex in Title IX to “biological sex recognized at birth,” which would allow the use of gender stereotypes in education and remove protections for LGBTQ+ students. It also would prohibit public school teachers from using a student’s chosen name and pronouns.
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.
Part three will tackle the right-wing vision to “rip and shred” the federal government and U.S. democracy as we know it. Read the entire series here.
This article appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms., which hits newsstands Sept. 24. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.
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